Marwoodchap.

"Both sides are convinced that they are entirely right; yet both sides, as we’ve seen, are..."

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:02:00 +0000

“Both sides are convinced that they are entirely right; yet both sides, as we’ve seen, are fundamentally wrong. Welcome to the new discourse. Welcome to the internet.”

- Angus Croll is talking about why discourse on the Internet is breaking. He’s right.

I am sorry for your loss

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:47:21 +0000

I am sorry for your loss:

I imagine being a doctor or nurse in a position like that could easily lead one to being jaded or to keeping distance from patients. How wonderful that this doctor has kept his spirit and was able to write such a letter.

Beautiful.

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 14:22:54 +0000

Beautiful.

"…kids just don’t grow up around entrepreneurial role models. Instead, they’re groomed to..."

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:04:00 +0000

“…kids just don’t grow up around entrepreneurial role models. Instead, they’re groomed to conform to traditional career paths. And when they get too close to the electric fence that guards socialized education, they’re shocked back inside. Many of the behaviors of highly successful entrepreneurs, even CEOs, are punished in school.”

- Eddie Smith makes some excellent points on the damage that teaching people to conform does - both to them and to our wider society and economy - Don’t say the ‘e’ word.

"Craftsmanship means caring about what you create. It means you measure twice and cut once. It means..."

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:14:38 +0000

“Craftsmanship means caring about what you create. It means you measure twice and cut once. It means you look at what you are creating from every angle and don’t cut corners. In short, craftsmanship means you don’t ship crap and you never mail it in.”

- David Sparks on Craftsmanship.

iPad Faves

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:58:40 +0000

Friendly web-chap and all round good egg James Whatley is talking about his favourite iPad apps and asking about others. Here’s mine:

Drafts The best of the quick text editors[1], things just got super nerdy with the automation and URL schema tools in version 1.5. I can’t wait to see what the mac nerds do with this.

Drafts is even starting to reduce my use of a UCD. It’s just quicker to open the phone or iPad and note a line or two of text, than it is to take my notebook and pen out of my pocket and get scribbling.

Minutes

I spend a lot of time in meetings. Too much time really, and Minutes helps me with that. It helps me track actions and take coherent notes, without needing to prop up a screen between me and the people I’m meeting. If I’m enforcing a grazing policy (And I should be. So should you) then it helps make it clear I’m adhering to that. It also sends stuff by email (So is easy to Evernote) and can chuck actions in my Omnifocus Inbox.

Remote

Being able to drive my iTunes library from the sofa, directing music to various airplay speakers or video to the Apple TV is nothing short of awesome. It’s one of the times I most feel like I am living in the future.

Day One

This is the leading journal app for iOS, and OS X. It is gorgeous, uses Markdown, has Slogger and is a joy to use. I wish other app developers would take a leaf out of it’s book.

Omnifocus

The daddy. OF for iOS is phenomenal. Hands down the best GTD experience I have seen on any platform, free accurate sync and excellent support. I use this app constantly.

There are loads more great apps on my iPad, but today these are my favourites.

As opposed to my beloved Byword, which is more for writing longer pieces, like this. ↩

Year 8 is Still Too Late

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:30:32 +0000

Emma Mulqueeny, the indefatigable Hubmum has again blogged about the need to teach children how to survive and thrive in the digital world. It’s well worth a read, especially if you have any interest in education.

She raises lots of excellent points (Really, go read it), but the most interesting to me is this

children are being taught to fear the internet rather than understand it, with schools restricting more and more access, rather than enabling them to understand what digital citizenship means; leaving them abandoned at 18, naive, unprepared and scared of what might happen, perpetuating the myth by avoiding too much understanding and simply being consumers of code-driven technology

It’s a real problem I see in business, and amongst my friends. So many people simply do not understand the tools they use and yet are called on to make critical decisions on how to use them. If schools can give the next generations of managers and employees that knowledge then some of the failures in IT building, procurement and management that plague the public and private sectors could be avoided.

Our ability to educate people in this often seems focused on the possibilities of the app economy or in enabling innovation, but this is just as important. So many decisions to offshore or outsource jobs, so much waste of time and money is down to poor management of digital tools. That is as much a reason for teaching our kids better as anything else.

