The Idea Dude

So you think you can dance

2009-11-06T08:45:00.002-05:00

That's name of a very popular TV show that finds the country's most popular dancer. One of the best parts are the auditions. Like American Idol, there are clearly people who not talented but nevertheless stand in line for hours for a chance at stardom.

We are all alike. I remember as a child, watching an action movie and for the next week, every kid who went to the movie wanted to be that hero, donning capes, swords and pretend guns.

Nothing's changed really. We still watch TV ads and buy stuff that promises we'll cook like an Iron Chef or make renovations like Mike Holmes. Last week, I accompanied my wife to an art store. It was like Christmas was early. Every shelf had crayons, pastels, paints of every shade and color. Hundreds of books showing you how to draw perfect pictures and paint beautiful landscapes. Air brush kits, projectors that could project any image on any wall, the list goes on an on. I wanted to draw again, paint again.

Then realized that anything I bought would sit on my shelf at home like many other things I bought in the past in the spur of the moment.

It was all aspirational.

That was when the penny dropped. Most of what I feel in life is aspirational. Something lit a fire and emotionally I wanted to do something. In reality, when that moment passes, nothing would be done.

So now before buying something, I make the mental calculation, is this aspirational or inspirational. Aspirational means it got me excited but I either wouldn't have the time or the talent to follow through. Inspirational meant I was capable of finishing what I will start. It is a call to action and there is a happy conclusion.

Of course advertisers appeal to our aspirational side. The people who show off makeup are the most beautiful people in the world. Toyotas are driven by racing drivers. The food is cooked by chefs. "Buy this and you could be like me, rich and famous."

Aspirational means, don't buy that snowboard for myself because I saw my son do some pretty neat stuff on the slopes the other day. Inspirational means try that new recipe for breakfast because there are only 3 ingredients and I can actually cook it.

So next time you pull out your credit card, ask yourself.

Is it aspirational or inspirational?

Making your blog viral - Step 2

2009-10-28T08:50:00.002-04:00

Boo!

Think about how people will respond to your blog post. Ask why people will talk about it or, better still, why they will write about it.

Why are urban legends viral? They have a sense of incredulity. People can't believe it, it makes them sit up and they want to share it because of how they responded to them.

People love surprises. Remember how the office loved the fact you brought in doughnuts to the weekly meetings. Remember how they grumbled after 2 months that you're bringing doughnuts again to the weekly meetings?

The unexpected doesn't have to be fictional. It can be a piece of knowledge that people feel compelling to share. That is the power of gossip. The delight of communicating something you know that someone else doesn't.

Did you know there are almost 95,000 applications on the iPhone and you can only load 148 of them at any one time?

I'm willing to bet if you read this post, you'll tell someone in the next 24 hours!

Next time you write a blog post, think Boo!

It's been a while...

2009-10-26T16:14:00.003-04:00

Sometimes we get caught up in our lives, our careers, our families, we forget to live in the moment. I was listening to some music today while I was coding. Got caught up by the voice, the inflections, the breath at the end of each phrase.

It made me stop and wonder.

When was the last time, I sat down in the quiet of the evening. Just a glass of wine, headphones and my favorite CD.

With eyes closed, I would focus on each instrument, anticipating the sigh, the breath of every well-known phase. Basking in the moment, letting the emotions wash over me. It made me feel complete, at one with the world. Nothing else mattered.

It's been a while...

We do ourselves injustice to have to share our moments with each other, when each moment deserves its own soapbox. It's like looking at your date with one eye on someone else in the room. But alas in our frenetic world, that's what we do. It's called multitasking.

In the end, it's like eating soup, entree and dessert all at the same time. It fills you up but you would hardly call it appetizing.

We should never have to say, "it's been a while..."

Making your blog sticky - step 1

2009-10-19T09:34:00.004-04:00

TheGoodBlogs have been running for over 3 years. I've blogged for almost 4. I've seen a lot of good blogs and a lot of bad ones. Here's my first tip for making your blog posts sticky.

Step 1: Keep it simple

What does simple mean? One idea. One clear idea. For something to be sticky, it must be memorable. We all have short memories.

Bad example: How to make the ultimate 3 course meal. French Onion soup, Filet Mignon and New York Cheesecake.

Good example: Wowing them with the Killer New York Cheesecake.

Question. Which one do you think you will remember? Which one makes you want to share your information.

