Redesigning the Boarding Pass – Journal – Boarding Pass / Fail
Every single suggestion is better than the original. The original is the only one that someone was paid to design!
I’m willing to bet that the original design was either “evolved” from an original engineering prototype or approved by committee.
This is an interesting comment…
“they’re pre-announcing this so far in advance to discourage current Entourage users from switching to the new Exchange-compatible versions of Apple Mail and iCal in Snow Leopard.”
If this is the plan then they’re on the route to failure. Moving desktop mail client has a minimal cost. You just plug in the new client and start syncronizing the mail server. It’s a two minute job.
What seems to be happening here is that Outlook is becoming a server only tool. The poor desktop client (is there anything slower?) is killing the fanchise.
A few weeks ago I found myself in California and talking to Eileen Hassi who part owns Ritual Roasters in San Francisco. The conversation started with the normal “what do you do?” and then she blew me away.
She had the perfect one line response, which led to my second question, to which she had another perfect response; and on and on. After a half day spent in her company not once was I left with the impression that she was less than 100% committed. Her commitment and obsession with her product seemed total.
I’ve rarely been so impressed by someone. And this is a three store coffee chain!
So I finally got around to looking her up on Google tonight and this is the quote I see…
Ms. Hassi said she was at a party recently when someone came up to her and offered a profusion of thanks. “He said, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you for opening your cafe.’ “
Street Scene – Cafe Capitalism, San Francisco Style – NYTimes.com
Can I recommend a coffee house without ever seeing it? Hell yes!
Steve Gillmor is obsessed with Twitter an especially Track a specific function within Twitter that allows you to vanity search the service in real-time. Gillmor runs the wonderful Gillmor Gang podcast and every episode includes a plug for Twitter and specially a complaint about the Track functionality not being available.
All this reminds me of Word in the early 90s.
In the early 90s there was a long running functionality fight between the various word processor applications. Every few months a new version would appear with yet more functions. Every few months the magazines would run articles comparing the different packages and tell their readers which to buy.
During this period Word would often be labeled as incomplete, and missing key features. What was it missing? Word Count! Every few months, Word would be reviewed and it still wasn’t ready. Microsoft even produced a Macro to display a Word Count but the journalists just called that a fudge and not integrated.
In the end, Microsoft produced a Word Count with added extras, readability scores and such. Journalists happy; Microsoft went on to world domination.
Why is this like Twitter?
Well the Track function is fantastic is you’re Steve Gillmor, it’s what he wants. In fact, it’s also why Scoble likes FriendFeed I believe. However, they’re of no use to 95% of the users who just want to talk to friends and family.
What we’re seeing is journalists push applications developers into helping journalists and not the majority of their users.
Want another example? Who on earth needs over 2000 followers in Twitter or Facebook? Outside the world of PR and journalism it makes no sense. Let the complaints begin.
Ed Brill works at the IBM Software Group and has repeatedly made claims that Accenture didn’t migrate off Notes as publicly claimed by Accenture and Microsoft.
“I have a slide in the presentation that is based on my “Then and now, episode 2″ blog entry from February. The slide shows the same two graphics that are in the blog entry — Accenture/Avanade’s claim around when they migrated off Notes, and the reality of Accenture hiring Notes developers (and using hundreds of Notes applications) today.”
And…
“It’s clear that Notes is not only not gone from the Accenture IT environment, but rather that it is still a key technology.”
It would be nice if someone from Accenture put his straight officially but nobody seems bothered. Therefore, I’ll do it unofficially…
Notes isn’t a key technology at Accenture, hasn’t been for a while. As far as I know, it exists as client software mainly so people can read their old data but Accenture is very clearly a Outlook/SharePoint shop.
So why are they hiring Notes developers? To help clients. Accenture doesn’t have a supply chain to manage but you’ll see a lot of adverts for supply chain expert jobs.
This is a VERY cool idea. Almost everyone I know uses www.google.com to test if their connection is working; now they will be able to get the next layer of information.
“Apple appears to have other plans to further innovation around its Multi-Touch platform that will reduce its reliance on chip designs conceived largely by third parties.”AppleInsider | Steve Jobs: it’s time we design our own iPhone and iPod chips
If you read the business papers, they give the impression that all hardware is now a commodity, that everything is assembled from off the shelf parts. Either they’re wrong or Apple is about to change that.
It just shows that very few things are really commodities.
A couple of months ago I put Mozy on the iMac at home.
For those that don’t know what Mozy is; you need to learn today. Most of us backup our data, we’ve already had the sinking feeling of a hard drive failure and now backup to an external drive. However, what happens when the house burns down?
Generally people think that this is a stupid point; however, I remember talking to a friend who lost her house when a Christmas tree caught file. Years later, the thing that she still missed…. her photos! Our photos are now digital and therefore can be saved, if they’re backed up to a second location. Mozy offers that second location in Utah, USA!
Before going further, you have to pay for Mozy but at $5 a month for unlimited storage (more on that later) it’s a bargain.
Initially it was the beta software and basically didn’t work. It was slow, I had trouble selecting what to backup without the software crashing and just to add to the pain there was a performance difference on the machine. I was about to ask for a refund when the v1.0 was launched.
This solved the majority of issues (although the initial scan for files is slow) and I’m now the proud owner of 50 Gb of data on the other side of the world. Peace of mind at last.
One final point, the space is unlimited but there are limits on how much you can upload every day. Therefore, backing up you’re complete DVD collection will be difficult.
All in all! Well worth a Starbucks a month.
“An absolutely superb customer experience and once again gives a lot of weight to what Jobs says: when you control the hardware and the software (and, it turns out, the point of sale) then the integrated experience you can give to the consumer is nothing short of superb. I bet there is not a single phone on the market made by anyone else that could reproduce this experience.”
What this actually shows is how bad most customer experiences are. You spend tens of thousands of Euros on a car and you can’t get service like this!
Yes, of course it matters but…
What amazes me is how good the interfaces looks compared to Office; this is an online app and it looks lovely to my offline application. I’m used to the online applications looking like Google Docs; basic, blue and boring. This is something very different and, in fact, so good that I’m itching to use it but I don’t want to go through the transition process.
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