In a world of chaos, it's great to see leadership in these areas shining like a beacon of light amongst the mass ignorance. Today, I came across this inspiring TED talk by Sylvia Earle about saving the blue heart of our planet. It's 18 minutes well spent, and I highly recommend it. My favorite quote from Sylvia was about two minutes in as a response to an earlier TED talk by Jill Tarter from SETI on the search for intelligent life elsewhere. She says "My hope, Jill, is that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet." It drew a big laugh, but sadly it's true. You can watch below, or go to TED directly here. Enjoy.

In a related talk, check out Captain Charles Moore on Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as he talks about the sea of plastic we are leaving in the wake of wastefulness of our throw away world.

Last week, I was introduced to an application called feedly by one of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Anshu Sharma. From the home page, it's described as "…a firefox extension which weaves twitter and Google Reader into a magazine like experience." In Anhsu's blog post, his focus is on the new service called feedly mini; however, I must admit, that I never tried feedly at all. After only week, I am hooked, and here's why:

1. Beauty – Feedly is very pleasing to the eyes. The flow, design, navigation, and page layout just work very well together. It enhances your reading experience and makes browsing feel less like homework and more like a hobby. This is one thing I have missed since subscribing to the many blogs I follow. If I am going to spend multiple hours a day keeping up, it helps when it's comfortable and fun.
2. Full Google Reader integration – I was highly impressed with the Google reader integration and how easy it was to setup. Actually, it was so easy that I didn't have to do anything at all. Once installed, it gathered all my Google reader information and built my page automatically. The picture above was what I got straight out of the box, no configuration necessary. It organizes all your content based on your current feeds and categories. Just in case you are worried that you won't be sold on feedly and you may want to go back to Google reader, do not fret. When you read, share, or save a post in feedly, it automatically does the same action in Google reader. It even synchronizes between the two when you subscribe or unsubscribe to a feed. It also works in reverse, so anything you do in Google reader, is reflected in feedly. Even as a bonus, when I went to email a post to a friend, it was able to do a live lookup from my gmail address book…sweet! Hey, hold on here, do I see a Google acquisition coming on?
3. Keyboard Shortcuts – If you are a shortcut geek like me, that is the first thing you will check when trying a new tool. Well, good news, feedly uses most of the same shortcuts as GReader. So if you are already used to and addicted to these, you will be very pleased. There are many extras available too that aren't available on GReader. The only one I miss that I haven't seen on feedly is the Shift-A shortcut for marking all items in a category as read. They have a button, but no shortcut (yet?).
4. Feedly mini – I have used feedly mini a little too, and it's also a neat add-on. When you visit a page, you can see if others are talking about it on twitter, digg, etc. You can also save, share, or email the current page from the mini feedly toolbar.
5. New Content Discovery – based on your current subscriptions and current friends, feedly builds recommendations to other content. I have already found and subscribed to a couple of blogs using this service. Maybe the crew at feedly should go talk to the guys at pressflip and really get some powerful content suggestion going on.
6. Other cool toys – twitter integration, friendfeed integration, and a neat semantic web feature that uses open calais, which has much potential to change the way we search and organize web content.

Feedly breaks the mold of a traditional RSS reader and makes for a very enjoyable reading experience. I never had complaints about Google reader, but after using feedly and seeing the difference that beautiful visual aesthetics can make, I won't be going back anytime soon. Feedly is a winner and my new RSS reader of choice. I just put in my pre-order for the Kindle 2, so I hope the guys over at feedly are working on a Kindle friendly version; that would just be the icing on the cake.

Disclaimer: Even though it may sound like it, I do not work for feedly as a product evangelist.

However, one of the coolest things that I have seen is Ice Yachting. Picture a sail boat on oversized ice skate blades. These things really fly and the sound they make as they whoosh around completes the experience. They were out today, so I took this short video of them in action. I was pretty far way, so you can't hear the sounds of the blades, but it's still awesome to see. Next step for me is to con someone to let me actually try it!

• Craig Cmehil
• Dan McWeeney
• Ed Herrmann
• Rich Heilman
• Thomas Jung

This week we have launched the new site where we will be maintaining a blog, podcast, and all kinds of other good stuff. Please check it out, bookmark it, subscribe to it, love on it, and tell all your geek friends about it at http://enterprisegeeks.com

We are proud to be an officially approved Blogger Content Community with the SAP Blogger Relations group ran be Mike Prosceno and Stacey Fish.

Note: Many of us are already affiliated with similar groups like the SAP Mentors and the Enterprise Irregulars. The goal of the new group is not meant to replace our involvement in these, but be complementary instead.

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we're talking less than 1%.

As he reveals the different iceberg secrets, he touches on one that often affects many programmers. When you show something that looks too fancy, it sends a false message of how close the application is to being finished.  This is the illusion of completeness.

If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done. People who aren't programmers are just looking at the screen and seeing some pixels. And if the pixels look like they make up a program which does something, they think "oh, gosh, how much harder could it be to make it actually work?" The big risk here is that if you mock up the UI first, presumably so you can get some conversations going with the customer, then everybody's going to think you're almost done. And then when you spend the next year working "under the covers," so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing.

Because of the rigidity that comes from this illusion, the application looks too complete to get useful feedback on the real functionality.  Instead, people will focus on superficial usability tweaks like screen layout, button placement, background colors, etc.  Kathy Sierra elaborates on this topic in her post Don't make the Demo look Done.

The more "done" something appears, the more narrow and incremental the feedback…Show them something polished and pretty, and you'll get feedback on font sizes. The reviewers make incremental tweaks, blinded by what's in front of them. But show a napkin sketch, and they don't just see what's there, they see what's possible.

Kathy is a master wordsmith and I heed to her expertise; I couldn't have summed it up any better.  We need to ditch the fancy mockups and powerpoint presentations and instead, be honest with our customers and embrace the sketchy prototype.

Bonus

Adobe Flex is a great framework for building quick prototypes; however, because it's so fast and easy to build nice looking applications, it's easy to fall into the completeness illusion.  It would take about 5 minutes to create an application like this one that I snagged from an On Reflexion post called Napkin skins in Flex.  Click the image below to run the application.

Flex makes it really easy to apply styles to your applications.  By simple applying a new style, eyes are opened, illusions removed, and truths revealed.  Again, click on the image below and run the same exact application, just with a different skin.

If you are a java person, you can use the open source Java Swing Look & Feel called Napkin Look & Feel

I found the napkin skin and other cool Flex skins at scalenine.  Check out these other "sketchy" skins.  Run the app by clicking on the images.

Edding (my favorite sketchy skin)

Flekscribble