Blogs are great because they let us ramble, like our diaries. They let us put a lot of ideas in one place. Blogs are bad because most of us ramble and most of us put too many ideas in one blog post.

So rather than give you 6 steps to great blogging. This is all you get. Step 1.

Step 1: Simple means one idea. Make people want to remember it. That's it.

Stay tuned.

Halloween Bunnies

2009-10-13T10:23:00.002-04:00

Maybe a little early but the last time we added the Easter Bunny to our iPhone app, it was approved and released the day after Easter. So for Halloween, we didn't want risk being late. And as it so happens we way early. Nevertheless, if you're looking to send a cute bunny to someone for halloween, our iPhone Send a Bunny apps have one just for the occasion.

Shameless pleas for your support... if you like the bunny, download our free iPhone app for the bunny or collect all the bunnies for 99c.

Visit us and get your Halloween Bunny

The subjectivity of value

2009-10-04T10:29:00.002-04:00

I was watching a YouTube video about virtual communities called Another Perfect World. Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life talked about how we have a perceived value of ourselves and others have a different value they place upon us. When the large number of people believe that value to be true then you have great wealth.

It's a sobering thought because that is equally applicable in the real world. It's a paradox really because we are taught not to care about what other people think but to be true to ourselves. Yet it the real world, for us to succeed we have to convince others to agree with our assessment of our value before we have a chance of success.

Think about an interview. On your resume you have state why you would be a valuable player and deserve a particular salary. On the other side, they have to agree with that assessment before they will hire you. Are baseball players more valuable than the president of the United States. Based on their salaries you would believe so. It is truly about market forces. Does it really cost $200,000 to build a sports car and is it really worth 20x that Toyota sitting in your driveway? It is because they made you believe it via marketing and scarcity.

So while it is not wrong to have a high esteem of oneself, it is important to remember that at the end of the day, our job in any interview or meeting is to be able to convey that value and what impact it has on the organization. Most of us do a terrible job at marketing ourselves because we are taught at a young age that is wrong and when we see others do it we think they are vain or precocious.

Sometimes letting our actions speak for ourselves is not enough. It is up to us to be heard and to be proactive in setting the price.

There are always two sides to a mirror, how we see ourselves and how others see us. Unfortunately, the latter in reality is what counts if we want to succeed. That is the absolute reality of charging what the market will bear.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

2009-09-22T22:07:00.002-04:00

An article in ComputerWorld today had the headline "Gold rush! Big money seen for iPhone, Smartphone app developers.". They quoted the Yankee Group Research as extrapolating the numbers to 2013 to be 4.2 billion. It said that 2.9 billion will go to developers and 1.3 billion will go to the people running the app store.

Being one of these developers in the game for almost a year, you would think I'd be jumping for joy hearing such great news. Alas, to me this sounds like the optimism of the dotcom crash. Here's the reality check.

There are only 3-5 major smartphone players running app stores of any significance. Assuming the numbers come true, Apple will probably take 60% of the 1.3 billion and the rest divided up between Blackberry, Google and Nokia.

There are easily over 30,000 mobile application developers, let's say 50,000 by 2013. Dividing 2.9 billion amongst 50,000 people is 58,000 per capita. Pretty dismal if you ask me. The harsh reality is that the long tail applies. Of the 80,000 apps in the Apple App Store, a handful (literally) will make a million dollars or more, a couple hundred will make several hundred thousand dollars and the rest (that's 95% or more) will never recoup their costs.

So it's all good news for the smartphone vendors but not as rosy for developers. (Sounds remarkably like Google Adsense, where Google makes billions and most of the poor blog owners are, well, poor, to the tune of making several cents a day). Sure, we'll continue to see the great story of how one guy spent one week to write a app that sold a million copies. These are the black swans of our age, it is unlikely they will ever repeat their success the same way again except if you're a big player with deep pockets and huge marketing budgets.

If I got a buck for every time some one came up to us and told us they had the next killer app idea, I would make more money than I would selling apps in the app store.

But this is the real world, life is fair and the majority will always be poor and few will be rich regardless of the industry. I just get disappointed because it's stories like these that make people flock blindly to the next paradigm. What's even worse, is the days to come, where small startups get funded with ridiculous amounts of money when the business models are not sustainable and built on hype. If you build it they will come is happening all over again. I lived through the dot com, this is another dot com in the making. We will never learn.

Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware, in this case, let the developer beware. If you believe you can build a set of applications each returning a reasonable amount of money over time, you have the makings of a business. If you believe you can write one app and make a million dollars, all you have is a dream. It can happen but don't bank on it.

The power of the brand

2009-09-18T08:20:00.002-04:00

Martin Lindstrom conducted an interesting experiment to see how brands affected our children. Most of the childen, in their pre-teens recognized brands by their logos and music jingles even though the logos were partially obscured. Even brands like Gucci didn't escape their recognition. Being bombarded by ads on radio, TV and billboards, these images become subliminal affecting our buying decisions without us even knowing about it.

My daughter inherited my Thinkpad a while back when I moved to a Mac for iPhone development. Recently she complained about the notebook being very hot and the battery not being very effective. Her tone led me to reply that although it was over a year old, her Thinkpad was one of the best and powerful notebooks on the market today. I don't think the message landed because all she said was "Maybe next time you shouldn't buy IBM". That, my friends, could be a signal of the beginning of the end for the venerable giant.

Seriously though, it did show that while the Thinkpad was a icon for us business types, it is not for Generation Y. I doubt my daughter would have said the same about my Mac which she grabs from me at every available opportunity. Functionally, either the Thinkpad or the Mac would amply meet her needs but that's not the point, is it? That is the power of the brand.

So the message to all the dads today is, if you want to be a hip dad, buy a Mac. Your kids will love you for it.

How rules make us forget common sense

2009-09-14T15:48:00.002-04:00

There was a road rage incident recently that gave rise to an interesting article in our local paper. It postulated that the reason why our traffic issues are getting worse and not better is because we have too many rules. Rules give people a sense of entitlement and in the heat of the moment, we use the rules as ways of establishing our rights even though our common sense may say otherwise.

It all makes perfect sense. In many countries, lawyers use precedents and laws to get clients off on technicalities even if it may be clear that they were indeed guilty. Driving on our roads, I often see people accelerate to close gaps or push in when they could slide in behind instead. Somehow, understanding how the rule may work to our advantage gives us the right to do the wrong thing. Perhaps there is a Darwinian gene in us that warns us that if we are to survive, the weak must die. Somehow we have mistaken meek for weak.

Of course, without rules the concept of full-blown anarchy may even be a worse alternative.

Nevertheless, what happened to using our common sense and discretion? Can we even trust ourselves to do the right thing when called to do so? Or do we cop out by simply justifying taking the low road with the excuse that we were just following the rules.

Fat grass and a lesson in patience

2009-09-09T08:55:00.002-04:00

Couple of years ago, our lawn died a horrible death while I was away working in the US for over a year. It was the hottest summer and the family joined me in Atlanta for several weeks. On our return, we had our mini version of the Sahara. Adding to the fact our soil is mainly clay meant any form of rescue was futile.

Being a person with no green fingers, I took advice and added top soil with fervour which promptly suffocated the rest of the grass seeing that I had put too much.

Over the years, the grass slowly returned. I resisted all attempts to rip it all up and lay new grass. I guess I was stubborn (but probably more stupid than I care to admit).

Enter Fat Grass.

For really good grass, there needs to be a couple things done every year as I found out the hard way.

Wash the grass in spring to get all the salt off from the snow

Aerate the lawn at the beginning of the season by punching holes at frequent intervals using a special tool.

Add topsoil at least once a season to replinish what is washed away

Watch out for small white worms that attach the roots of the grass. The best way without using chemicals is to use nematodes early or late in the season. These are natural parasitic worms that attack garden pests like cutworms.

Fertilize several times a year if you have very bad quality soil.

Finally, reseed your grass every year. Grass like anything else has a life cycle and needs new grass to keep the lawn nice and thick.

If you do all this, as I found out incrementally over the years, the lawn will be become your friend. The best way to fight weeds is to have really thick grass. Most weeds survive because their roots reach deep down. Grass tend to have shallow roots so the more grass you have, the more they will choke the weeds.

Ok so what about Fat Grass. This refers to seeding the lawn with new grass to make it really thick um fat. The fat grass recipe can be found at the ChumFm blog. Top soil is great for existing grass but not for new grass because it dries out too quickly requiring a lot more watering. How to create fat grass?

To seed new grass, mix peat moss (very fine powdery stuff that can hold 20 times it's weight in water) and vermiculite (white stuff, actually 2/3s clay) and add water until it is all spongy and wet. Then spread over the areas that require new grass. Sprinkle the grass seed on top of the peat moss mixture and water every day for 10 days. Around the 8th day, the grass should start sprouting and in a few weeks, a much richer and thicker (fatter!) lawn is the result.