Safari is released to the world

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:05:00 +0000

Safari is released to the world:

What a privilege to be a spectator during that process. At Apple, we were actually all students, not just spectators.

I’m loving this series of reminiscences on a critical part of Apple’s history. Fascinating stuff.

WhatsApp has nearly ⅓ of Mobile Messaging Traffic

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:56:00 +0000

WhatsApp has nearly ⅓ of Mobile Messaging Traffic:

From Horace Dediu comes this fascinating link. According to figures released by WhatsApp and Ovum¹ there are 21 billion messages sent daily, with WhatsApp alone sending 6 billion outbound messages. We’ve no idea how many are going through the various other alternatives, but I’d be surprised if the total didn’t beat the total of SMS.

This should terrify mobile networks, who have been used to charging crazy prices for SMS and who are now losing that business to cheaper, more friendly alternatives. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond to this. I’m not sure how they can.

Doesn’t their logo look like Orange’s? ↩

This Is How Design Works, by Wells Riley

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:08:33 +0000

This Is How Design Works, by Wells Riley:

Companies like Apple are making design impossible for startups to ignore. Startups like Path, Airbnb, Square, and Massive Health have design at the core of their business, and they’re doing phenomenal work. But what is ‘design’ actually?

Not just for startups. Design is Important. Very, very Important. Important. Doesn’t matter if you’re looking at a start-up or a huge technology implementation for a multi-national, or how you organise a photography workflow. Design is what makes the difference between good enough and useless.

via parislemon

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:12:00 +0000

via parislemon

Answers about Android

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:49:40 +0000

Answers about Android:

The BBC has been getting a bit of a kicking on the Twitters about the disparity in it’s levels of support for Android and Apple mobile devices. Rory Cellan-Jones has sought to answer some of the biggest complaints in a fascinating Q&A.

The difference in cost for 3rd party vendors to reach the 2 platforms is especially interesting. Despite Android having far more users, the take up of the service appears to have lagged dramatically. No doubt the much, much slower rate of uptake of new OS versions has made things even harder, and more expensive.

Android is designed to be free for vendors to use¹, and I assume is cheaper for Google to develop than iOS is for Apple. However it is more expensive for developers, and harder for them to make money. Pushing the costs from Google and the vendors to 3rd party developers and users (In the form of a worse experience) enables some interesting developments—the Congoloese Elikia and the Sony Smartwatch spring to mind. However it clearly detracts from the value of a platform, and with how much users can and will engage with it. This is bad for device manufacturers, as less quality platforms will be be less appealing to customers, and bad for networks, as users will use less data services, leading to reduced ARPU.

Given that the race to provide very cheap netbooks “did an incalculable amount of damage to the PC market”, it is possible that the race to provide very cheap phones will do the same thing to the phone market. Something that HTC, Nokia and RIM seem to be finding out².

That isn’t strictly true however. A number of vendors make licensing payments to Microsoft. ↩
A market with only 2 vendors—Samsung and Apple—making money is not a good one for customers, so I hope this predicition is wrong - competition will lead to much more cool stuff than a stagnent duopoly. ↩

Does the “school cliff” matter more than the fiscal cliff?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:23:00 +0000

Does the “school cliff” matter more than the fiscal cliff? :

This is profoundly worrying. I’ve long been of the opinion that schooling fails a great many students, especially boys. There has to be a smarter way of doing this.

The "whoa" business model

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 13:31:07 +0000

The "whoa" business model:

But I can’t forget that when those lights went down, when that screen went up, and when that twangy riff kicked in, there were audible gasps and cheers in the audience, and someone behind me yelled out “whoa, awesome!”

Advertising detracts from whatever it is you’re selling. Be it pre-show trailers, those annoying inserts in magazines or the “One weird trick” diet ads you get all over the web. Sometimes adverts can be great (John Lewis) or events in of themselves (Like the half time at the Superbowl) but interrupting, delaying or degrading an experience to advertise to customers detracts from their pleasure. It might be a trade-off worth making - very little of what we watch or read could be funded otherwise - but there is delight in doing away with it. If only for Christmas.

