How to get a genuine Moleskine notebook
Sometimes I can’t believe the lengths people will go to in order to save money. Michael Shannon has about 2500 words and perhaps 25 illustrations on 5 pages teaching you how to create your own Moleskine-like notebook.I think I can do it simpler and cheaper.Here’s his steps:
Page 1.
- Materials Needed
- Tools Needed
- Step 1. Cut paper
- Step 2. Fold paper
- Step 3. Collate folios
- Step 4. Mark spine
- Step 5. Punch holes
Page 2.
- Step 6. Sew signatures
Page 3.
- Step 7. Glue signatures
Page 4.
- Step 8. Glue endpapers & cover
Page 5.
- Enhancements
Here’s my steps:
- Go to Amazon
- Buy Moleskine notebook
- Wait a couple of days
My way: $9 plus a couple of bucks shipping. His way: hours of effort, some money for materials, massive PITA factor.I rest my case.
Iceberg on Demand
Note: this is a paid review - ReviewMe is paying me $50 for posting this. However, all thoughts are my own, and I’m saying only what I decide to say. The payment part is so that I say *something* about Iceberg on Demand.
Iceberg on Demand is one of a new class of development tools designed for the web. They kinda make me think of GUI RAD environments, but they’re for the web, and they’re typically much, much easier to use. Similar tools include Sidewalk (which I’ve mentioned before), The Form Assembly, and WyaCracker.
The difference
The difference appears to be that Iceberg on Demand is orders of magnitude more powerful than these other solutions, that pretty much focus on simple web forms to gather data. It’s billed as allowing non-technical users to create “enterprise applications,” which is a major, major claim.
I wanted to personally try it before reviewing the application, so I signed up at their home page for a beta account. However, they appear to be in limited beta, as I haven’t received any access privileges in the 48 hours since I signed up.
The promise
The basic premise - giving non-programmers the tools to create full-functionality business applications - is incredibly compelling: use the business process mapping tool to map a process, create your business forms via drag-and-drop, integrate simply into already-built apps such as HR, CRM, project management, and bug tracking … and voila … you have a working enterprise system to run your business on. It reminds me somewhat of Sigurd Rinde’s thingamy.
I’m sure the reality is a little different: I don’t yet see accounting apps that you need to run a business and I’m sure there’s a number of other missing pieces, but wow … if this takes off and they increase the number of built-in apps over time, this could be very, very exciting.
The reality is, most of what businesses need to function is to get, store, retrieve, and modify data. It’s not rocket science. It’s data that follows business process rules.
If Iceberg on Demand can essentially automate creation of enterprise systems, look out IBM, Oracle, Infosys, and all the other “business services” tech shops out there: the billions you’re hoovering out of clients’ pockets is in danger.
OK, back to reality for a moment.
Right now, this looks like a great tool for start-ups, young companies, anyone with not much budget but need for real business systems.
In the future? Who knows.
Now will they get the zen of Apple?
Sometimes it’s hard to convince PC users of the benefits of Apple computers and Mac OS X.
Since their computers are hardly personal, and just tools, and essentially lacking style and personality, they don’t understand, can’t grasp, cannot fit in their brains the concept of an interface that has been obsessively designed to fit, to function, to form an environment that accepts and welcomes people.
Maybe the iPhone will solve this problem. Check out what this Time reviewer says:
The user interface is crammed with smart little touches — every moment of user interaction has been quietly stage-managed and orchestrated, with such overwhelming attention to detail that when the history of digital interface design is written, whoever managed this project at Apple will be hailed as a Michelangelo, and the iPhone his or her Sistine Chapel (Steve Jobs can be Pope in this scenario). If you’re not a reviewer, chances are you won’t even bother to look at the manual. Translucent, jewel-like, artfully phrased dialogue boxes come and go on cue. Window borders bounce and flex just slightly to cue the user where and how you’re supposed to drop and drag and scroll them. When you switch the phone to “airplane mode” (no electronic transmissions, for use on planes) a tasteful little orange airplane slides into the menu bar, then zooms away when you switch out again. (This was so pleasurable that I repeatedly entered airplane mode while using the iPhone, even though I wasn’t actually on an airplane.) As soon as my phone realized it belonged to someone with a nonsense-name like Lev, it started correcting typos like “Leb” and “Lec” to match.
That’s the zen of Apple taken to a whole new level.
First rule of marketing
OK, my blog is my memory, which means that you, dear reader, get treated to gems like this:
[First Rule of Marketing:] If you want to be interesting, don’t talk about yourself. Amen.
