Darn, wish this workshop was a lot closer to home. Princeton in January is hazardous duty for a California boy like me.
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Category: Web/Tech
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Stanford’s Silicon Nanowire Battery
Stanford’s Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has led the development of battery research resulting in a “silicon nanowire battery” that “produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.”
This can’t be commercialized soon enough! Couple this kind of battery with this kind of processor technology (also claiming a 10x improvement) – and battery life should be a worry no more!
There’s a great article in this week’s Economist titled “The Accidental Innovator” that’s about Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame and his belief that innovations are mostly stumbled upon. In his “pursuit of accidents”:
The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.
From Apple’s Human Interface Design Principles:
The best approach to developing easy-to-use software is to keep the design as simple as possible. In other words, a simple design is a good design and the best tools are those that users are not even aware they are using. The more you can do to simplify the interface of your application for your users, the more likely it is that you will build a product that meets their needs and is enjoyable to use.
From 37 Signals:
The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them.
I’m reminded of that great quote from Alfred North Whitehead:
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
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Smart Folders and Mail.app Performance
One of the things that had been bugging me since my upgrade to Leopard on my MacBook Pro had been general performance – something I couldn’t figure out.
Last night, I noticed that the many smart mailboxes I had set up in Mail.app a long time ago (and never bothered to actually use!) had thousands of emails in them. Using the Activity Viewer in Mail, I noticed that a lot of time was being spent after retrieving my mail (every minute!) updating the smart mailboxes.
So, I ended up just deleting those smart mailboxes – one by one – and now things are much snappier – and I’m much happier! I suppose I could have also backed off the mail check frequency a bit and had the same effect. Smart mailboxes are great tools – but if you’re not using them, you might enjoy shedding their baggage.
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Loving Times Reader
One of my partners is a huge fan of Times Reader, the Windows-only application that brings you the New York Times in an integrated, non-browser, application. It really does work beautifully – even when run on Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac Book Pro.
Part of the elegance of the application is the narrow column design that is sensitive to my screen’s height (meaning there’s simply no scrolling up and down across the “fold” to read – the columns just continue right to left across the page) and, I believe, the Times’ careful use of photography on almost every story page. This user interface seems so natural and intuitive – yet it’s so much not a part of today’s browser-based web UI. Why?
The Times says they have a Mac version coming – this Windows version apparently is heavily into .Net’s runtime. I look forward to having this same refreshing interface for reading the Times natively on my Mac sometime in the New Year.
Just after Thanksgiving, a new Amazon.com Kindle e-book reader arrived on the front step and I’ve been reading much more ever since. I was one of the first day orderers – and, other than obsessing about when it would arrive (it was Thanksgiving week after all) – I’ve been very happy with my Kindle experience since then.
Others have written a lot about their experiences – with some disappointments noted regarding the design, the case, the DRM, etc. One of my colleagues commented that the design would have been an Apple prototype about 18 months from product release – meaning how much more work on improving the design that he thought was needed to bring it up to Apple-like design quality. It is true that when you demo the product to friends, they love the screen and the features but almost always conclude by saying “It is clunky, isn’t it?” Brings to mind the old Volkswagen Thing.
While it’s not perfect, I’ve come to appreciate the functional design of the Kindle. With the cover folded back over, it’s a delight for me to use reading with one hand. The next page keys are right where my fingers want them – much easier to use for linear reading, IMHO, than clicking on a touch screen would be.
The whole online store experience is about as good as it gets. Selecting, buying and then receiving the whole book on the Kindle in less than a minute is really amazing. My primary frustration is wanting to learn daily what’s new in the store and available for purchase – that’s not easily accomplished from the device itself nor, for that matter, in the Kindle Store using my Mac’s web browser.
More comments coming soon!
I’m always intrigued to see how various attempts to block progress are often “routed around.” This morning’s example is the new Google Maps application on my Blackberry 8703e from Verizon. Despite Verizon’s block on sharing the GPS signal in the device with non-Verizon applications (like Google Maps), the new Maps application uses an alternative approach to finding my approximate location – a feature unavailable earlier.
Verizon (or RIM?) wants me to subscribe to their lame maps application and, as a result, doesn’t share the GPS signal inside the device. Google’s found a way around that blockage with the new My Location feature. “The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map – it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).” They’ve even made a short movie about it. Tastes great – and it’s a lot less filling than the Verizon approach. Very cool – thanks Google!
Today, I’ve completed a number of updates to what had become a pretty moldy oldie blog here at sjl.us. Sorry for the recent lack of tender care – but life’s been busy!
Part of today’s update included replacing the header graphic (of “ducks in a row” in Sharon Park in Menlo Park) with a new one from a recent photo shoot on the way to Point Reyes. Here’s the story.
As you head into Point Reyes on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard through Inverness, on the western side of Inverness you come across this vista with that lovely “Launch for Hire” pier jutting out into Tomales Bay – known as Brock’s Boathouse. That’s where this new header graphic photo was taken using my trusty Canon 30D – shooting using my Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 Lens at f/9 and 29 mm.
In one of my offices, I’ve got one of Chris Honeysett‘s prints of that same building – but shot on a beautiful foggy morning from a position on the opposite side a bit northwest of the pier. Chris’ beautiful photo provided the inspiration for this alternate view.
Obviously, one of these days I will have to actually hire that launch! If you do go to Inverness or Point Reyes, be sure to stop on your way at Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station. Here’s a map. Earlier is better – the Creamery can get busy on a sunny afternoon! (Update: unfortunately, Cowgirl Creamery closed its retail location in Point Reyes Station during the pandemic).
Edward Tufte’s teaching a new two-day “experimental class” next month in Palo Alto (Thursday-Friday, July 12-13). I attended Tufte’s one day session a couple of years ago – and am looking forward to the “deeper dive” of the two-day session next month. “The two-day course is the theory of analytical design with examples; the one-day course, examples with some theory.” There’s nothing better than a deep immersion!
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A Hat Tip To Google Reader
Over the last month or so, I’ve become totally addicted to Google Reader for reading RSS feeds all over the web. Turns out, it’s kinda amazing – I used to have this routine list of bookmarked sites that I’d periodically check during the day for new posts, etc. Pretty unstructured, wasting more time than required. Using Google Reader changes that completely. Now, I can do a very quick scan, quickly see what categories have new articles (using Reader’s folders to organize the feeds), and go back to getting things done. It’s a truly useful tool.
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