Author Archives: Elia Freedman

Why Did You Start Your Business?

Posted on by

I went to a Founders event last night. There were probably 30 or so people there representing about 20 companies. I wasn’t able to stay long but in 45 minutes or so I talked to a handful of these companies. The conversation went something like this:

“Hi, I’m Elia.”

“Hi, I’m <whatever the persons name is>.”

“What does your company do,” I’d ask?

“We develop <whatever the company does>.”

Then the question I asked that surprised me the most:

“Why did you start this business?”

I have no idea why I started asking that but it struck me as a better question than most others. In a number of cases I heard them explain that they had a personal problem they were solving. In other cases they saw a market opportunity and could relate it to their own experiences. And in still other cases the person had some rambling, jargon-strewn response that didn’t make much sense to me. It seemed to give me instant insight into that founder, their experiences and how likely they are to persevere when they hit roadblocks.

I walked away trying to explain that to myself as well. Why did I start Infinity Softworks? I hated my college calculator. I was tired of seeing a tiny little number in a tiny little window, having to remember an arcane set of keystrokes to calculate.

In 1979 Jimmy Carter was President and established diplomatic relations with communist China for the first time. The shah of Iran was overthrown which eventually led to the Iran hostage situation later that same year. Nickelodeon debuted on Warner Cable, Sony debuted the Walkman in Japan, and McDonald’s debuted the Happy Meal. Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall was the hit album of the year. In 1979 the entire PC industry sold 535,000 units and was dominated by Tandy TRS-80 (Trash-80 for those that don’t remember), the Apple II and the Atari 400/800. There was no publicly-available Internet. Everything was shared via tape drive and 5.25″ floppies.

And we did math with spreadsheets and pocket calculators, the same as we do today.

So why do I persist at Infinity Softworks? Because performing math hasn’t changed in 33 years. And it is time it did.

Prompts

Posted on by

Prompts

MG Siegler is right:

Not everything done in computing is intended to be nefarious. At some point, you simply have to trust that someone — be it Apple, Google, or an app developer — isn’t out to screw you over.

I decided a long time ago to assume that I am being treated fairly and honestly. It feels a lot healthier then assuming everyone is out to screw me.

Great Presentation By Corey Pressman On The Post-Book

Posted on by

Very interesting presentation by Corey Pressman last night at Mobile Portland. He talked about the history of publishing (he’s an anthropologist by training) and how we are at an inflection point. But unlike most in the “traditional publishing” world Corey sees this as a tremendous opportunity, an amazing inflection point, a Big Bang with tons of possibilities in the publishing world.

Corey speaks for the first 38 minutes and then there is a panel on iBooks Author and eBooks in education. Well worth the time!


(or watch it here)

TV Is Broken

Posted on by

TV Is Broken

Oh this little story is awesome and mimics my own experiences with my own daughters:

I say all of this to set up the fact that Beatrix has little idea of how traditional TV works and seeing her first real exposure to it was enlightening to say the least.

…

“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.

“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shrek will come back on in a few minutes” I say.

We have a television set and have basic cable but rarely ever watch it. The “basic” part gives us the local channels and Discovery channel, in essence. For the most part, we stream movies and tv shows from a hard drive to Apple TV or via Netflix, not that my girls watch much of that even.

So their exposure to commercials? Almost none.

When I was 3 years old my mom worked nights so would set me up in front of the television on Saturday mornings to play and watch cartoons. She said I would watch the commercials saying, “I want that!” to every one. Now my girls barely know what a commercial is. Funny how things have changed in 35 years.

The Awesomeness That Is VoiceOver

Posted on by

We started work on version 3 of powerOne for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch this past week. While I am not ready to announce what made the cut and what didn’t, we do hope to ship it to Apple in about a month. It will be a free upgrade to current customers.

One of the requests we got was to enhance our support for Apple’s accessibility feature called VoiceOver. Our customer said, “This app isn’t perfectly compatible with VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in text-to-speech technology, but it is the best I’ve found so far.” I’m really glad she wrote because powerOne is perfectly geared toward the sight-impaired and with version 3 it will be even better.

How does VoiceOver work? There is a setting in the Settings app (General then Accessibility) that when turned on lets you tap a button, label, or control once to hear what it is and then double-tap anywhere on the screen to activate the button or flick to move the slider. It is a little arduous but I can only imagine how hard these devices are to use for the visually impaired without it.

For the most part the iPhone and iPad is really smart. It does things like read the contents of table cells and labels. Today the templates work quite well as Apple reads the label and value in each cell when tapped. But the calculator and number editors are filled with buttons with graphics and it reads the name of the graphic used on the button. Other problems include the fact that it doesn’t tell you the settings correctly and it didn’t read the result of a calculation.

We went through and spent the better part of a day assigning all those details. For instance choosing the decimal precision now tells you the current setting and as you move the slider it reads it to you: “0”, “float”, “1”. Every calculator button now says what it does, every toolbar and navigation bar buttons says what it does, it even reads the help to you. And now when you complete a math problem, algebraic or RPN mode, it reads you the result.

This was one of those features that would have been easy to justify away. After all, how many sight-impaired customers could we possibly have? But it is rare that we get a chance to implement a feature that truly helps people better themselves, to help those who would otherwise need help do for themselves. In some ways the time spent enhancing powerOne for VoiceOver felt like no time at all!