Kindle

I think the new Amazon Kindle is actually pretty neat.

When I heard about it today, I was naturally quite skeptical. (Who's isn't?) This no new idea, so the first question is “Yeah but, is it actually good?” And since Amazon has a track record of pretty poor taste, there's this real conceptual bias to get past.

But after some strong consideration, I think they might be onto something. There are a few key points. People don't like to stare at screens instead of books, so the new electronic paper technology is just mission critical. And it looks like they got the physical size and weight right, and their wireless and battery life answers are logical. The store sounds great.

The physical attributes and the look-and-feel of the software seem rough and poorly resolved. Seeing as how they've worked on the product for three years, this is just a non-surprising result of Amazon's poor taste and improper priorities. At least they kept things kind of simple, but they could have taken it even further. I wish they'd learn to be smarter on that level. But I'll look past this for the moment because there's still a story.

On the other hand, I find myself rolling my eyes at the inital customer reactions. People are full of the same old knee-jerk responses we all hear year after year, on product after product. Seriously, be realistic, it's a first product offering. The price point ($400) is beyond acceptable. This price is the sweet spot: don't you guys remember the iPod?… And backlights and color screens are totally irrelvant right now. It's far more important that it just actually read like paper.

This should be an interesting new product. Of course time will tell, but I don't think this is another Segway. This product has some real, honest potential. (And I don't say that often.) I can't wait to get my hands on one.

Read more about Kindle.

---

3 Comments

VCD + Facebook + iPhone

Things have been a bit crazy recently but I've been having a lot of fun.
I want to stop for a minute though and share some stuff I've worked on and talk about a few things that I've been spending time thinking about.

Visual Communication Design

I just heard from the Design department at UW that I've been accepted as one of the twenty-two Visual Communication Design majors for 2009, which I'm very excited about.

Last year we had a bunch of fun assignments. Here's some of my work:

• Playful Word Pairs — layout and typography study
• Recipe — layout and typography study
• Sweatshops — double-sided poster for both sides of world issue
• Teabox Set (blueprints: T / E / A) — 3D product packaging
• 3D Cube (side one / side two) — corporate case study on REI
• EngineerYourself.com (website / poster) — UN goal promotion

I love the faculty and the talented students I'm with and I'm looking forward to my classes next year as a junior in the program.

Facebook

Switching gears, if you haven't heard of Facebook yet, you must not be paying attention. With over 27 million people returning to the site every month, they're the 6th most popular site in the US and the #1 photo sharing site on the entire web. (I know, a lot of people think Flickr is the #1 photo site... but it's actually not even close. If you want to see the impressive numbers, check out this blog post on the stats behind Facebook photos.)

I mentioned Facebook here before and I said I liked the site, but what I didn't say is that I really believe they're doing some cool stuff. Just under a year ago I decided I liked them a lot, so this summer I'm interning here with them. They're a 200+ employee company in Palo Alto, which means I'm back in beautiful Silicon Valley this summer.

I joined the small team of Product Designers, so I'll be working on the user experience and look-and-feel of the site.

There's no doubt Facebook is slightly controversial and there's still a lot of opportunity ahead. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts about the site: what you like, what you hate, and what you think in general about their future. I'm spending every day this summer thinking critically about Facebook and I'm learning a lot from being here.

But I think it's important for me to say that I don't think Facebook is just a dot-com bubble or a fad. I think it's actually a really neat tool that's useful and is a great way to keep in touch with real-world friends. I also think there's still a ton to do and the coolest stuff is yet to come.

iPhone

The web has been buzzing with talk about the iPhone for the past few months and especially the past few weeks. It is pretty funny to see everyone's take on the phone.

A lot of people spend time talking about Apple's marketing. And it's true that there is probably a good amount to talk about. Whatever you think, there's no denying they did a great job getting people talking... and that's the point of marketing after all.

But the real story is the phone itself. And seriously, I can say with 100% confidence that I think Apple is about hit a home run with this phone. They did what they do best: take the core of what a product should be and make that work really nicely, then throw away everything else.

That means you'll hear gadget geeks complain about it doesn't have this feature or it doesn't have that feature, but at the end of the day it does exactly what a mainstream phone should do and it does it incredibly well.

