Kickass Pixels

Fully Customizable Edit In Place jQuery Plugin

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:58:16 -0500

Fully Customizable Edit In Place jQuery Plugin:

Jeditable is an in-place editor plugin for jQuery. With few lines of JavaScript code it allows you to click and edit the content of different html elements. User clicks text on web page. Block of text becomes a form.

i12bent: July 10, 1856 was the birthday of one of the great...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:44:00 -0400

i12bent:

July 10, 1856 was the birthday of one of the great scientists of the Victorian epoch, Nikola Tesla (d. 1943)…

He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Photo: Tesla reading by the light created by his coils - NOTE: apparently a composite photo!!

Apple's X Factor with Final Cut Pro X

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 01:23:00 -0400

The Final Cut Pro X uproar reveals one key to Apple’s succes that they’ve applied for years.

It started with Mac OS, then iMovie X and now Final Cut Pro X. Each time they’ve refined the process, calculated the blowback and confused competitors.

Dramatic product resets are a strategic tactic - take an existing product, strip it bare, ship a new bare bones feature set with an obvious core benefit, like 64-bit or native Cocoa, weather the criticism and let the market tell them whats needed next.

Apple famously doesn’t use focus groups - but they DO listen to customers regarding shipping products. As Gruber and others have mentioned, Apple watches every review and listens to feedback. They filter, prioritize and plan updates to rapidly close major gaps for dissatisfied customers.

The final key being, close gaps that pay dividends in a much larger market usually and ignore legacy features that have little value to the larger audience.

Most competitors would delay shipping until every feature for every market niches was ready. Most wouldn’t have the balls to attempt resets like Apple does. If they did, they would delay shipping for months or years until a “finished” product was ready.

This process is Apple’s X Factor. Its why unlike competitors, Apple thoroughly dominates the niches they pursue.

iMac To Wirelessly Charge iPods, iPhones, and iPads? - SlashGear

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:41:42 -0400

iMac To Wirelessly Charge iPods, iPhones, and iPads? - SlashGear:

Apple’s patent application describes the system as “Wireless power utilization in a local computing environment.” It is based on the “mid range wireless power transfer physics” and makes use of wireless near field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power transmission to power devices up to 1 meter distant.

Very cool!

Paul Thurrott's gambit - Apple's Evolution vs. Microsoft's Revolution

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:10:00 -0400

Paul Thurrott recently talked about why he is unimpressed with Apple’s latest iOSand Lion announcements. Hardly surprising considering his known disdain for most things born in Cupertino. John Guber explained why Thurrott is right and is missing the point.

Having been a developer using OS X since the developer previews of 10.0, when it was just Next/OpenStep with a Finder-like GUI veneer, Paul sounds like a party crasher, bitching about how the music and food sucks, unlike his buddies last party, which was OFF the HOOK and CRAZY.

Paul wishes for a crazy Apple. An Apple that completely overhauls the OS with each release, throwing caution to the wind.

Given his experience with Microsoft’s OS strategy I assume he hoping Apple suffers the same fate as Microsoft, whose decade long failure of an OS strategy allowed Apple and to a lesser extent Google/Linux to make huge gains.

Just compare the release cycles for both companies to see why Microsoft failed so badly where Apple succeeded.

Windows XP - October 2001
Windows XP Media Center - October 2002
Windows Server 2003 - October 2002
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 - 30 September 2003
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 -12 October 2004
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition - 25 April 2005
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs - 8 July 2006
Windows Vista for Business use - 30 November 2006
Windows Vista for Home use - 30 January 2007
Windows Home Server - 7 November 2007
Windows Server 2008 - 27 February 2008
Windows 7 - 22 October 2009
Windows Server 2008 R2 - 22 October 2009
Windows Home Server 2011 - 6 April 2011

Compare that mess to Apple’s strategy - remember each release included both the desktop and server versions.

