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Herb & Dorothy

June 28, 2009 / 12:04 AM / Comments

Today, I was out with a friend, shopping for furnishings for her new apartment. While at CB2, it suddenly started to rain, which has been annoyingly typical these past few weeks. But we were hungry, so I used the Yelp iPhone app to find restaurants nearby. We settled on a cheap burger place called Soho Park, on Lafayette and Prince, and we sprinted over through the rain. The burgers were great, a solid 7 out of 10, The highlight was the endless bucket of fries, which came with a choice of two “speciality” dips. The service was shoddy, but the cheap price, good food, and easygoing company made up for it.

Afterwards, we wanted to see a movie, but we had already seen the good movies currently out, including Up and The Hangover. So I pulled up the Now Playing app on my iPhone, and it told me which movies were playing in which theaters nearby, and their Rotten Tomatoes rating. Given that we were in the SoHo/Greenwich Village area, we were able to find the nearby Cinema Village, a 3-screen cinema specializing in foreign and independent films. We quickly honed in on the documentary Herb & Dorothy, mainly because of its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I’ve only had my new iPhone 3GS for a week now, and I’m really enjoying the fact that I can access the internet anywhere. Location-based services add a lot to the experience of going out and figuring out what to do. Rather than sit around wondering what is going on in the big and daunting city, location-based apps on the iPhone help me parse what I can do nearby, to certain broad or specific parameters. I firmly believe in planning in advance, but sometimes it’s nice to let the spur of the moment carry the day. I had read the hype about location-based services through blogs, but until last week, I had not had the opportunity to really experience it for myself.

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Fever: Social Aggregation and Curation

June 22, 2009 / 7:02 PM / Comments

I know many words have already been written about Fever, but I’d like to provide my own impressions of Fever after a few days of usage. Rather than try to provide “first impression” type reviews, I like to let my thoughts simmer.

Fever is developed by Shaun Inman, who also developed the Mint site analytics package. The basic mentality behind Fever is that it helps you curate the most important content from a large number of feeds. It does this with an additional top layer of automatic aggregation and curation on top of a traditional RSS reader. Fever semantically looks at which stories have been posted most often and lets those rise to the top. Fever distinguishes between two types of feeds: “kindling” and “sparks.” Essential, must-read feeds are designated “kindling,” and supplementary feeds that mostly repost links are designated “sparks.” Sparks ignite Kindling raising the temperature of items and links that should not be missed.

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Dreaming in the Shower

May 20, 2009 / 2:54 PM / Comments

Cameron Moll has an interesting blog post up about the “creative pause” we experience in the shower. Creative pause is the “shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.” You move from a structured thinking to a stream of thinking.

Of course, when I want to complete a structured task, I don’t want to be in the shower. The desk is better environment for completing structured tasks. But the shower is great for brainstorming in an unstructured manner. Shifting your brain into a more relaxed state allows you to attack a problem from a different direction.

I find that a lot of my most creative thinking happens in the shower. The shower helps me develop my thoughts in new directions. It’s also a place for me to escape from stress or cluttered thoughts. These two ideas build on the fact that deliberate breaks can be helpful to problem solving.

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Real-time: Search or Discovery?

July 2, 2009 / 12:11 PM

Lee Hower has an interesting blog post saying that “real-time” search is actually discovery:

Search is when you know basically what you’re looking for in advance, discovery is when you want things to be revealed to you. Search experts talk about lots of different forms of search… recall or recovery search (when you know a name or a brand and are trying to locate it), research search (trying to learn more about a topic or concept), competitive or comparative search (seeking similar concepts or objects to one already known), etc. Most of the products we call real-time search today involve consumers and companies wanting to find out what’s happening right now and perhaps explore the conversation or draw high level conclusions from it. That’s discovery.

Stop Password Masking

June 23, 2009 / 3:52 PM

Jakob Nielsen implores web developers to stop masking passwords in web input forms. I have to admit I never thought about it this way.

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

The only case when you would need to mask passwords is when the user is in a public space, in which case Jakob proposes there be a check box to mask the password in the input form. (via Kottke)

How Cloud Computing Works

June 23, 2009 / 1:15 AM

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but how does it actually work? The visualization of how cloud computing works, and the difference between cloud computing and traditional hosting. The key word here is scalability.

Ten Things Not to Do in New York City

June 22, 2009 / 6:46 PM

This list of Ten Things Not to Do in New York City is surprisingly accurate. If you’re going to visit NYC, this list is a must read. NYC is too interesting to waste time in tourist traps.

Eric Schmidt Commencement Speech

May 24, 2009 / 12:54 PM

“You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.”

– Eric Schmidt, Carnegie Mellon Commencement Speech

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