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.

Every once in a while I print a blog post to PDF just in case it ever gets consumed by the short memory that is the internet. Even more rarely, sometimes I print a blog post. On physical paper made of atoms and wood, and ink.

Read this. Maybe print it. It might make you feel like a planet, or a rabbit, or a human. But it will make you feel something. You should probably print it.

“Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.”

http://blog.frankchimero.com/post/979706728/what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-graphic-design-student

Paprika is all about text. Simple text. And we made sure that any other application that dealt with text could talk to it quite easily. Every computer built in the last decade or two can talk to Paprika via copy & paste. But today, we’re making it cooler.

Now every paid (we’ll come back to this) Paprika account gets to receive email. When you email your Paprika account with a subject line that matches an existing project, your text gets appended to the end of the existing project. When you email a new subject line you will create a brand new project.

We think you’ll find all sorts of uses for this (We have!) When some one emails you something that needs done, mark it up Paprika style, and forward it to your account. When you’re stuck in traffic, and can’t get a good 3G connection (AT&T we’re looking at you) just send an email to your Paprika account, -it’ll go out when you get a signal. When you’re offline at a meeting, take notes in your email app, and shoot them to PK when you get time.

If we had it to do all over again, this would be in the launch feature-set. It’s so incredibly useful we just can’t believe we did without it. Unfortunately email is unavoidable. You get all sorts of info emailed to you on a repeatedly daily basis. When your simple productivity app can gulp those emails down, you just can’t imagine the difference it will make in your workflow.

Back to the “paid account” thing. We’re still running with our idea that our base app is incredibly useful, and it offers a ton of goodness for free. As we add functionality to the app, we’re going to charge for it. We hope we’ll add enough great stuff that our free users will see the value in an upgrade.

Paprika update
Here’s a totally honest update on the progress of Paprika so far.

• Paprika is our fastest growing app in sheer numbers of users per month since launched.
• It’s gotten more blog posts, and more tweets than any other app (within the timeframe)
• It’s got our best conversion rate of testers to “real users” of all of our apps.
• It’s also got our poorest upgrade percentage we’ve ever had. People try it, people like it, and people just keep on using the free account.

We’re incredibly happy with the progress of Paprika so far. But one thing is for sure. If we’re to make our money back on the hundreds of hours of time that went into the development (We know… such a simple app! but it takes more time than you would think to do it right) we need to keep adding cool new features to the paid account. We think $5 a month is an incredible bargain and we hope you’ll give it a shot. Go check out Paprika

We talk all the time about the need to ruthlessly edit ideas. Sometimes you omit something because you realize it’s not great. Sometimes because you don’t think it has a market. Sometimes because you realize it would just take too much time away from other objectives.

This was a particularly painful cut for me. Paprika started out to be the Wii Fit of productivity. We would incentivize users to use the app more by unlocking new features for them as they did. Behind the scenes, a lot of this reward system actually works- but we didn’t launch it.

Despite the fact that we really believe productivity can be aided by incentives and goals (Like http://www.epicwinapp.com/) we just didn’t feel right about our implementation. It felt more like clippy than a fun way to keep on task.

So we ended up cutting the very thing we set out to build. Painful, but we think it was the right move. Paprika is even more focused, and simple. Nothing to distract you from what you’re working on… But I still miss the little Paprika robot just a little.

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

Staction is built in PHP. For all it’s occasional syntax weirdness, it is an amazingly flexible and liberating language. PHP does so many things incredibly well, and we’re big fans.

One thing however that it’s not so great at (in our opinion) is session management. The default garbage collector from PHP isn’t perfect, and consistently removes session files that it shouldn’t, almost totally ignoring whatever setting you have for expiration time. It’s frustrating for us, and often causes untimely logouts for our users.

A few weeks ago we started working on a bespoke database driven session system for Staction. The first part came together much easier, and better than we expected. But we still had a problem. After launching the new programming on our dev server we were still getting booted and timed out. Or more to the point, I(Joe) was still getting booted out.

I’m a long time Safari user, and Brian, who was working on the programming, is on the Chrome side of life. Not everyone here was having the problem on Safari, so we started thinking maybe it was just me. After resetting Safari totally, the problem still persisted. Brian, who had also started using Safari as a daily browser for testing, started experiencing the problems, too.

Lots of research, and trial-and-error later we wound up here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12078357 -10 pages long of people with the exact same problem. Safari occasionally, and arbitrarily sends a new HTTP header without any session information. So after our WTF moment, we started thinking of a workaround.

After a couple other ideas that were non-starters, now once in every 50 calls (approx.) we regenerate the session data, duplicating it into a new session, wiping out the old data and sending the browser a new cookie.

We’re incredibly happy to tell you that since making that change we haven’t been logged out once on our dev server. On Safari, or any other browser.

This morning we pushed out the new session management programming to all Staction accounts. We hope to push it to all the other apps in the next couple weeks.

As we always like to learn from an experience, here are our takeaways:

• Don’t always assume the problem is with what you’re doing. Check external factors too.
• When you start to work on solving a problem, be prepared for the problem to evolve as you learn more about it.
• Make time for solving the little problems with your app. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about improving our session management programming. We can’t say “With sessions that actually keep you logged on!” on our sales site. But we think improving the foundations for these things helps make the app more satisfactory to use. You’ve got to do them, even if it would be more fun to work on email-in on Paprika, or new Jumpchart import/export features.

via kottke in a roundabout way.

“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

After hand coding the demo in PHP in front of the live audience, he makes the app call everyone in the conference room’s cell phone. (about 6 minutes in)

The death of Google Wave got me to thinking about what all Google is into these days. Here’s a list I threw together: Keep Reading