Mac OS X v10.0 “Cheetah” - March 24, 2001
Mac OS X v10.1 “Puma” - September 25, 2001 (6 months)
Mac OS X v10.2 “Jaguar” - August 24, 2002 (11 months)
Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” - October 24, 2003 (13 months)
Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” - April 29, 2005 (18 months)
Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” - October 26, 2007 (30 months)
Mac OS X v10.6 “Snow Leopard” - August 28, 2009 (22 months)
Mac OS X v10.7 “Lion” - Summer 2011

Looking back on the Windows XP juggernaut Microsoft unleashed. Imagine where they would be if they had a focused iterative release cycle like Apple.

Microsoft’s revolutionary path, like most revolutions, failed more often than it succeeded. Media Center only caught on with die hards. Server aficionados still love 2003. XP users are still leary of upgrading after the Vista disaster. It took 8 years for Microsoft to produce a worthy successor to Windows XP with Windows 7. Which I love and think is the best version of Windows ever produced.

Apple by contrast followed the evolutionary path, building momentum and carving out permanent market share gains while Microsoft flailed for a decade.

As I type this, on a Lion install, I can say without doubt that Lion is the largest gamble Apple’s taken since the port from PPC to Intel.

Pundits like Paul should beware of brushing aside Apple’s evolutionary march. It destroyed the status quo in mobile and has been doing the same on the desktop for the last few years.

Paul I hope you enjoy the next Microsoft revolution. I hear developers really love the new direction they are taking with Windows 8.

iPhone's Achilles heel

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:39:11 -0400

I’ve owned every version of iPhone. Was in line on launch day, during a hot North Carolina summer day.

The iPhone is one of the greatest phones every designed, minor flaws and all.

My iPhone lays deactivated and turned off tonight.

Why?

Despite the new hotness of Verizon, carrier lock-in forced me to leave. After years of pitiful AT&T service, I tried Verizon, the supposed savior of the iPhone and after a few months found it to be worse than AT&T.

Sure, I could make and receive calls, but only outside my home. Data speed here in Emeryville and around the Bay Area ranges from ok to useless.

Verizon proposed I pay an additional $249 for a booster in my home. If I lived in a huge building or in a canyon I would understand. But I live in Emeryville, center the Bay Area, completely flat with nothing obstructing my signal.

This brings me to the iPhone’s Achilles heal - its the carrier.

The carrier will always taint the perfect product experience Apple strives for.

The iPhone loses its luster when its on a crappy network.

While people bitched about dropped calls on AT&T, the dominant use of the iPhone is data - something Verizon sucks at.

In contrast, my T-Mobile Nexus S gets great signal and the data speed stomps Verizon and AT&T in my city. The problem, you can’t use an existing iPhone on the T-Mobile network or buy one for it.

Apple has a few options to improve this situation.

First, become a carrier. Either launch a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) or leverage their massive market cap to acquire a carrier.

I don’t thin Apple will acquire a carrier, they would spend too much time and money revamping the acquired company to operator at Apple speed. But they might pull off something like Virgin did with Virgin Mobile.

Second, ship a quad band, dual GSM/CDMA phone. This would allow customers to take their iPhone to any carrier in their area that provides good service.

The latter option is the obvious choice, Apple is an engineering company foremost. They could design such a phone and being unencumbered with exclusivity to any carriers, they could go rogue with an unlocked phone.

That said, Apple has always tried to be a one stop shop for a consumer’s computing needs.

If they launched an MVNO, using their famous negotiating skills to drive low rates, they could provide everything out of the box with Apple’s famous customer experience.

Apple’s next evolution should remove the requirement that “their” customers deal with another company in order to use “their” products.

It would change the game at a time when Google, HTC, Samsung and Motorola are just getting into the one Apple started.

Short logic: Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:35:10 -0400

Short logic: Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal:

shortlogic:

Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.

At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to…

Cleverness kills products.

Sun, 29 May 2011 18:16:34 -0400

The following dialog must make sense to the developers, decision maker and security nerds at Mozilla.

It will baffle normal users of their product. But, its sure clever!

Cloud music + Airfoil rocks!

