Yesterday we wrote about this and this

To wrap up, signups did finally pick up a little later in the day. Still not near normal, and far less than what we would call a good day.

Oh well. We tried. We’ll round up to help a good cause.

ALS has left Tony Quan nearly completely paralyzed- except for his eyes. But his debilitating diagnosis hasn’t stopped him from creating great things- thanks to the members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), and their enabling eye tracking software.

Makes you aware of the true potential in development, and thankful for what you have…

- Read more about the project here.

I was reading about a 45 year old who is gonna try for the 2012 Olympics Swim Team, when I read this bit:

“What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?” Cooley asks. “They don’t spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car.”

And I immediately thought about our apps. It might have been a long shot association, but it was worth thinking through…

If you want to improve your app, you don’t spend hours and hours using the app, hoping to just get better at navigating it. You look at the fundamental backend things you can do that will make your app more useful and efficient. Check its rate; can you up the speed of your app? Check its heartbeat: can you improve the way it makes API calls? Check its stomach; can you add storage somewhere? Check its digestion; how can you improve the export?

Boosting the biomechanics of a car will make it go faster. Boosting the internal forces of your app will get you the same results…

“When working with designers the content is often one of the last things the designer receives while building the site. Unfortunately, this is can cripple the designer’s ability to create a site that achieves the goals set. Design is supposed to compliment the content, not the other way around.” – Tyme White, CrazyEgg.com

Getting started the right way when you’re planning a website is crucial. Nobody likes to be behind before the starting gun even goes off. So why would you push pixels before you know what those pixels are gonna reinforce? Plus, getting your content laid out first is a great way to spend less time revising in the end. Who doesn’t want to be more efficient?

Read the whole article on why content should come first here.

“Let’s all talk about this stuff in public, so that we can teach each other how to get better at whatever the heck it is we love to do.” – Jeff Atwood

Love it! When you write about what’s going on in your company, it can be scary putting your experiences out there for the world to read. You never know what you’ll learn from the occasional transparent blog article- whether you’re the one writing it, or reading it.

• It’s the middle of the week- you feel buried, without a light at the end of the tunnel.

• Those app updates you’ve been wanting to start? Still untouched.

• Your new product launch is just around the corner. Your revolutionary marketing ideas = brainfart.

Not the least bit productive, they’re not the states of mind you want when you’re trying to, well… do anything. How do you get out of your slump? I think the first step is simple, although often overlooked.

First things first

Think about it this way. When you realize your problem is just a state of mind, you’ll realize you have the power to change it. Mentally take control of your actions- and know that you’re bigger than they are. Yeah, actions speak louder than words, but actions don’t happen without your willpower leading the way.

Here’s how it goes for me. There’s an internal battle going on in my head: I think about the thing I have to do. I realize how difficult this thing is going to be. I decide to do it anyway. Keep Reading

We think preferences suck. We tend to be positive about most things, -but we really do hate preferences…

Preferences are:

• A fork in your app. You will forever have a divided user base.
• A time sink. The eat up support time, programming time, and debugging time.
• A cop-out. When you can’t decide, -add a preference. It’s how bad software gets worse.
• Confusing. They often have far reaching effects on usability that the user has no way of visualizing.
• Ugly. Those fiddly screens full of toggles and buttons are a mess. A mess to use, and a mess to design.
• A chance to fail. If you allow your users to customize your app so that it is accidentally less useful to them, -you’ve missed the point.
• Sometimes Necessary. Awful, but necessary. Things like “time zone” or “currency indicator” are unavoidable preferences.

Make sure the list is small, and deal with them gracefully as possible.

You’ve got to want to be productive. You’ve got to want to create. It will start when you see the joys of accomplishing something rather than absorbing others’ creations.

I think Adam Spooner nails it here. I’m certainly guilty of saying “Well, now that I have this productivity app, I’ll get more done” and then reading my guilty pleasure blog five minutes later.

No more. We have to stop blaming our inability to get stuff done on anyone (or anything!) other than ourselves. We have the most important tools already- we just have to dig all the way to the bottom of our toolbox (while hoisting those heavy distractions out of the way) to get to them.

I used to be a copywriter for a retail catalog. Golf, to be specific. If you’ve ever written (or read, for that matter) catalog content, you know there’s not a whole hell of a lot of creativity that goes into it. Even still, there were headlines to write, and 120 words to cram into a 25 word space- all of which had to be approved by 1.) our buyers 2.) the company… NIKE, Cobra, FootJoy, TaylorMade, or whoever. It was very unlikely that anything I ever wrote actually ended up in the catalog because it got changed somewhere down the line. But hey, they paid me, and I wasn’t complaining.

Except that I was. Every single day. Keep Reading

“All successful businesses start as an idea in the back of an insane entrepreneur’s mind. They start with a single storefront and a single product. All successful businesses start with a single customer. And no matter what — no matter the size it is aiming for nor the type of business it is looking toward — all successful companies start with something simple and quaint (even if it doesn’t appear that way).” – Dustin Curtis