For me, what matters most isn’t the code or pixels, it’s the users, clients, and friends who share it with me.

It’s always nice to find other people who think like we do, and Trent Walton does. He shares our belief that it’s more about the overall experience we create for our users, rather than the bits and pieces we use to get there. Although we strain immensely over all of those bits, and pour tirelessly over each of the pieces, what brings us the most joy is someone telling us “your work really helped me today.”

And that is what we strive for, because the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.

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…

“Complex” apps are usually a mess. Look at any Adobe app, or Microsoft app. Most of them (not all) are a catastrophic mess. They look like the drawer in your laundry room. The one where disparate items like flashlights, rulers, sewing kits, giveaway pencils, off-sized screws, and IKEA pieces, and half-used batteries come to rest. Not purposefully lain, but because no force but apathy, and gravity could hope to contain them.

Complex apps “do more.” But they do it at the expense of crashes, and a manual in seven languages. Users use them, they hate them. They’re trapped by some function that no other app has, but that they need.

Take Photoshop for example (please take it!). No other app does RGB/CMYK, and compositing as elegantly. It’s amazing with it’s bezier curve handling and it’s simple yet incredibly powerful layer management. Keep Reading

“...by the time a program has been cleaned up to the point of being truly bug free, it is most certainly obsolete.”

-The Art of Interactive Design by Chris Crawford

We’ve entered the planning phases of a brand new app. It’s something we, of course, can’t tell you the specifics of for several reasons:

...We don’t know them ourselves.
...They’ll probably change a lot before we’re done.
...After exploring, we might decide not to finish the project due to several reasons.
...It’s a competitive advantage to be somewhat secretive when building niche apps.
...Keeping things a secret builds interest, and makes the whole thing more fun.

Still, keeping everything secretive goes against our nature. We love to share, and we love to help the community. As an experiment, we’re going to share some of the growing pains we’re experiencing as we plan, sweat and think about this new app. Keep Reading

I’m not a nerd. Well, I guess I’m kind of a nerd… but not really.

I’m Kristin, and I work for a web app development company. To be (brutally) honest with you, I don’t know much tech lingo or a lot about web design in general. But I do find it fascinating. So what am I doing here? I guess you could say I’m sort of a journalist inside my own company; I work to pull out the information people might find captivating (or at least, a little bit appealing) about what we do here at Paste Interactive. 

The truth is, I’m not so different from my co-workers, even though I don’t have a design degree and reading code is like reading another language. We’re all here to solve a problem. They’re here to solve the problem of disorganization and they do that by creating great web apps that help people simplify their lives. I’m here to solve the problem of what happens when they’ve dug themselves so deep into their work that they have trouble seeing when something is really interesting and worth sharing. I talk to them, probe a little bit to find out what they’re working on. I ask them to explain things to me. I look it up online, and then I attempt  to translate everything into plain english, which sometimes is the most difficult part.

It’s a really great and interesting gig, though, because as much as I disliked school, I’m thrilled with doing research all the time. Seemingly tedious tasks like that can be so rewarding when there is genuine interest. 

So I’m a writer. Of words, not code. But I’m going to do my best to be a good translator. 

Here at Paste we decided that we’d like you to get to know us a little better. To do that, we’re starting a new string of posts called “The 5 Series.” In these short articles, we’ll give you little insights into our personal lives (but never TMI!).

And so, meet Brian, our main developer of both Jumpchart and Staction. Here are 5 desktop apps he uses most often.

1. Things.app
“I use Things on my Mac and iPhone to keep my life outside work organized. I keep wishlists, gift ideas, grocery lists and much more on it. The synchronization with my iPhone makes it perfect to take everywhere I go.”

2. Yojimbo
“I started using this to plan a trip last month, and haven’t been able to stop using it since! It’s my little box of collection of things I’ll need sometime in the future.”

3. Tweetie
“Again, I use it for my Mac and iPhone- it’s just the best Twitter client.”

4. Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers
“Whenever I’m working in the living room, this pair of apps works perfectly to stream music from my laptop to my media center that’s connected to my home theater system.”

5. Audio Hijack Pro
“I use this to mute the sound on Firefox. I hate websites and banners that play music!”

Most of you reading this in the USA probably own a car conceived, or produced outside of the USA. You don’t have to feel bad about that- the rest of the world caught the USA slipping on the very ideas they invented years ago. The ideas of the assembly line, and the industrial revolution were around long before Henry Ford, but like many of the most intriguing figures in history, he took the new ideas from his own time and repackaged them simply for public consumption.

As we watch the US automotive industry get reinvented, let’s take a moment to see what us app developers can learn from the past with a few Henry Ford quotes. Keep Reading

One of my favorite books is the Tao Te Ching. I read it first back in college when we all cast about for new ideas, and new schools of thinking (I still cast about quite a bit!) I have it now on audiobook, and I listen to it often. It’s a great brainstorming tool, and it really opens up your mind to alternate possibilities. Every time I listen to it, depending on where my mind was before starting, I take away something different. This last time I started out by thinking “how does the Tao apply to Apps?” -Here are a few takeaways. Keep Reading