capcloud | Martin Polley

ohonestly: i’ve been a fan of austin kleon’s work for a few...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:24:59 +0300

i’ve been a fan of austin kleon’s work for a few years now, and i was eager to get my hands on his latest book, “steal like an artist”. billed as a “manifesto for creativity in the digital age”, it’s chock full of great quotes, illustrations, and advice on how to follow your interests and embrace your influences. and though the title says “artist”, the material inside is applicable to any medium. it’s perfect for creatively-frustrated creative types (which i know many of you are), and i loved it so much that i want to give you a copy!

what you’ll get

your very own copy of austin kleon’s “steal like an artist”, shipped anywhere in the world, at no cost to you.

the rules

you have until may 1st to enter.
every reblog is considered one entry (likes don’t count, nor do replies).
i’ll use random.org to choose three winners.
keep your inbox open so i can notify you if you win. if a winner doesn’t respond within 48 hours, a new one will be chosen.

good luck!

p.s. if giveaways aren’t your thing, you can always pick up a copy on amazon.
p.p.s. this giveaway is not affiliated with or endorsed by tumblr or my employer, new york media.

Progress?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:49:21 +0200

So anyway, I haven’t done much on my webapp lately, but now I’ve decided to pull my finger out. I originally started playing around with Google AppEngine for the back-end, but I realized a couple of things.

First, I’m not going to get very far, nor learn very much, just by copying and tweaking Google’s example code.

Second, using AppEngine ties you in to Google. You can’t easily move elsewhere. So I figured I’d be better off not going that route.

So I’ve decided to take a step back and refresh my programming “skills”. On the recommendation of my friend Idan, I’m working my way through Learn Python the Hard Way. Which I’m rather enjoying. It’s not really a Python book. It’s more like an introductory programming book that happens to use Python.

We’ll see where it leads…

Bookmarklet, Part II

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:30:44 +0300

That bookmarklet is shaping up quite nicely. Shame it doesn’t actually do anything yet :)

Bookmarklets

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:56:04 +0300

Woot! I made my first bookmarklet that actually works! It’s small and doesn’t do much, but it does something.

Making

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:11:10 +0300

I want to make something. I have an idea and I want to bring it to fruition. To design it, then build it. All on my own. Right now, I can’t do it. Not all of it. There are too many things I don’t know yet. But I know enough to get started. I can design it. I can code the front end. I trust that I’ll be able to figure out the Javascript.

I don’t have a clue about the back end. Not yet. How to set up a database, handle requests, query the database, write to it. But I’ll learn.

So what is this thing I want to build? It’s something that I want, for me. It’s like Instapaper or Read It Later, but for people who lack self-discipline. Those apps are great, but they have one limitation—they have no limits. I toss stuff into Instapaper willy-nilly, knowing deep down that I will never have time to read all of it (and maybe not any of it).

It has become a bottomless pit, sitting there, being intimidating. I now have Instapaper guilt. Guilt about all those important articles that I should have read but haven’t. It’s become like a second inbox.

My app will be different. If Instapaper and Read It Later are giant backpacks that always have space for more stuff, my app will be a carry-on bag. You can put a reasonable number of essentials in there, but when it’s full, it’s full. If you want to put something else in, you’ll have to take something else out. That way, you’ll have to be very judicious about what you put in there in the first place.

Maybe it sounds like a daft idea to you. Fine. No problem. But it doesn’t sound daft to me. And maybe there are other people out there who will find it useful.

Time will tell.

martinpolley.com

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:51:08 +0300

I finally got round to registering martinpolley.com. For now, it just redirects here. Maybe I’ll do something interesting with it at some point. Let’s just say that I’m not holding my breath…

The Power of Personalization (or not…)

Mon, 09 May 2011 15:33:57 +0300

My wife recently got a new phone. She said she didn’t really need an iPhone, so she went for an LG Cookie Plus. It’s a nice looking phone, with a decent-sized touch screen and quite a slim casing.

I played around with a bit and found it incredibly frustrating. The touch screen isn’t as responsive as the iPhone’s. Swiping is as likely to move something as it is to do what you actually want it to do. In lists, it is way too easy to select something when you want to scroll. Etc.

My wife said she wanted to send it back and go back to using her old Sony-Ericsson candybar phone.

But then a funny thing. She changed the wallpaper. She changed the background color from black to white. She changed the icon set from the default iPhone-like one to one that looked hand-drawn.

And suddenly the phone wasn’t so bad after all.

What happened here? A couple of things. First, she had made the phone her own. And maybe because of this, she was more willing to give it a chance.

Second (and I think, more importantly) the phone did not seem to take itself so seriously any more. Instead of being a vastly inferior iPhone wannabe, it was something else. It had stopped trying to be something it very obviously was not.

It was suddenly more honest. It’s just a shame that it wasnt like that from the start.

Do Tools Matter?

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:30:25 +0200

Michael Angeles has an interesting post over at konigi.com about how our tools are not important.

