What I’m Reading: The Technology and Business Book Collection

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Yesterday I mentioned I watched the movie Jobs on the plane ride back from vacation. I believe it is based on the Isaacson book Steve Jobs. As I mentioned the movie was mediocre. The book was mediocre, too. A couple of other Apple non-fiction books I’ve read over the last couple of years:

The Steven Levy books were the best, the Isaacson book was one of the most mediocre. I enjoyed the Lashinsky book as well. Hackers is about far more than Apple. It’s an incredibly fascinating book about the early computer pioneers.

Other business and technology books I’ve read recently:

These books were all good. I especially enjoyed Make Art Make Money. I’ve even given it as a gift to a few people. Still on my list are Startup CEO and Dogfight. I’ve debated whether I want to read Hatching Twitter or not. I really like Fred Wilson and I’m worried the book will change how I feel about him. I don’t think it’s fair to sum up a man based on a book written by someone who was not there and didn’t get Fred’s involvement. There are a few additional books I started and haven’t finished for various reasons. I won’t mention those.

It’s kind of funny. I work all day at a computer and then, for fun!, pick up books about what I do for a living. I must be doing what I love to make it a 24-7 affair.

Would love to know if you’ve read something I haven’t. I always love a good book about technology or business.

Waiting For Something Amazing

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I watched the movie Jobs, about Steve of Apple fame, on the way back from vacation this past week. Doing so made me realize something I’m not certain I have figured out before about myself. Maybe it is the fact of watching a movie, a condensing of his life down to bullet points, in essence, that brought this to light for me, but it is clear now. What the world lost when Jobs died was inspiration.

There has been a hole in my life since Jobs past away two and a half years ago. I think that’s why most people are clamoring for something new from Apple. Somehow, by releasing something new, we can all have that feeling of inspiration again [1]. Even this mediocre movie made me feel that way.

By the end of the movie all I can think was who is going to inspire us to be greater than ourselves?

It seems like the tech industry is all about the bottom line anymore. This ability to inspire great things seems to have past this generation of tech companies by. Maybe that could have been Google, but Google decided that the ad was greater than the relationship long ago. Same for Facebook and Twitter. They would just as soon sell our souls to make another dollar.

Maybe we can turn back to hardware. The closest we may have is Elon Musk, a man who dreams about cars and trains and spaceships, but his inventions don’t touch us like Jobs’ work did. Most of them are literally beyond our grasp financially, and the rest are dreams, something that Jobs rarely let us see.

One of my favorite scenes in any movie ever happens to be in a Pixar movie, The Incredibles. Earlier in the movie the father pulls in the driveway and, upset, lifts his car above his head. Turning he realizes a small boy on a Big Wheel bike is watching him and gently sets it down. Later, after being fired, the father pulls in the driveway in the same car, turns to see the boy, and asks, “What are you waiting for?” The boy replies,  “I don’t know. Something amazing, I guess.”

All the doubters say that Apple has lost its edge, that time has passed it by. I doubt that. I doubt that a company can just lose its edge over night like that. Maybe over time it will fade but that’s inevitable for everything. Once great things tumble all the time. I also think the doubters know that.

So what makes them doubt? Why so negative about a company that hasn’t missed a beat since Jobs’ resignation? I think the doubters are mad. We’ve all lost inspiration and we don’t know where to get it back.

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[1] Whether you like it or not, you are inspired by Apple. Even if you don’t like Apple products, all the other consumer tech companies seem to follow Apple’s lead, which means at a minimum Apple inspired you by proxy.

A Shift To Web-First Development

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As most of you know I’ve been “mobile first” my entire career. We developed our first apps for Newton and PalmPilot in 1997, although Apple cancelled the Newton before we shipped an app for it. We then developed for Windows Mobile and Windows, although our Windows version was designed for the pen-based tablets, not the desktop OS. This was followed by BlackBerry, iOS, and Android.

When we started developing Equals we started it as an iOS application. Multiple rounds of prototype development were done on iOS, where the web served primarily as connecting tissue, syncing templates across devices and giving our customers a read-only view of their notes so they could be followed.

I was always uneasy with this approach. There are significant problems starting a service on mobile devices. Here’s a few of them:

  1. Gives us massive scale immediately
  2. Requires a high level of polish
  3. Long release cycles
  4. Connects us only indirectly to the customer
  5. Offers only vanity metrics

When starting a new service, all of these are required in reverse. We can’t handle massive scale because we don’t know how or where to scale yet. Plus, we need to control who uses the app. We want a rough product to launch that can be revised quickly and easily. We need tons of customer touch points so we know whether we are on the right path. We need in-depth data and knowledge to refine our metrics, not vanity metrics such as downloads that tell us next to nothing.