This bumbling gardener has been able to turn a desert into an oasis (ok maybe not an oasis but definitely a better looking lawn than most on my street). So you can too.

The thing I learnt the most? You have to do all of the above and most of all exercise patience. During the 8 days, I endured jokes and friendly jabs like "Are they growing yet?" as I religiously went out to water the lawn every day.

Who's laughing now!

Fart used to be a 4 letter word

2009-09-03T16:42:00.007-04:00

As of this week, there are no less than 167 iPhone apps dedicated to elevating farting to an art form or should I say fart form.

That is a staggering number considering it used to be an embarrassing activity one tried not to talk about or share the love for that matter.

I can only shudder to think what would happen if they all submitted updates to Apple at the same time. You definitely want to be a fly on the wall watching 40 reviewers testing all the apps simultaneously.

I know Apple has the been on a drive to make all their products a little greener but this is ridiculous.

Their impact on global greenhouse gases will only be known to the generations to come.

Is Bistro Food, the next iPhone Killer App?

2009-09-02T12:58:00.003-04:00

Maybe not, but it got me excited enough to write about it...again. After the last blog post, I started browsing using Bistro Food and found a couple of neat recipes on the Food Network site. First thing I did was bookmarked them. That's when the penny dropped...

I can't remember how many times, we used to run upstairs, browse to a website, print out the recipe. Weeks later, we would have paper recipes littered across the kitchen counter. With Bistro Food, no more!

From now on, all my favorite recipes will be bookmarked with Bistro Food. And if the meal is a success, imagine how smart you would look, if you could whip out your iPhone at the dinner table and email the recipe to a friend right there.

The snapshot below is a Paul Dean recipe for Strawberry Shortcake at the Food Network. Yum!

We love all the apps that we write, but this one is going straight to my top ten list.

Food, glorious food

2009-09-02T12:33:00.002-04:00

Food is by far our popular Bistro app on the iPhone. It highlights all the great sites like the Food Network that are formatted correctly for the iPhone. It is also the app that bookmarks are used the most often. Makes sense, I would too if I found an interesting recipe. Unwittingly, Bistro Food may be the best way to save all your recipes and have them at your finger tips.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2009-08-31T10:17:00.002-04:00

Too early for winter but just the right time for Snow Leopard, Apple's latest OS update. Usually I'm pretty cautious about new operating system versions, waiting a couple of months until the bugs get ironed out. But heck, I'm a Mac fan, so this weekend was dedicated to installing Snow Leopard. It's a great upgrade. While the base OS was 64-bit, all the system apps like Finder was still 32-bit in Leopard. Enter Snow Leopard with true 64 bit system apps.

The advantage? All the apps are now much smaller (I suspect the 32 bit apps in the past had to still honor 64 bit boundaries but utilizing only half the instruction and data space). Smaller means faster load and execution times, less swapping etc. So even if there were no new features, this alone was a great update.

Pros.

Faster execution of all the system apps. Definitely feels more snappy.

Less diskspace. I got back around 6-8GB on my two Mac systems at home.

Cons.

None really except it will ask you for permission for apps you installed because it thinks you're using them for the first time.

Gothas.

Make sure you backup your current system first. I do a full backup to a dmg file and time machine backup. Good job I did.

The upgrade re-installed apache and deleted my conf files. The lesson learnt is if you think you have custom files in directories outside your user directory, make sure you back them up, you'll have to copy them back after the install.

MySql lost its symbolic link and didn't start automatically.

My iTunes crashed trying to access my iPhone but resynced successfully after relaunching. Some anxious moments here!

Xcode didn't think my iPhone was a valid development device until I rebooted my iPhone. Tip: shutdown iPhone and hold down the home button while restarting the iPhone until you see the Apple logo.

Takes about 45 minutes to do the upgrade. For developers, XCode is supplied with the DVD. Nice touch.

So for the very first time in my life, I'm glad it snowed in August!

To Blackberry or not to Blackberry

2009-08-27T10:15:00.008-04:00

We're at the crossroads this week. After 8 months of iPhone development, we're wondering whether we should diversify our market into other mobile platforms. The logical answer is yes, the practical answer is a little tougher. It means supporting a different application channel.