“Don’t let anyone tell you that the tools you choose are wrong or inappropriate. Find the right design and keep winning.”

This got retweeted a lot. I read it and found myself agreeing. I even retweeted it myself. But since then I have been thinking about this a fair bit. And now I’m not so sure.

I think he’s missing something by only talking about one side of the tool question. The side that deals with working through a design. As he writes, “There are no good or bad tools for finding the right design.” But there is another side to this. And that is concerned with what we do with the things we create using our tools.

And there I think there are not insignificant differences in fit between the actual deliverable and the thing we want it to do for us. As Bill Buxton has said on many occasions “Everything is best for something and worst for something else.” And we use the deliverables that we create for several different things: To show to our designer colleagues for the purposes of collaboration and critique. To show to stakeholders, for the purpose of getting buy-in. To share with our developer colleagues so that they will know what to build at the required level of detail.

A wireframe is good for working with design colleagues. A video walkthrough may be the best thing to show to stakeholders. And a high-fidelity HTML prototype may be better for communicating to developers than an annotated wireframe.

Maybe I’m stating the obvious here. What do you think?

Alma (test post from iPhone app)

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:45:52 +0200

Alma (test post from iPhone app)

rcoleman: Day-to-day driving must feel like such a chore to...

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 07:47:52 +0200

rcoleman:

Day-to-day driving must feel like such a chore to this guy (the awesome Ken Block)

Forex Trading

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:23:30 +0200

A friend of mine asked me to post a link for him. If you’re even remotely interested in Forex Trading, you should check it out.

Sir Ken Robinson Gets Animated (RSA)

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 13:30:44 +0300

I’m a big fan of Sir Ken.

Dodgems

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 11:09:09 +0300

I’m pretty chuffed with the way this photo turned out.

Photo

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:01:53 +0300

The Importance of Vision

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:42:07 +0300

I just listened to an old episode of The Conversation, where Dan is talking to Garrett Dimon, Cameron Moll, and Faruk Ates about how you know when an application or design is done.

Garrett Dimon said something that particularly stuck with me. He talked about the importance of having a vision for what the thing is going to be like two years from now. You use this to help decide what new features to add to your product, but perhaps more importantly, what not to add.

This ties in with something that Jared Spool has mentioned on many occasions—one important characteristic of successful teams is a vision of what the experience of using the product will be like five years from now.

Anyway.

OMG!!! (Make sure you watch it in fullscreen.) /via @orian

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:02:24 +0300

OMG!!! (Make sure you watch it in fullscreen.)

/via @orian

Don't Touch the Controls!

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:57:01 +0300

One of the dubious benefits of having a leased car is getting to drive a different car whenever it has to go to the garage for something. (This time, a cracked windshield.) The one car I actually enjoyed was a Prius. All the others were meh, including the Toyota Corolla that I have at the moment.

One of the more annoying things about this car is the gearbox. Automatic transmission has been around for many years. The interface is pretty much standard by now, and car manufacturers need a pretty good reason to mess with it. One such reason was the addition of tiptronic gear changing (which the Corolla also has). So why has Toyota gone and changed the interface from the usual Park/Reverse/Neutral/Drive/1/2/3 pattern?

For starters, Park seems to have been removed. And “E” seems to have replaced Drive. (Any idea what “E” stands for? Me neither.) Reverse and Neutral are still there. And M with plus and minus is pretty standard for tiptronic shifting. The numbered gears have gone. No need for them when you have got tiptronic shifting. (And this transmission has five gears, so this is a good solution.)

But the most mysterious thing is the big button marked “M-MT Es”. Pressing it does not have any obvious effect. Nothing lights up. The behavior of the transmission seems unchanged. In fact, it is impossible to tell if it is on or off. For all I know, it may have more than two states. (The label seems to suggest that this is the case.)

If you know the answer to this mystery, please tweet or mail me. I am genuinely curious about this. (One possible explanation that I can think of is that maybe here in Israel we get cars with localized labeling for some non-English-speaking European country…)

This is just a test to see if I screwed up my blog -> Twitter thing…

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:33:26 +0300

This is just a test to see if I screwed up my blog -> Twitter thing…

Better vs Familiar

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:56:29 +0300

While reading #1 here (which recommends using familiar user interface paradigms for learnability), I couldn’t help thinking about Loewy’s MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable) and this from Dieter Rams:

Things which are different simply in order to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.

We need to strike a balance, but would should keep Rams and Loewy in mind as we do so.

Sensible Defaults to Save Energy

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:00 +0300

Our new office building has dimmable lights that each person can control for their own cubicle. Originally, you could set the dim level anywhere from 30% to 100%. Every morning, the lights would be reset to 100% brightness.

But recently they changed the defaults. Now you can set the dim level from 0% (off) to 100%. And the default (which the lights reset to every morning) is 0%. So now when someone is out of the office for the day, the lights above their cubicle are off instead of on. Which is already a win.

But lots of people have either not noticed the change (and are using the default “off” setting) or (like me) prefer the lower light levels. I wonder how much electricity such a simple change is saving…