JetBlue has dedicated screens on every seat. They are dialed into DirecTV and you ca nchoose form about 40 channels. The shows are pretty up to date, but possibly are recorded from the day before. Flying JetBlue is so different than flying another airline. Reason: Time Flies when you are…
How long do you prepare for a presenation? I usually like to start thinking about the presentation 1-2 weeks in advance. Hopefully, I have a decent slideshow prepared, but the details rarely come into focus until this 1-2 week period. I’ve been thinking about the ExtJS conference that I am…
Ask any 5 year old: Which is better? 5 pennies or 1 dime. Any 5 year old will tell you the 5 pennies are better. There are MORE of them, of course. They don’t care that the dime is more expensive. OK, now consider your software product. Which is better?…
How does one USE a dream? I have alot of dreams and I think of it this way: A dream is your mind’s way of telling you something you don’t want to think about. I used to have a dream about being chased; always in a different place, like Yankee…
I just did a quick search. I have never posted an April Fool’s Day message. Quite surprising, since I love the tradition. The internet is particularly good as a medium to deliver fake messages. I was fooled yesterday about the IE8 news. A great April Fool joke is believeable. It…
I can’t even believe I am letting my hopes get this high. Check out this SmashingMagazine article about Internet Explorer 8.1. The thing that pops out, and it pops out ALOT is shown in this picture: This is GIGANTIC. It is showing support for Firefox add-ins The biggest reason I…
What is the best way to watch Monsters vs. Aliens? (neat site by the way) My choices are numerous: Imax 3d at Emeryville. (Or the Metreon). This would probably be the most interesting way to watch it. It would be gigantic and THREE-DEE…unless that would be totally annoying. Is the…
hip·po (hp)n. pl. hip·pos Def: Hippo is an acronym standing for HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion. This term was coined by Avinash Kaushik, analytics genius. When you are in a meeting and trying to get some decisions made, look around. Who is the person who gets to make the final call?…
The other day, I was lamenting that I didn’t have visibility regarding the usage patterns in the application I work on. I wanted to know who was “at risk” and who was an emerging power user. (Being ‘At Risk’ means that you might not renew because you aren’t using the…
Go to google and search for “foo bar” You get some variety of this: http://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar Notice the q= part. It is describing the term you searched for. Now go to yahoo.com and do the exact same thing. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=foo+bar Notice the p= part. It’s p not q. Why is Yahoo using…
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday. (Funny, that link says IE7 all over it.) I have such conflicting feelings about Microsoft. They have provided a ton of my primary software for over 20 years. I started on DOS, then moved through every single version of their operating systems. I learned…
Many people I know develop personas for their applications and then pretend to be the user. It’s like method acting for application development. I think this is a bad idea. The reason is simple: Users are random and unpredictable. They will click everywhere and do every possible wrong thing. An…
Imagine your users are normal smart people who are using your application during Halloween. They are happily using your great product when all of the sudden, “ding Dong!”. Oh, it must be a cute little bunch of trick or treaters. Let’s stand up and walk over to the door. Oh,…
This Saturday, I skipped P-Camp and went into San Francisco to see the Interaction Design gathering at Adapative Path‘s offices. (Photos) I have to say, I was kind of disappointed. P-Camp, last year was pretty dynamic with alot of energy and interesting talks. The IxDA conference seemed really toned down…