Yearly Archives: 2013

The Uniqueness of Oregon

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Smuggler Cove

Oregon is a pretty unique place. As an example of that uniqueness, we recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of a decision then Governor Oswald West made regarding our beaches. In 1903 resorts and others were already starting to establish themselves. In addition there was no road system so if you wanted to get from Point A to Point B, you literally drove on the beach. Governor West also saw what was happening back east, namely that private resorts were claiming beach land for themselves.

So on February 13, 1903, Governor West went before the legislature to argue his point. Whether it was “to keep the beach road open” or to “give the beach to all the people,” we really don’t know. But whatever his intentions, what the good Governor did was establish the largest public beach access in the United States, over 360 miles.

The Oregonian talked about the anniversary in an article last week. If you haven’t explored the amazingness that is Oregon’s coast line, I highly recommend it, especially in summer. It’s a magical place.

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The included picture was taken by me at Smuggler’s Cove, Oswald West State Park, on the Oregon coast.

That Holy Shit Moment

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Sometimes things don’t sink in. I’m sure I’ve heard people talk about this topic before, maybe hundreds of times, but it was something about the way John Gruber said it that it sunk in.

That holy shit moment: that moment when someone gets what you are doing and realizes how amazing it is. Seeing a Mac for the first time, in 1984, was like that. (Holy shit! I can do everything visually instead of remembering arcane commands.) The iPad was like that for me. (Holy shit! The perfect combination of size and weight to carry stuff with me all the time.) So was the PalmPilot. (Holy shit! People are going to carry these around in their pockets.) I had that reaction with the Internet (Holy shit! I can actually follow my beloved Cleveland Indians from across the country), GMail (Holy shit! All the company mail without configuration), and Dropbox (Holy shit! All my files with me wherever I am).

In Infinity Softworks’ history, I’ve seen this reaction three times to our products. The first was with our financial products back in the late ’90s. Holy shit!, was the customer reaction. I can carry one device, a PalmPilot, and still have my calculator. The second was powerOne Graph when we’d show it to teachers and administrators. Holy shit!, my kids won’t spend so much time learning keystrokes. And third is what we are working on now. I see the look in people’s eyes when I show it off. Sometimes those words even stream from their mouths.

I never put it together before. We have developed multiple products over many years, some we shipped and some we didn’t. I’ve always assumed that figuring out which to ship and which to hold was a black art, a gut feel. But now I know better. What I’ve always looked for is that holy shit moment. Seeing that from enough people makes one realize the product could be something big.

Google Now and the Mobile Information User

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Fred Wilson wrote about Google Now yesterday. If you are not familiar Google Now has an interesting promise: that it knows stuff about you and can help you even without asking. To me, Google Now is the closest thing we have to fulfilling a need for what is very close to an ignored user group in the mobile market place, information users.

Michael Mace wrote in an incredible article a number of years ago on the various use cases for mobile computing. He simplified it down to three core user groups: communications, entertainment, and information. I believe very strongly that the first two are being covered well but the third is basically ignored (from the OS/hardware companies).

Google Now is interesting to me because it starts to get at a core need of information users. I have an appointment each month and invariably I forget the meeting once every couple of months. So I start setting an alarm, which sets off 10 devices around my house and means another thing I have to set. But Google Now has the potential to be smart enough to know where I am, the direction I am heading, what’s on my calendar, and which devices I have with me. If it knows all that, it can be smart enough to tell me if I’m not headed to my appointment, reminding me it’s time to go but also smart enough to not tell me if it sees I am on my way.

Once my devices are smart enough to look at my calendar, contacts and current position — with all kinds of other information — it can be smart enough to help me in all kinds of ways. I’m driving and traffic is backed up beyond my vision, it can tell me to take an alternative route. It knows where my meeting is and which parking meters are open near by, directing me to the one closest to my meeting. It knows where I am headed is for work and track the mileage for my expense report automatically.

As an information user myself feeling a bit underserved by current apps and OS implementations, I can’t wait for this future.

Hello Kitty To The Stars

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If this doesn’t inspire everyone, especially teenaged girls, to explore science I don’t know what will.

Besides the feeling of awe when watching this video, the other thing that jumped out at me was that she could do this at all. When I was in third grade we tied notes to balloons and let them go, seeing if anyone found them and would call to tell us about it. (We got at least one call.) But Lauren, the girl who conducted this experiment, got to watch the entire thing via mounted cameras at multiple angles. Ten years ago the cameras would have been too heavy to send into space. Five years ago, too expensive. Now? If their destroyed, oh well!

The joys of potentially disposable technology: great for our minds, bad for our landfills.

Opera Goes WebKit

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Interesting news yesterday that Opera is dropping their custom backend for WebKit. WebKit is the HTML rendering engine used by Safari, iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and BlackBerry with its latest OS. From the press release:

When we first began, back in 1995, we had to roll our own rendering engine in order to compete against the Netscape and Internet Explorer to drive web standards, and thus the web forward. When we started the spec that is now called “HTML5”, our goal was a specification that would greatly enhance interoperability across the web.

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

Some developers will be concerned that innovation will stop now, with all but two major browsers using the same engine. I’m not concerned about that. In fact I think quite the opposite will occur. We will see increased innovation on top of the consistent WebKit base as each Google, Apple, Opera and BlackBerry attempt to innovate on top of what is there already while maintaining compatibility for what came before.

As for developers, more consistency is a very good thing. For anyone who has tried to make their web sites compatible with Internet Explorer 6 knows… yeah, consistency is a very good thing!