by Greg
February 17th, 2010
“In general, what I tried to do, is prep as little specifics as possible in terms of shots, so I wanted to be able to go to the set and make things up as I went along, and sort of, you know, wing it. … Within the parameters of what we had, I tried to storyboard nothing so that the [movie] would have energy and would feel vital, and we’d get to make it up as we went along.”
- JJ Abrams, director of
Star Trek, when asked how much of the movie was improvised versus planned ahead of time.
I heard this quote last week while listening to the commentary track on the latest Star Trek movie. It was a great reminder for me that the process of iterative design, and not planning out everything ahead of time, transcends software development. It also reiterated it’s effectiveness to me for creating inspired products that consumers really want. When your design decisions and inspiration are based on real world feedback rather than judgements made in a vacuum, I don’t think you can help but have a better outcome.
Photo courtesy Esquire.
by wikidlabs
February 15th, 2010
Screen shot of Reveille
A few weeks back we introduced Reveille as a slick new way to tie your Backpack Calendar to Backpack Reminders. Today we’re proud to say that Reveille is now available for anyone to check out.
Only 85 Days…Part time mind you
We built this fairly simplistic, but extremely useful application in 85 days while maintaining our current full time jobs, keeping our wives happy, spending time with our kids and helping with homework, serving at church, etc. So, basically while we were living our normalish lives, we whipped this product out in our spare time.
How we 4HWW’d and Got Real with Reveille
As a “side” project, we had to make the most of our time and efforts. We’re avid followers of 37signals and Tim Ferris so we applied many liberal doses of Getting Real and 4HWW to Reveille. The end result of all the minimalist effort is that Reveille does basically one thing, it could do more, we’d like it to do much, much more, but for the time being it simply does this one thing: Reveille automatically creates reminders for you based on your calendar items.
Continued…
by DL
February 11th, 2010
I recently needed to be able retry a begin block and was simply nesting begins within begins, then I ran across this little Ruby gym. The retry, http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_exceptions.htm.
begin
@calendarapi.calendars
rescue Exception => ex
logger.info ex
switch_ssl()
retry
end
Obviously this bit of code could end in a continuous loop so be careful to add a little logic to ensure a clean exit.
by wikidlabs
January 21st, 2010
We are very excited to introduce, and give you a little preview of the first application from Wikid Labs. It’s called Reveille, and it is going to add some great new features to 37signals’ Backpack application that aren’t available today.
Before we tell you more about the features, we want to explain a little of the history behind the idea for Reveille. We have been happy users of 37signal’s Basecamp and Backpack for about two years. In fact, we’ve used Basecamp to manage the development of Reveille. The idea for Reveille came as Greg’s wife was trying to move the family calendar completely into Backpack from iCal on her Mac, but was finding the management of reminders to be a bit of a challenge. She wanted an easier way to add the reminders she was used to having, for instance, reminders for friends birthdays, or other important appointments. The solution hit Greg one day, late October, in the place where all good ideas seem to come, the shower.
Continued…
by DL
September 8th, 2009
That may sound like a silly question at first glance since we usually associate character with people. The idea of company character makes a ton of sense once you realize that a company is it’s own entity. Any company that employs at least one person has a character and since every company employs at least its owner then I think it could safely be said that all companies have character, be it good or bad.
Before you can answer the question “What is the character of my company?” it’s probably important to identify what defines the character of a company.
Continued…
by Greg
August 4th, 2009
Photo by: J Heffner
When you are a small team of developers who is building a web-based application with very limited resources, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the size and effort involved in bringing your idea to life. How in the world can you possibly design and build an application, make it full-featured, and attract customers in a relatively short period of time? We found ourselves asking these questions, and it took us a while but we finally found an answer.
Continued…
by DL
July 10th, 2009
This is the first of a series of posts where I’m going to discuss some of the, um… fun that we’ve had while writing Wikid Editor, the text editor that we built for our flagship product Haven (which is still being developed). In this post I’m going to focus solely on the choice in technology.
Here are a few high level requirements for Wikid Editor.
- It had to run inside the browser and it needed to work in all browsers or at least the main ones, Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome.
- It needed to be able to color text any way we wanted.
- It should be able to color the background of rows.
- It needed to be able to communicate with our servers without reloading the page and preferably be able to receive pushed data from our servers.
- It needed to perform well.
Continued…
by DL
July 10th, 2009
Greg and I had talked a little about building a Flex app that would help you to visualize your mind map and get it out of your head faster than drawing it on say a white board. So naturally I went looking for one that already existed. I found several but one stood out as the most horrible 1 minute of my life. Beware that as soon as the video starts you’re gonna get irritated.
I hate telling folks that there software must suck but I’d guess, based on the blatant overuse of techno music, fast movements and quick dramatic sales speech, that the http://www.imindmap.com/ software needs a lot of selling to get anyone to try it. If you need all that hype you probably spent too much money on the development of the software and it probably sucks from over-engineering.
Remember simple, fast, easy, no frills software is the stuff that gets people excited. Needless to say I’m not even going to try iMindMap, it reminds me too much of an Office application. It does so much that you can’t do anything useful with it.
by DL
June 8th, 2009
Joel Splosky quoting Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator in How Hard Could It Be?: Start-up Static when talking about why startups fail.
“That would be boring,” she told me. “They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business.” Um, yeah, well, sure, and most people die because their heart stops beating. But somehow dying in different ways is still interesting enough to support 40 hours a week of prime-time programming.
I couldn’t agree with this statement more. I believe that most startups don’t realize that they’ve “made it” untill they’ve been making it for a while and it’s obvious to everyone except the person hard at work worried sick that tomorrow he’ll run out of money and have to fire someone. If success happens that slowly why would anyone think that failure happens any faster?
by DL
June 8th, 2009
When I was younger my dad was constantly interrupting, although I’m sure that he’d say he was interjecting into, our conversations and asking me “What’s your point?” I have to admit that at the time it didn’t sit well with me since it was usually asked just as I was intently describing something that I thought was as relevant to the topic as toilet paper is to a bathroom. I wouldn’t recognize the lesson that was taught by this seemingly innocuous question until years later, last year to be specific.
The lesson was to not spend time or energy on those things, even if they are words, that did not have a valid point to the topic at hand. All too often we spend time on tasks that do nothing to get us where we are trying to go, or to the point of our actions. We get distracted and spend time focusing on the wrong things. This usually happens because the point is not well defined, not good enough or it’s just flat out wrong.
The right point will not only keep you focused, it will drive you. It’ll get you up early and keep you up late. It won’t leave you alone and best of all, it will be simple.
You’ll find that the clarity of a good point brings a sense of purpose to your actions. A sense of purpose brings drive and determination both of which bear success. Do you want to be successful in your endeavors? Have a good, clean and simple point.
What’s your point? Is it the right one for you, your company or you client?