That’s from Hugh at GapingVoid, and when I re-read it today, I wanted to remember it. So I posted it.
Very simple rule, and very simple reason: who likes to be with the person at the party who’s alrways replaying personal movies: did this, did that, went here, went there, my kid this, my kid that, blah blah blah?
No-one.
Here’s how Kathy Sierra puts it:
Tags: marketing, rule, hugh macleod, gapingvoid, john koetsier
Introducing the book
Isn’t tech support grand?
In-your-face web nasties
Saw these over the past few days and had to post them in order to cool my blood:
Click or die advertising:
“You will see our ad. You will click our ad. And we will monetize your eyeballs whether you like it or not.”
Get lost loser subscription policy:
“We don’t know you. We don’t like you. We don’t care about you unless you subscribe. Loser!”
Great campaigns, Silicon Valley Sleuth and Pocket-lint. Wish you guys lots of success with that.
RDF tutorial: how to present like Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is famous for his reality distortion field … the way that his presentations or presence seems to exert an almost uncanny degree of influence of people.
Here’s an overview of how to do that in presentation form. A brief overview:
- Rehearse often
- Be yourself
- Use visuals effectively
- Focus on the problem you’re solving in detail
- Say everything three times
- Tell stories
- Use comparisons to demonstrate features
There’s much more meat at the actual post - go check it out.
Tags: steve jobs, rdf, reality distortion field, john koetsier, presentation, presenting
Some web 2.0 is very 1.0
This is the (cough, ahem) Web 2.0 Journal story on the “habits of highly effective web 2.0 sites.” One habit, of course, is ease of use.
Note the part with actual content, which I’ve highlighted in yellow:
Not very simple, or clean, or user-focused. Apparently, web 2.0 is 90% advertising and interface.
(Of course, Dion Hinchcliffe probably has very little say in the actual look here, as it’s a Wall Street Journal production.)
Tags: web 2.0, journal, dion hinchcliffe, john koetsier, simplicity, webdesign
Koetsier’s Law of Technophobia
I love tech, and I love gadgets, so don’t get me wrong. However, there’s a law very definitely at work here:
The simplicity of a product is inversely proportional to the number of times the word “simple” is used in its marketing.
Yes, I am trying to figure out a HD digital custom non-bank-breaking satellite TV package and oh, how I hate big companies with big solutions and big plans for product segmentation and big $$$ signs in their eyes.
(Just a hint of the disgust I feel at Bell ExpressVu may be imagined by understanding that in Bell’s “Family 2″ channel pack, MTV and BPMtv - along with a few other UNfamily channels - are sandwiched in with perhaps one or two legitimately “family” channels.)
Tags: simplicity, usability, john koetsier
Usability: the cost of getting it wrong
I would bet a lot more money than is in my pocket right now that 50-75% of electronics returned are not, in fact, defective by damage or second law of thermodynamics.
Rather, I suspect they are defective by design.
Today my wife and I fought with our cordless phone system (tip: if it’s a system, it automatically sucks). It’s been phantom-ringing, not connecting, connecting only if you waited three rings, connecting if it felt like it, connecting if the moon was in the right phase and you had thrown a skunk over your left shoulder the previous night.
In other words, haunted.
Does anything suck more than phone usability? I’m talking about cell phones, about home cordless phones … anything but the old-fashioned rotary brick that never died.
We have three phones hooked up on one network, which we futzed with for about half an hour. In the end, we de-registered all the phones (i.e., told the main base station to forget about their existence) and then re-registered all the phones (i.e., told the main base station that they existed).
And now there is domestic bliss in the Koetsier household again, our fifth-grade daughter can phone her friends with impunity, and my wife’s sister can tie up the phone all night. (I, of course, regard phones as instruments of the devil and never use them unless poked with almost-molten cattle prods. After all, mothers might be calling. Or people who - ugh - might want me to do something. Cell phones, on the other hand, I will relunctantly answer, if no other alternatives exist. But that’s business, and I get usually paid for it, so I have no choice.)
But the point - and yes, there is a point - is that a couple times throughout the whole process we felt like chucking it all in, boxing up all the phones, and returning them. Obviously, they were broken. Obviously, they were not working. Obviously, we should be given a full refund.
I wonder how often that happens. How often does perfectly fine gadgetry (read: functioning with specs as designed) get returned simply because people can’t figure out how to make it work?
I would not be shocked if the answer is more than half.
And that’s got to cost somebody a whole lot of money. In comparison to which designing in usability starts to look cheap.
Agree?
-
-
About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
Welcome, enjoy, buy the T-shirt, take a picture, tell your friends. -
Virtual me
-
Blogroll