There are many examples, from Visual Voicemail to Google Maps. For a lot of people Mail is going to be the coolest part of the phone. I know that sounds funny because it seems so uninteresting, but it's actually a crucial feature that I could see myself using a ton of the time and it seems like it's done very nicely.

And it's always easy to point to technologies that should one day be in the phone but aren't yet... 3G, GPS, developer support, etc. But remember this is a 1.0 product. There will be a place for those features in the future (as well as a full product line and cheaper hardware). This is day zero and right now I think the iPhone is on track for a great release and I'm looking forward to using one myself. I can't wait to see them shake up the cell phone world a little. And I have no doubt they'll do exactly that.

---

3 Comments

What's Next

I want to look at the state of the industry for a minute. Looking forward, there are a few big changes that I can point to:

Hard drives will be replaced with flash-based storage.
This one is starting to become common knowledge for anyone closely following the industry. The cost of memory keeps going down and the storage size keeps going up. This transition will have great speed benefits across the board for computers and it really opens the doors for hardware speeds. Some people think the start of transition is still far away, but I believe it is right around the corner in the next couple of years for laptops. (It's already happened with the most popular iPods, for instance.)

Resolution independence will improve how we see content.
There have been a lot of murmurs about this recently. Despite all the discussion, I don't think a lot of people understand what resolution independence means. In a sentence: it gives people the ability to easily control how big everything is on the screen. If you have a big screen and don't need the screen real estate, you can adjust everything larger without causing pixilation due to resolution emulation. This has many positive implications, but moving to it requires a good amount of developer effort and it's not going to happen overnight. It sounds like Leopard will ship with support built-in to encourage developers to get started thinking about scaling factors... but it probably won't be until Mac OS X 10.6 (after Leopard) when it becomes a full-fledged feature for consumers to enjoy.

The web is in its infancy and it will get unbelievably cooler.
Tim Berners-Lee outlined the World Wide Web in 1990, and didn't start taking off until a handful of years later. For all intents and purposes, the web is maybe 12 years old or so. That means we're at a point where lots of people are going "Oh yeah, the web" and talk about it like it's reached its full potential and it's "finished." We've become accustomed to it in our daily lives and so easily forget it did not exist at all just a few years ago. Here's a wake-up call: think about cars when they were 12 years old... suddenly you realize we're just barely getting started. There is so, so, so much more that can and will be done with the web.

I think these are some of the most important changes up ahead. There are of course many other trends we're moving toward in the future as well and I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments.

---

4 Comments

Don't Keep the Bad Stuff

This is something I've learned through experience. It might sound obvious but when you're actually faced with the situation, it's not always so easy...

Whenever you work hard on something you really care about, you sew your heart into it. That's a great thing because it means it's honest.

Sometimes though, down the road it turns out you made a mistake. The interface or feature you've spent a week designing or coding is just not feeling right...

The problem is that it can be quite tricky to let that hard work go to waste. When you spend a lot of time on something, you feel like you must somehow justify the work being done in the first place. There is a temptation just to leave it in or tone it down or make it a setting.

Don't do it. Don't keep the bad stuff. Throw it out. You do not need to keep something just because you spent some time on it. Go back to the drawing board. Kill it, start over, and do it right. If it's just not needed, leave it out.

Never let "but I worked so long on it" be an excuse to keep a feature that isn't working or isn't necessary. Mistakes happen. That's part of the process. Move on and feel great knowing you did the right thing.

This process works great as well for something even when you think it is working. Weeks into a project, it can be amazingly helpful to drop everything, get a blank slate, and just start over. You might be amazed at some of the things you learned through your initial attempt that radically change the way you think about it the second time around for the better.

In other words: always throw yourself into your work... just don't become attached to it. Never get so involved that you forget to step back.

---

5 Comments

Removing Photos from vCards

I was faced with a challenge the other day:
How do you quickly remove photos from a multiple-entry vCard file?

For those familar with regular expressions, here's my crafted answer:
PHOTO;BASE64:(\s+[=+/\w]+)+\s

Here's the context of the question:
Facebook just added a new feature called Find Your Friends that lets you easily find people on Facebook who you already know in real life. It's especially useful for new users just signing up, but relevant for anyone.

(By the way, if you haven't heard of Facebook, sign up. It's quite simply the best way to keep in touch with friends. Think MySpace, except good.)