Last year I fully realized the folly of my ways and we started making the shift to a “web first” approach. We had minimal skills here though. As of last summer I had never written more than three or four lines of JavaScript. I knew what responsive design was but had never thought about how to implement it. We did (and do) know Rails, CSS and HTML basics, so we weren’t completely starting from scratch, but all the same I knew it would be a difficult but necessary transition.

I lined up contract gigs that taught us HTML5 and got to use responsive design for the first time. We refined our skills for most of the year, iterating over development projects and working on Equals between the contract gaps. We have the skills we need now and are full-time on Equals. We will have a web version that runs on various desktop and mobile browsers available before April is out.

We still have plans for mobile-native versions of course, but this gives us the flexibility to build at our own pace, learning a ton, refining the features, and then make the best possible mobile apps we can when ready.

Two Days of Pain and Suffering, Windows 7 Edition

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I forgot what a bear installing Windows is. Got back from vacation last week and had a very busy week catching up. We are trying to launch Equals this month so will be heads down writing code.

As apart of the testing process I needed copies of Windows with various versions of Internet Explorer so I can do appropriate testing. For this, I downloaded VirtualBox, installed it, and downloaded copies of IE specially provided by Microsoft for testing purposes. It’s a fantastic set-up and couldn’t be happier with how Microsoft is supporting web developers with this option. I accomplished this quite some time ago.

This means I had VirtualBox setup with copies of IE and still had Parallels setup with a copy of Windows 7 that I use primarily for bookkeeping purposes. (Quickbooks for Windows is still the best option.) I increasingly became frustrated with Parallels over the years. The app is slow, I find that after quitting it does weird things to my Mac, which doesn’t act right until I reboot, and they now install stuff that I don’t need and give me no means to turn it off.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d install Windows 7 in VirtualBox and uninstall Parallels altogether. I started the process Saturday and this morning, Monday, it is finally completed. The install went fine. The problem is the updates. Downloading one set of updates for Windows uncovers a bunch of additional downloads which uncovers a bunch of additional downloads, etc., etc., on and on, until eventually it stops finding downloads. This went on for nearly two days.

In the dark ages when I was stuck on Windows I remember going through this process about once per year. I’d wipe clean my drive and reinstall Windows. I forgot how time consuming this is and am glad that I rarely do it anymore. My Mac has never required a re-install of the OS.

I’m hoping this is the last time for Windows for a very long time.

 

My Technology Wish List

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I’m a reducer by nature. I figure that’s because I like simplicity and getting rid of physical things simplifies life considerably.

About a decade ago I reduced a music collection of some 500 or so CDs down to a portion of a hard drive. A couple of years after that I burned out the DVD drive on a Mac mini by ripping some 300 DVDs to the same hard drive. Two massive collections down. This past year I took 1100 pictures in physical form (slide, negative and print) and sent them off to ScanCafe. They are sitting on two discs next to my desk right now, waiting to be imported into my collection and all the photo albums have been reduced to a small box. I will likely turn my sights to our book collection next, which has been reduced substantially since our college days, converting as much as I can of what remains to epub.

I have one very good reason for eliminating all this stuff and one silly reason. The good reason is that it all collects dust and when there are allergies in the house (my oldest daughter and me) anything we can do to eliminate potentially dusty things is good. The second, and silly, reason is that I once moved across country with only the things I could fit in the back of my car. There’s a part of me that wishes I could do that again.

One area that I’d like to reduce is the clutter around my tv set. I have a tv, an antenna, a receiver, a DVD player, a Roku box and an Apple TV. Plugged into the receiver are five speakers and a sub-woofer. Again, too much stuff. It’s not a big room so can’t help but wonder if a tv with sound bar and subwoofer would allow me to get rid of all the speakers and wires. And if Apple would release an Apple TV where I could plug in one of their mini DVD players, I could also get rid of my big honkin’ DVD player that takes up a whole shelf. I could get rid of Roku also if Apple TV would add Amazon Video. How awesome would that be? A TV, soundbar, subwoofer, antenna, Apple TV and a small DVD drive only, all except the subwoofer off the floor. [1] I’d probably mount the TV on the wall and build a small shelf for everything else. Oh, heaven.

Finally, while I’m making a list, I’m also ready for a new Mac mini. I wish Apple would release it already. I’m tired of waiting.

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[1] I don’t have cable and haven’t for seven years. The antenna lets us pick up local channels. We got rid of our landline phone at least that long ago, too.