We're dabbled before with writing Blackberry apps. It's not a technology issue. It's whether we want to spend time learning a different environment. By that, I mean finding out the hard way the quirks of multiple Blackberry devices, a different App Store, approval process. Probably the marketing plan would change too.

Opportunity
So the first step is the opportunity. The market share of iPhone vs Blackberry is pretty even with Apple around 13% and RIM at about 18% (source: Business Insider

This would essentially double our reach.

Competition
Apple has approximately 70,000 applications in the App Store and Rim has 2,300. A breakdown of the RIM appstore as of today is shown below. As expected Games and Books take the lion's share, over 40%.

Barrier to purchase
Apple has made it dead easy to buy an app. For the Blackberry you need a PayPal account plus not as seamless as Apple. We have no clue whether Blackberry users are more likely or less to buy than an average iPhone user.

Approval Process
Less onerous and faster on the Blackberry Appstore from our understanding.

It looks tempting but I'm fully aware of spreading ourselves too thin and sacrificing the quality of our products and our service. But then as the saying goes if you continue to do what you've always done then you'll get what you always gotten.

I think I need an extra large latte and more downtime to make this decision.

Is this the next gold rush or are we going to be tumbleweed in the desert?

Bistro - the Best iPhone Sites That Rock

2009-08-25T22:18:00.004-04:00

Today we generally design our webpages to be 1024x768 as the lowest common denominator. It used to be 800x600. !2 years ago, VGA was tremendous breakthrough in color depth and screen size at 640x480. It's hard to buy a wide-screen monitor these days that is less than 22 inches. So it's hard to imagine a life of 320x480 (i.e. half VGA). Welcome to the world of the iPhone.

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you'll be familiar with swiping, squeezing, expanding we have to do with our fingers as we navigate websites that were never conceived for a format so small. The fact that we can view most websites (as long as they don't start with a flash homepage!) is quite amazing. Nevertheless, it isn't satisfying.

There are quite a few websites that offer an alternative view to accommodate the iPhone. Problem is most often people don't know they exist. So we took it upon ourselves to find, collate and share them with the public.

Welcome to Bistro, the Best iPhone Sites That Rock.

Visit our Bistro page today for the first installment of apps offering news, technology, entertainment, food and other great sites that has made browsing the web with an iPhone a great experience.

I'm not sure we're making the world a better place. We're certainly making it easier for you to find it if you have an iPhone.

Three splats

2009-08-25T11:37:00.002-04:00

It's happened to all of us. You're running late in the morning, trying to get the kids out on time, making breakfast and sometimes everything just goes disastrously wrong.

For me, that was this morning.

Coming up from the basement, I was trying to hold on to a couple tubs of yoghurt, bottles of water and some snacks for their lunch bags. Splat! a tub of yoghurt drops on the floor splattering it's contents.

I pick it up and go back to the fridge to get another one for the lunch bag. The offending tub falls again, this time even a bigger mess. Splat #2!

Ok, deep breath, run upstairs to get some paper towels. En route, I quickly try to flip the omelette I've got going. It didn't flip well. Splat #3!

At that point, as the US President would say, it would prove to be a learning moment. Do I totally freak out, shout obscenities and proceed to have a bad day? or do I figure out how not to ruin the next 16 hours of my day.

Takes a lot of discipline to do the latter because it is so easy just to give in. Deep breath, visualize myself watching all of this from somewhere far away or 10 years later. Think about how big the situation really is. And all of the sudden, even three messy splats which look like mountains a moment ago, now look like mole hills.

Three splats, but I didn't strike out. So I'm having a better day after all.

It's a mental exercise I try to remember to do every time something bad happens. I try not to look at the situation now but how I would feel about it looking at it 10 years later. Was it really that big a deal? Most times, it's not.

Have a terrific day!

The importance of great habits

2009-08-21T11:27:00.002-04:00

I have an old Roland A90 midi keyboard that I hooked up with GarageBand. My son started mixing tracks like a pro. Enough to inspire me to spend an hour tickling the ivories (actually plastic keys!).

So I pulled out Fur Elise and proceeded to try and play it. Age took its toll and my long forgotten music reading skills let me down. After struggling for some time. I closed the book and played from memory. Surprisingly I did much better, my fingers seemingly guided by hidden strings as I magically found notes, chords and progressions.

Somewhere in my brain lay a hidden map. Although dusty, it was there, chiseled in by hours of repetitive practice years ago.

