Flyover Country

July 21, 2010

Rita Hayworth

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June 1, 2010

I finally pulled the trigger on my minimum viable product concept. I started working on the website and developing some more refined screenshots of the concept a couple days back, bought a perfect domain name two nights ago (http://www.[REDACTED].com), and created the first Google AdWords campaign for the product just a few minutes ago. I’m very excited to see how well this concept works, especially since the two [REDACTED]s I’ve run the idea by have been very interested in getting the app as soon as possible. I’m doing some A/B testing with the app’s price and I’m curious to see what—if any—difference that ends up making to my conversion rate. No sense in leaving money on the table, you know?

Along the same lines, I love how fast and easy it is to run a Google AdWords campaign. I banged out some ad copy about 20 minutes ago, and the ad just went live. I’m not competing with anyone else for my primary search keyword, “[REDACTED],” which hopefully will reduce my costs and drive a ton of traffic back to my website.

I’ve also incorporated Facebook’s Like widget into my site in order to drive organic, word-of-mouth traffic back to my site. I’ll be sure to describe how well that works.

Finally, the website I built for the [REDACTED] is built on Rails 2.3, super light-weight and can easily be adapted for any future MVP-type concepts, so hopefully putting up more of these sites will go from being a week-long process to a couple hour affair.

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May 26, 2010

Minimum Viable Products

(This is the redacted version of a blog post I will update in the future. I’m redacting certain bits of information since there is virtually no moat or secret sauce outside of the novelty of the idea and an opportunity to get out in front of other likeminded people.)

A couple days ago, I happened upon the federal government’s [publicly available dataset]. Frankly, I recognize that this stuff isn’t of much interest to your average person, but—by way of my [good, knowledgeable friend]—I’ve developed a keen understanding that there are tons of [likeminded people] who live and die by this information. Simultaneously, I’ve been looking for a product concept that I can build through a fairly rigorous application of the minimum viable product (MVP) mindset. So, of course it struck me that there could be potential for a rather novel niche product, here. And, if I can manage it, I’d also love to have a topical portfolio piece to include in my application for Code for America.

Underserved niche? Check. Opportunity to apply a goofy product development methodology? Check. Possibility of actually making some money? Check. Serving my long-term goals? Check.

Naturally, the Federal Government’s [user interface for accessing the aforementioned dataset] is terrible. I mean, it’s really mind-numbingly awful. [So are all of the other tools that serve up this dataset].

And therein lies my niche: a Mac OS X-based [dataset access] tool with the added ability to [do some cool stuff no one else is doing].

I did some initial user research: I mocked up the UI in Photoshop and shot it over to [another person similar to the knowledgeable friend of mine] I know. When I asked her if she wanted it, she flipped and replied “YES!!!!!!!”. That’s encouraging: there might be a real niche market to serve.

Next up, I’m planning on buying some Google Adwords space for relevant keywords and putting up a website with more of my mockups and feature descriptions behind it. Luckily, literally no one is advertising on [relevant keywords] right now, so ad space ought to be cheap. The website will A/B test a couple different feature sets and price points, and ask interested parties to leave their email addresses. Hopefully, that will help me better gauge overall interest, and direct my development efforts.

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May 4, 2010

Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and iPad

I picked up an iPad on release day, but didn’t bother to get the Apple Bluetooth keyboard until today. Here are a couple quick thoughts about it:

1. This is the *only* way to type on an iPad. It turns the device from a content consumption mechanism into a totally reasonable laptop replacement. All I need now is a way to build Rails and iPhone apps directly on my iPad

2. It’s a lot smaller than I expected. It’s just a little bit longer than the iPad itself, but still totally comfortable to type on. It reminds me a lot of the keyboard on my MacBook Pro.

3. Some keyboard shortcuts work, some don’t. Things like Option+Delete and Option+Left Arrow/Right Arrow work perfectly. Things seem to work pretty much as you’d expect while you’re in UITextView controls (i.e. big text fields); things fall apart when you’re in UITextFields (like in a table with editable fields). Playback, sound, and brightness all work perfectly.

All told: $70 is absolutely worth it to pair your iPad up with this keyboard. If I was not a developer, I’d start seriously considering leaving the laptop behind and just bringing the iPad + keyboard with me everywhere I went. It’s that good. Run, don’t walk to your Apple Store and buy one!

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February 22, 2010

John Gruber, Jackass

John Gruber:

12-word review of “A Serious Man”: So much for the Coen brothers never having made a bad movie.

Where by “review” Gruber means “140 characters of obnoxious drivel.”

(truth be told, I haven’t seen A Serious Man yet, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to riff on a recent DF post title

cough cough.

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February 15, 2010

Solution for undefined method `sphinx_scope’

Running into undefined_method errors with Thinking Sphinx and sphinx scopes?

Make sure you define your sphinx_scope after the define_index block, instead of before.

Simple, huh?

In other words, make sure your ActiveRecord classes look like this:

class ContrivedExample < ActiveRecord::Base
  define_index do
    has :something
  end
  sphinx_scope(:something_cool) { :with => {:something => 10} }
end

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February 15, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Series Looks Beautiful and Unusable

The name is terrible. Would Windows 7 Phone have been so bad? Really? The fact that the videographer talking with Gian Wilson from Microsoft can’t pronounce the OS’ name doesn’t bode well for anyone else. Everyone I know who is not a consummate techie—and even some who are—call the Apple iPod touch an iTouch, because iPod touch is just too damned hard to say. Windows Phone 7 Series is an order of magnitude worse.