Sun, 01 May 2011 10:39:30 -0400

Tiring of syncing, copying, backing up my large music collection I’m pushing it to Amazon’s Cloud Drive and using the Cloud Player to listen to it.

One component of iTunes that I can not live without is streaming music to numerous speakers around the house.

No worries - Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to the rescue. With this slick application you can hijack audio from any application on your Mac.

Shiny bobbles. Productivity fallacies. Ship it.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:08:41 -0400

My personality lends itself to constant experimentation and willingness to reevaluate my work methodology.

Sheer laziness often leads me to solutions that are simple, stable and sustainable — code, deploy and forget is what I strive for.

Google Reeder and Twitter are my biggest distractions. Reading posts from one of many developers I admire, touting technology XYZ being the end all be all, leads to countless hours of investigation and experimentation.

I’ve been building web services since the days of filemaker and applescript, yes you could build services on those back in the mid 90s. AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Java and Ruby have all be a part of my arsenal over the years.

Lately Node.js is luring me away from my usual tools, but late the other night as I tried to port an existing service to it and during the process I realized while cool, it was detracting from my productivity.

To sum up this hair brain thought, be very careful about investing time in new technology. You must balance the need to ship with the desire to innovate or grow your technical knowledge.

How the iPhone Knows Where You Are

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:15:00 -0400

How the iPhone Knows Where You Are:

Great read.

Ship greatness always.

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:37:15 -0400

Checking out Tweetbot tonight cemented a philosophy for me — “ship greatness always”.

Who thought there was room for yet another twitter client this late in the game.

Tapbot did and their product is awesome.

It reminded me of how most markets Apple now dominates were owned by others. For years in many cases. MP3 players, mobile phones and netbooks. The latter they tore apart with the iPad and MacBook Air.

Both Apple and Tapbot strode into niche markets with products that do less, but what they do is better designed, better executed and launched with intense focus.

They both are shipping greatness.

Always is introduced by the level of quality, never shipping half-assed features and building a track record of consistent self-imposed standards in their products.

Ship greatness always.

Rebooting Mailtemplate.

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:36:48 -0400

Everyone struggles with direction from time to time. Over the few years life has been an exciting and terrifying roller coaster. Ending old relationships, starting new ones. Tackling projects undreamed of a few short years ago.

For 10 years I was architect and partner in a struggling web service, Mailtank. It started as a freelance contract to replace an internal tool used to power Mactank, a telephone tech support service.

Over those years, it grew from a PHP app running on a couple servers under my desk, to a full fledged SaS business hosted out of a top tier data center.

The lessons I learned were priceless, it was a decade lone college education on right and wrong ways of running a business, architecting web services and balancing life.

Needless to say, I bit off more than I could deliver a number of times. As someone I admire says, Out of Scope!!!

Today, I’m VP of Engineering at a VoIP company in silicon valley. While still a partner in Mailtank, my focus is on my day job.

There is one product I acquired and failed to grow that is still close to my heart - Mailtemplate for Mail.

As a customer of the original author I jumped at acquiring it when the source code was put up for auction.

Grand plans for integrating it with Mailtank never got beyond the dream stage. Maintaining the code as Apple moved Mac OS X forward grew difficult for a number of technical reasons, though mainly due to my lack of time or skill.

A lot of customer still attempt to use it, though with Snow Leopard it grew harder with changes Apple made.

When I realized how many people I let down, the guilt paralyzed me for some time. I tried handing off the legacy Mailtemplate had, but found no takers. I don’t blame them.

Over the decade successfully building products for others, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. The biggest being, set an achievable goal and break the steps needed to reach it into the smallest you can.

Today, I’m setting a goal of cleaning up Mailtemplate so that its core functionality works on Snow Leopard and beyond.

What does that mean?

It will do the bare minimum needed to provide value.
It will take advantage of stable and documented APIs Apple provides.
I will share the progress publicly.
I will ship it.

It will NOT work with other email clients. It will not support HTML content initially. It will only use Apple’s frameworks, not rely on ancient 3rd party code.