It reminded me of the importance of building great habits. A habit is a unconscious behavior that is reinforced by repetition. Great habits mean that we do the right thing without thinking. I call it unconscious greatness. Alas it takes practice and discipline but eventually they become an automated responses, great ones.

More about boxes

2009-08-20T10:33:00.002-04:00

I thought more about my post yesterday. I think people like putting stuff in boxes and labelling them because if they can define it, they believe (perhaps erroneously) they can control it.

It's perhaps because of the way we are educated. As engineers and scientists, we are always taught to breakdown a problem, identify and classify and solve it bit by bit. Our analytical bias is probably due to the system making us think that way.

Kids have no boundaries because no-one told them there should be any. Indeed, if you look at who has the greatest imaginations and see possibilities instead of roadblocks, it is our children and not us.

Perhaps we should learn from them as much as we want to teach them.

Don't box me in

2009-08-19T10:27:00.002-04:00

I was reading a post this morning on Gamesutra about the state of gaming by Wanda Meloni. Her concluding comment was really profound.

...It all depends on who you ask, their individual preferences and their frame of mind. Are we still so myopic that we can’t see where this is going? Entertainment has no defining demographic, it simply is...

And that would be a perfect way to describe the Internet. The web is a like a molten mass of digital assets that really defies description. It is different things to different people. Being in the tech world, we take it for granted everyone has a Facebook account or everyone twitters. When you have a hammer, yep, everything looks like a nail.

The reality is the web is like smorgasbord and to even try to define an individual's preferences and partiality is wrong. That individual changes every day. Yesterday it was MySpace, tomorrow it is Facebook and tomorrow who knows?

They should dub our current generation, Generation-N for Generation Now. My kids live in the moment. They have no qualms in changing emails, social networks, games or tv shows. To try and define them and put them in a category would be futile. It would be obsolete by the time you read this sentence.

It does change the way we look at loyalty and how we build loyalty programs. Making people collect points over 12 - 24 months are not going to make consumers change their buying habits. They would happily jump ship for the 10% instant discount across the street or worse still it is just a url away.

Those who figure out how to give you a 10 second emotional buzz and get that one time purchase every time will eventually be king.

Every day is a crossroad

2009-08-18T12:05:00.002-04:00

Every day we wake up and face the task of making decisions. Some are easy like what you're going to have for breakfast, others are a lot harder like where are you going to take your business today.

I make it a habit of questioning all my assumptions almost on a daily basis. Not the same as second guessing myself but I know too well how easily we hang on to our prejudices and biases. In fact the longer we travel down a particular path the harder it is to switch paths mainly because generally people hate change and also we feel like we are throwing away our previous investment (time, money, emotions).

We all play the same game, i.e. if we a priori decide that we want something, we will always find a way to justify it regardless of cost or practicality. That is the genius of the human race and also its flaw. That is my biggest fear in life, that I may be fooled by my own desires and ambitions that I make the wrong decisions because of the wrong reasons.

If we are not successful, there is a determinism that makes us prevail. If we are successful, we are loath to try something else in case we lose our success. But time brings new paradigms, culture, preferences and thinking and if we don't move with it we become dinosaurs.

For every decision, there is always an example why it was right in one circumstance and wrong in another. One entrepreneur will tell you how prevailing for 10 years in one domain was his demise, another will tell you how he hung on until the last payroll and ended up rich because of his perseverance.

At the end of the day, every piece of advice we get is only a guideline and at the end of the day, our decisions rest solely with us. We live and die by our own swords, there is no-one else to blame.

Perhaps we should not view our changes in our lives and businesses as radical acts that invalidate everything we've done before. Perhaps we can come to terms with them if we view every path at some point has a crossroad. We make our choices that may take us down a path less travelled but we never forget how we got there.

Our legacy got us here and helps us figure out what's next at every crossroad.

What's love got to do with it

2009-08-11T18:10:00.002-04:00

Everything.

We just received a review from iPhone App Review. The reviewer used the words, So I LOVE – truly, madly, deeply – Signature from IdeasUnplugged. We get quite a few of these in emails every week. When users take time to email you with suggestions and tell you what a difference it's making for them, you know it's all worthwhile.

We've put a lot of work into Signature and will put a lot more in. Financially, it's not the home run. But heck, we wanted to make a difference and slowly and surely we have. Every upgrade isn't a "Gee Whiz, look a this feature that makes all my friends laugh!". It's a determined effort to come up with a professional slick application that hopefully people will appreciate. I'm starting to think so.