The lock screen is totally illegible. Undoubtedly, part of the problem is the camera that’s being used for the interview, coupled with the phone’s glossy screen, but there simply isn’t enough contrast in the lock screen’s background image and the white text to make this work. At least for Barcelona, the MED group responsible for setting up their demo phones should have used a background image with darker colors. From a feature perspective, the text should have a drop shadow or something to ensure that the bajillions of photos that *look just like this* will work with (ahem) Windows Phone 7 Series.

Also, unlocking the phone isn’t particularly intuitive. iPhone: press the power button, swipe the thing that says ‘SWIPE ME.’ Affordances are great, baby! Windows Phone 7 Series: slide the image up. Wuh?

Start Screen

“Here’s the story/of a lovely lady!” First thought: wow, that looks like the Brady Bunch title screen. Second thought, this looks pretty good. A heck of a lot better than the one from Windows Mobile 6.5. Why are the content margins so wacky? There’s a huge gutter on the right side and a teeny tiny one on the left side.

Animations on the Start Screen

Super slow. The swooping tiles effect is super pretty, but looks like it takes forever to complete. Just launch my damned app already. For a phone that’s supposedly about getting out of your way and letting you live your life, I think it places too much emphasis on whiz-bang-for-the-sake-of-whiz-bangerry effects.

Xbox Live/Games

I really like the fonts used across the interface. I’m not really fond of the Zune’ish ‘let text run off the screen’ thing. Seriously, guys, please tell me that the word “Games” getting clipped on the right side of the screen is an honest to god bug, and not someone’s idea of cleverness. The gutter issue mentioned above shows up here, again. Another issue I noticed is that the word “Games” doesn’t move off screen when Gian starts scrolling down. Yes, I know I’m in the Games app. Why do I need to keep staring at a reminder in 80pt Segoe when all I want to do is look at my games?

Finally, why does the app’s icon call this Xbox Live, while the app itself is referred to as Games? This should be consistent. Not to mention that, yes, I still know exactly what I clicked on when I left the Start Screen.

Navigation within the Xbox Live/Games app

Oh my god! You can change screens on both the X and Y axes. That’s totally undiscoverable! Where the heck are the affordances? Why couldn’t you just put a tab bar at the bottom of the screen like Apple? Also, on the Spotlight screen, the word ‘Games’ is now clipped on the letter ‘G.’ Maybe this is supposed to somehow tell you where you are in the app. “Hey, I’ll look at which letter in the title is clipped, and then slide my finger in the opposite direction in order to see more stuff!” Yeah, that’s intuitive.

Notifications in the Xbox Live/Games app

Pertinent notifications related to my use of apps really should not require multiple swipes into an undiscoverable piece of UI in order to find. That’s just braindead.

People Hub

OK, they’re doing the freaky clipped title thing again. I’m getting the feeling that this is intentional. And it’s utterly terrifying. Also, why does that first guy’s picture take 2-3 seconds to slide up? Why do I want his picture to slide up? Don’t I just want to see his picture? Finally, maybe it’s a result of the video quality, but the contrast between text and background color on this screen looks incredibly low again (i.e. stuff looks like it’s hard to read).

What’s New page in People

In order to see what your friends are doing, I counted the following gestures:
- One click to access the People Hub.
- One swipe past Recents to access All Contacts.
- One swipe past All Contacts to access What’s New.

The amount of work you have to do to reach seemingly undiscoverable pieces of content is remarkable.

The ‘Pictur’ Hub

This clipped text thing is obnoxious. Text contrast is awful again. Seriously, guys: drop shadows. I can’t quite tell, but it doesn’t look like the Pictures Hub offers that cool (and useful) scrolling inertia feature you’ll see on the iPhone. That’s the thing where it keeps scrolling, but at a slower rate after you swipe.

Finally…

I find it extremely curious that we never saw the actual phone calling experience, given that the name of the OS includes the word ‘Phone’.

Windows Phone 7 Series looks beautiful. The typography is fantastic. The screen looks vibrant. It looks like a great step forward from Windows Mobile 6.5. But… It feels like a group of really top-notch developers and designers sat down in a room and said ‘what sort of awesome stuff can we do that looks really cool, never mind the usability?’

OK, I’m being unfair. But, the fact of the matter is that I’d have significant concerns about my own ability to easily use the device, never you mind how my 66 year old mother would deal with it.

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January 4, 2010

Waiting for a bus

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December 22, 2009

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

From an article in TNR:

[John] Kerry remains furious about Tora Bora today. “They declared Osama bin Laden the world’s number-one criminal, and went out boldly proclaiming, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ and talking about the dangers of Al Qaeda,” he told me recently. “And when they had an opportunity to completely, not only decapitate it, but probably to leave it with the minuscule, last portion of its tail, they never showed up.” His anger is justified. Bin Laden was clearly at Tora Bora, and sending so few troops was indeed a major failure.

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December 21, 2009

It’s not funny when it’s true

The link in question

my response:

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