Reblog

Resumed this week highlights

I never stopped my weekly reading, listening and watching but I stopped talking about it here. No notes means I forget about everything, what a waste. So I resumed the habit: just a few lines when the topic is interesting and thoughts provoking. Very opinionated! Enjoy.

Sketchnotes iPhone Tapstack App by SixVoices… An interesting case of a company (SixVoices) selling a product which is an User Experience concept. The idea is then adapted and implemented down to iPhone apps like this one to illustrate sketchnotes. The concept is to reproduce with the iphone what happens to a stack of cards or pages when they are on a table and can be browser with your finger. The effect is very intuitive.

About Mike Rohde’s Sketchnotes… Here is a concise introduction to sketch notes. Mike Rohde explains the process and tools needed. What is actually amazing considering the quality and quantity of details of the illustrations is how this can be done realtime while possibly paying attention to the presentation. I think at least at the beginning I’d be completely absorbed by the sketching part. Maybe start incrementally: just writing, then a few geometrical sketches, then some more typography and fonts to create the finger memory. Anyway,

37signals Podcast - Rework… A few simple annoying facts about business books (and sometimes not only business) which I agree with in this interview about the soon to be published 37signals book. Very often the main topic of the book is thoroughly explained in the first 60 pages which by them selves sell the book. Money well spent and a lot of a-ha moments. The remaining 250 pages “rework” the same topic killing completely my interest in the book. Unfortunately there could be the same treatment at the beginning too and this is enough to abandon the book right away. The second are those 15+ pages before chapter 1, with 20% interesting contents. But I hate prefaces (why I wrote the book, why I decided to republish the book, etc) copyrights and so on. Needless to say, “Rework” refused the format in both cases. I knew also about Rohdesign, the mind behind sketchnotes. This reminds me of the importance of engaging right brain thinking using all the possible senses. Wondering if to use the technique for my learnings.

Confreaks: RubyConf 2009 - Solid Ruby Jim Weirich… I’m always sure that whatever presentation by Jim will teach me something. I had the opportunity to reflect on a few important facts. Changing behavior by monkey patching is dangerous because it is triggered by a require statement at the beginning of a file which nothing has to do at least apparently with the patch. It triggers unexpected behavior. Changing by subclassing instead depends on the type of the instance receiving the message which usually is dependent on the instantiation context and therefore planned more carefully. There are no enforced interfaces in Ruby as for example in Java. But there is an implicit protocol to obey which has more to do with discipline. The protocol is in the documentation and parameters name, much more freedom, no need for ceremony with interfaces. A protocol is basically a subset of the methods of a class. So in Ruby OCP and DIP does not need the creation of a new interface to invert dependencies.

Podcast Interview With Oceanhouse Media Brands And Their Impact On Volume and Price… One reason to choose volume over complexity in the app store is discoverability: many apps in the app store makes more likely to be found. The app store is a search engine: we need SEO kind of rules. Simplicity is the key, not necessarily low-quality. A working iphone prototype is the new business card to catch the attention of the next customer. After 80+ apps created their experience is you can’t predict what will sell the best. The development effort should be 3-4 weeks to minimize the impact of low number of units sold. You accept 3-4 months project only when you know is a guaranteed seller.

Jon Skeet - World’s Greatest Living Programmer… Heard an interesting and simple trick to make 2 services built on top of the same API but supporting different versions. If the version of the response retrieved by the server is not the wanted one, the client can make a second request of translation with downgrading of the default version to the previous one (for example). The service that upgraded the version of the API is supposed to provide the translation service and to know how to downgrade the response version (when applicable). Jon then tells us how he achieved the best contributor status on StackOverflow. There is really nothing surprising here, he doesn’t plan for a daily StackOverflow session. He just fills all the possible holes during his working day with StackOverflow, that’s it. As simple as it sounds, being really focused on only one or few goals is the key for success. The problem is learning how isolate from all the possible external distractions. Pomodoro rules.

Railscasts 199 - Mobile Devices… Pretty impressive here the ease you can setup your Rails web app to serve better content for a mobile device or even completely look like a mobile device with JQTouch. You can start by just a better looking UI by defining a css which is only triggered when the user agent matches a certain string. You can create an helper method for that. If you want a link to switch back and forward from mobile to normal version, you need to save which UI you’re on in the session. If you need instead the pages to look different beyond what a CSS can do, you need a custom template for a specific new format. When the page is called with the new format (.mobile instead of .html) a completely different layout is triggered. JQTouch can be used at this point only for the mobile layout to render the application very similar to a native iPhone interface. This is all concisely and beautifully explained by Ryan Bates in this screencast. Enjoy.