Shredding

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Source

One of my clients has an interesting annual event. Every January they hold their ShredFest, where they encourage people to sort the paper documents they no longer need and pass them to a colleague who will arange to have them shredded. The goals are to reduce clutter, reduce the strain on storage space and to reduce the risk of Data Protection Act and security violations from having all that paper information floating about.

A manager at the client firm remarked to me the other day how much he was looking forward to it, as his drawer was overflowing with unwanted paper. I can see the appeal, but it does rather highlight a missed opportunity.

Tidy is, to coin a phrase, something you are, not something you do. The whole point of programmes like the paper-light¹ working culture most large firms prefer, or the more formal 5s is that this becomes standard practice. It’s even the last S (Sustain) in that approach. You don’t let crap build up in your workspace until it overflows. You trim as you go. Like a good cook washes utensils as they are used, a good knowledge worker straightens as she goes.

It’s interesting that my client organisation puts so much effort into getting this annual event going—posters, global emails, people spending a couple of days collecting and shredding—essentially effort in the back end, the problem solving end. They could apply that effort to the front end, the problem creating end and remove the need for this annual blitz. That would have a much more longlasting effect on the problems they seek to address.

Some claim to be paper free. I’ve yet to see an office with no paper. I did meet a person who described herself paper free evangelist earlier this year however. She gave me a business card. ↩

The Web We Lost

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:25:23 +0000

The Web We Lost:

And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

Anil Dash, who I think was the first person I linked to on my first (And thankfully long-gone) blog back in 2003 or so.

Microsoftish

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Ben Brooks is wondering if he is unusual in using just Microsoft Office. This is in response to another article by Charlie Demerjian which describes the Microsoft ecosystem as being an all or nothing proposition — that you either have your systems as 100% Microsoft, or not at all. I think this misses those of us who use Office for Mac.

I’m in the same camp as Ben. I own my own business, so I get to choose what software I use. I use OS X, iLife and software from the Omni Group for almost everything. However for some client facing work I can’t avoid Office’s change tracking, Visio’s templates or the complex tools available in Excel. I am using the same XP license I ran on my last PC, a version of Visio a client gave me about 8 years ago and Office for Mac 2011. I’ll probably update the latter when a new version becomes available. When I upgrade my desktop mac early next year I’ll also likely buy Windows 7 to get me back into PC gaming.

Like Ben I don’t think I’m an edge case. I think I’m part of a growing number of people who are using a mix of Apple and Microsoft for their core business activity. Office is, despite Microsoft’s core business strategy, a compelling proposition. Were my clients not so strongly wedded to it I’d almost certainly still shell out just for Excel. I’d also give Outlook a good go if it played nicely with OmniFocus. I dislike using Windows and I hope never to buy another PC like the typical machine on sale today, but I’m sticking with Office.

Video

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:55:05 +0000

More on Meetings

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:31:56 +0000

It’s been a week or so since I began actively pushing back on the rubbish meetings I waste time in, and (probably more importantly) making sure I didn’t cause it. I’m applying the simple 4 rules from Merlin Mann’s Broken Meetings presentation.

1 One Agenda (It’s simple courtesy)
2 Two Hard Edges (Start & Stop on time)
3 Ruthless Grazing Policy (Is it OK to check email in a meeting?)
4 Transitive Follow-Up (Do what you say you will. Expect others to do the same)

For one reason and another the first half of the week was a wash out, but the second half showed improvement. This may have been because I’ve been focussed on cranking out documents since Wednesday, and there’s not enough data to draw any conclusions but I’m cautiously optimistic for the coming weeks.

Take out the outlier from last week when I locked myself away to get a plan done and things look even better.

There’s been very little pushback from my colleagues either. The invites haven’t slackened, but my insistence on agendas and starting & ending on time has been well received. So far.

Let’s see what next week brings!

Data Wrangler

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:58:23 +0000

Data Wrangler:

This looks very useful - a quick and simple way of building powerful data transformation scripts. I imagine this would have a lot of value for EPOS data analysis or commercial reporting.