Actually, Find Your Friends isn't entirely new, but they just added the ability to import your contacts from a vCard file, which makes it useful for anyone who uses Mac OS X's Address Book to store their contacts.

The problem is that Facebook only lets you upload a file that's 500KB — and when your Address Book has lots of photos, it's going to be much, much bigger (10.5MB, in my case).

Here's the full solution:

1. Export your vCard file.
   Select all your Address Book entries and drag them to the desktop.
2. Open the vCard in your favorite modern text editor.
   May I recommend TextMate or SubEthaEdit.
3. Look at the content. Is there an empty line after every line?
   If not, skip this step. (If you do it, you'll just get gibberish.)
   If so, it means that one or more of your entires contained a non-basic character, like an accent character, so the file is UTF-16.
   TextMate: File ▸ Re-Open With Encoding ▸ UTF-16 (Big Endian)
   SubEthaEdit: Format ▸ File Encodings ▸ Unicode (UTF-16); choose Reinterpret
4. Open the Find window and paste in the magic incantation.
   This goes in the Find field. Leave the Replace field empty:
   PHOTO;BASE64:(\s+[=+/\w]+)+\s
5. Check the box for Regular Expression / RegEx.
6. Replace All and Save.

Mission accomplished: you've got a much smaller vCard file that contains no images, perfect for uploading to Facebook's Find Your Friends.

Of course using regular expressions sometimes feels like just one step up from compiling your own kernel... so I've filed an Apple bug report (rdar://5022380) suggesting that this really should be an Address Book feature in the form of a preference checkbox.

Update 2/27: Tweaked the expression to reach a corner case.
Update 12/13: Apple listened. In Leopard, they implemented this feature exactly the way I proposed it. You can find it in the vCard tab of Address Book preferences.

---

2 Comments

Hurting Customers

Here's one thing I hate: the "security device" labels on CDs and DVDs. These things are ridiculous. I guess they're there to prevent theft of the disc from the case?

But they're really annoying for actual paying customers. Seriously, how effective are these things? Doesn't the plastic wrap work well enough? Are these labels really stopping thefts? It seems like if you really wanted to steal something, a little tape isn't a show-stopper.

When only the customer is hurting, something's very wrong.

(This gets even more foreign when you order from Amazon.com, who ships you items that still have the labels despite having never been on a shelf. I assume that's how they come from the factory, but come on...)

Here's another: when I call customer support, why do I always have to repeat my problem when I'm transfered?

I understand the need to transfer me. There are times when this gets out of hand (twice or more is kind of pushing it), but mostly I'm okay with that in and of itself. The annoyance is when you've just finished telling the customer service rep your life story only to have to repeat it all a couple seconds later to the next guy (this time, invariably in summary).

Sometimes they'll even ask you to verify your mother's maiden name or such and then when you're transfered, they need to know it again. Hello... I'm the same guy... on the same call.

Why can't customer service reps jot down your problem on their computer and have that information passed along with the call? It doesn't seem like a technical challenge... I think the industry is just brain-dead. And again, the customer gets the short end of the stick.

I think there is probably an endless supply other situations like these out there as well. I don't get it.

---

1 Comments

Tidbits

A tidbit is a small piece of a something. Tidbits are life's building blocks... by themselves are they often meaningless, but become very powerful when combined together.

It is impossible to tackle anything successfully if you just think in terms of generalizations and abstractions. When you start paying attention to the little things, you'll do great work.

Good products have tidbits that are not coincidental. With great products, for better or worse, we usually fail to notice the tidbits at all (we just get a good feeling) and find ourselves scratching our heads wondering "What did they do right?" The answer of course is... everything... every detail. If you are aware of this, I think you appreciate it even more.

Don't worry about spending too much time on tidbits. If you work on the right ones, they'll pay off. Make sure you're working on the right ones.

At the risk of no context, here are a few tidbits of mine recently:

• Typography Project — my initials in serif + sans-serif
• Study of Visual Opposites — over 300 photos later...
• Mock Cover Design — his architecture is truly stunning.

• VAMacros.h — makes variable-length arguments easier
• AliasExtensions.h + .m — round-trips paths with alias data

Cocoa programmers are welcome to use the code above as they see fit.

---

3 Comments