It is a great lesson on how to build a following of raving fans. Don't just give them something that works, give them something they love. Who would think that you can build a business app, especially a signature app that people love. I think we just did.

If you think I'm wrong? Take a look at Unix. It's been kicking around for decades. Unless you're a geek, you would never consider loading it as your OS. That is until Apple took it, wrapped in aluminium, added a sexy interface and called it a Mac. The rest as they say is history. Listen to a Mac or MacBook owner, the word that comes up as often as the word "Apple" or "Mac" is the word "Love".

Gotta love it. I do.

The Problem with Momentum

2009-08-10T09:42:00.003-04:00

A really good topic for a Monday morning. Momentum is one of those properties of life that is synonymous with been effortless or at least minimal energy while maintaining a good speed. Finding life's momentum is probably the toughest thing to do. Like getting a huge rock moving, once it gets going, it's pretty awesome but the energy required to get the rock rolling is pretty darn hard. It's called inertia, it's the nemesis of momentum.

We just started another web project. It's not unfamiliar territory but still it felt like a chore. Lots of mundane and time consuming tasks to do just to get it to a point of being presentable. Pretty much trying to get that big rock rolling.

Then I remembered how I used to get my own teams from overcoming their inertia. Divide your tasks into much smaller and manageable chunks. Then tag a few that will give you some quick easy wins. Part of overcoming inertia is feeling good about your progress. Do one thing at a time. Make sure it is one small thing that you know you can reach quickly and easily. Before long, momentum kicks in and you look back feeling good about how far you've come.

Incidently, there is a reason why the couplings between train cars have some slack in them. There's no way a train engine can pull 50 trucks from standstill. What it does because of the loose couplings, is pull the first one. Once the engine and the first truck is moving, it is easier to pull the next one. With each moving truck, the momentum gets larger and larger and eventually the whole train gets moving. Pretty smart. We have to remember to do that in our own lives. Building momentum one truck at a time.

Listen to the user

2009-08-05T19:23:00.002-04:00

Too often in the software industry, we create elaborate product plans thinking we know what the user wants. Usually we partially right but often we don't really know what is the pain point (and hence the purchase decision) until the software is really in the hands of the user.

A significant upgrade to our Signature app has just been made available in the AppStore. The biggest feature? Letting users use a photo taken from their iPhone camera or pick one from their photo album. Of all the support emails we received, most people had no clue how to post an image to Flickr or some image host and get the URL from that picture. As technology geeks we thought it was trivial. Obviously we were wrong. Most people were probably put off after struggling to add their profile image from an Internet hosted image.

Our lesson here. We got the first version out as fast as we could without sacrificing quality and then we listened. Version 2.0 is simply stuff people wanted and struggled with when customizing their signature. Every support email got a personal reply. We felt their pain. And in the end, we produced an even better product that we're pretty stoked about.

In addition to better image support, we threw in a couple of fonts, allowed users to chose the style (normal, bold, italic) and even the font size. People want reasonable defaults so they can see and use something quickly. But once hook, they want to make it their.

If you're interested, more about the Signature app can be found at Ideasunplugged on our Signature application page.

One of the funniest reviews we had in the store was someone complaining that we were fabricating the reviews by getting friends and family to comment. It's a common practice amongst the developer community but one we don't do. We'd rather let our raving fans do the shouting. Every comment and review has been submitted by users without our input or request. The fact that someone thought the reviews were too good to be true even though they really were is just way cool.

Great Wall of Apple

2009-07-27T16:12:00.003-04:00

So we chilled out a little last week after finishing a major update to Signature which hopefully will be available in about a week awaiting Apple approval.

We're always promoting the little guys, like at TheGoodBlogs showing the lesser known bloggers. At the Apple appstore, there are over 75,000 applications clamouring for your attention. Unfortunately like Google search pages, people rarely go beyond the first 2 or 3 pages which means if your app is not in the Top 100 of either recently posted or most popular list, you're on a downward spiral to nowhere fast.

We decided to create a wall of app icons (similar to the physical wall they did at MacWorld. This time it's virtual. Here's a small screenshot of a typical wall.

Check out full size image at The Great Wall of Apple.

Each category has several walls each holding 120 icons. There are 21 categories so you could spend quite a bit of time, browsing the walls.

Don't forget to click on the top right hand corner of the wall to see the next part of the wall.

Have fun. We did.