Improvements

• The upgrade freed up over 10 GB of space of my hard drive.
• Snow Leopard offers much better swap file management (effectively giving me more RAM on average as it frees up the swap quicker). Leopard never freed up the swap without a reboot.
• Finder, iCal, Address Book is snappier / more responsive
• Startup and shutdown are noticeably faster.
• Screenshot naming now includes a descriptive date and time.
• Built-in recording in new Quicktime

Issues

• Firefox 3.5.2 had a serious memory leak and crashed when selecting menu items. Installing Firefox 3.5.3 looks to have fixed the issue.
• Several Mail.app plugins were disabled. Since I now exclusively use Mailplane, this wasn’t an issue and I will not be fixing.
• Snow Leopard broke the symbolic link for MySQL. Here’s the fix: http://mineer.blogspot.com/2009/09/mysql-server-wont-start-after-upgradge.html
• FineReader for ScanSnap doesn’t work at all with Snow Leopard. This is the OCR software that’s bundled with the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. A possible fix is coming: http://www.documentsnap.com/abbyy-finereader-and-snow-leopard-file-not-created-with-scansnap/
• All previously installed Safari plugins are gone.

Summary
Overall the upgrade was painless and left me with a somewhat snappier laptop. Most users are also likely to find the improvements are nice, but relatively small and not terribly noticeable. Eventually most Mac users will have to upgrade to take advantage of forthcoming software, but I feel the majority have no need to rush to install Snow Leopard.

If you do decide to upgrade, Amazon has Snow Leopard for only $25.

The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and the way you respond to adversity. Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment.

“Despite the recession, it still pays to be your own boss,” says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. The survey, adds John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “reaffirms my view that the more control you have over your work, the happier you are.”

Bingo. I love going to work each day and I think a large portion of this feeling is the knowledge that virtually everything is up to me. Succeed or fail, I have direct influence on every aspect of my career.

(via WSJ, NY Times)

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine,” he said. “We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

(via NY Times)

I’m particularly fond of the minimum viable product (MVP) concept and have been using that from the beginning with my company’s new product, StatsMix. The essential idea behind MVP is to determine as early as possible the core set of features that solves a problem a customer is willing to pay for, build that out, and then continue to iterate in this fashion constantly creating something customers actually want.

Last night Eric spoke while we ate dinner at the Hotel Boulderado and then fielded questions afterward. The entire evening was an excellent opportunity to learn more about his ideas surrounding lean startups.

Here are few of my notes from his talk and the Q&A session:

• Eric advocates small companies split into two cross functional teams – one focusing on the problem and one on the solution. Startups are not just small versions of how larger companies are organized.
• What is the problem and is it worth solving?
• When doing split-testing or A/B testing, remember the AAA’s of metrics: Actionable, Accessible, Auditable
• A/B test anything you think will have a macroscopic effect.
• Have high level company metrics for evaluating split tests.
• Early adopters hate mainstream customers, but you have to go through them first if you ever want to reach the mainstream customers. A startup will eventually have to make a decision about which of these customers to continue to target.
• Many of these ideas come from lean manufacturing and the auto industry.
• StumpleUpon’s advertising program may be the new Google AdWords.
• Understand vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics.
• Actionable metrics – you know what to do to get more or less of these (A/B testing is helpful here)

If you’re interested in lean startups, definitely check out the Lessons Learned blog. There’s also an active Google group called the Lean Startup Circle that has been having some interesting discussions and case studies.

And for Boulder area entrepreneurs, Marty Haught is organizing a local meetup to regularly discuss lean startups based on these ideas.

Recently he posted a transcript of a presentation he gave on the lessons learned from three years of running PeepCode.

One skill that is important is being able to respond to change. I frequently think back to a quote I saw in a skateboarding video from a few years ago where photographer Grant Brittain talked about the changes he had seen in the sport and business of skateboarding over the past 30 years. He said that everything changes, and if it stops changing, it dies. I think that’s part of the stress and unpredictability of running a business: you can almost guarantee that a success one month or one year won’t be successful the next year. Your skill as a businessperson isn’t about finding one hit and riding it out, it’s about learning the skill of understanding the present, looking to the future, and making bets about what might happen.

People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

One communication aspect I feel the need to visit is how users of a service prefer to stay informed about developments and news. Specifically, I’m talking about new features and updates.

While there are many options, the main ones come down to the following:

• Email
• Blog – visit directly
• Blog – subscribe to RSS feeds
• Twitter
• View notifications when logging in to the site
• Facebook

Personally, I subscribe to the RSS feed of services I use and keep them all in a folder in NetNewsWire called “Products I Use” and then check them occasionally. Alternatively, I’ll sign up for email notifications.

How do you prefer to stay up to date with web services you use?

Knowing when to release a product is difficult. The maxim “release early, release often” certainly applies but that has to be balanced against making sure you have a minimum viable product and features that work well, with a minimum number of bugs. You also need to get feedback as early as possible to either completely change what you are going to do or introduce new feature you would never have thought of on your own.

As my company’s product, Investify, is now in a private beta, these tips gave me a lot to think about in structuring the remainder of the test period.

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

(via Daring Fireball)