Creating productivity tools at the intersection of product strategy, mobile software development, and user-centered design

Monthly archives for July, 2012

Office Web Apps



“Updated applications augment, but can’t replace, their desktop counterparts.”

As a firm believer in web apps over native apps, I truly think Office Web Apps from Microsoft are probably the closest entity to what will be the standard form of mobile productivity in the future. Currently, the technology is still heavily reliant on its desktop counterpart to reach its peak performance, but Office Web Apps are for the most part on par with Google’s offering online. Rather than trying to cram more functionality into the web apps, Microsoft should focus on getting the existing features to work as effortlessly and smoothly as possible. The limitations of mobile have fortuitously forced the Office team to limit the app to what is absolutely essential without piling on all the extra chrome that only edge cases require. Perhaps they can build out an enterprise or Pro version to make sure they don’t lose a foothold on that market when absolutely everything migrates online (more than just Office 365 or Click-2-Run). The guiding principle should be to keep it simple!

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/office-2013-web-apps-a-step-forward-but-still-dependent-on-the-desktop/

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Huddle Goes Social



“Huddle, the cloud collaboration company that picked up $25 million in funding in May, today is launching a significant update to its platform: it’s adding in a social communication layer to its service, so that when people share and work together on documents online, they can also talk to each other about them”

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/19/like-google-docs-but-with-more-conversation-huddle-updates-its-content-sharing-platform-with-social-layer/

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Microsoft Office 2013: First Look



The newest version of Microsoft Office was unveiled at a quick press conference today that is touchscreen-friendly, cloud integrated, and puts social front and center. This bold move from Microsoft is what CEO Steve Ballmer considers the “biggest most ambitious Office” update since 1995.

Download a preview of it here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

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The Case Against Everything Buckets



The Mac software ecosystem faces a plague. A plague of Everything Buckets. Indulge me.

If you search for “productivity” or “organization” software for the Mac, you’ll find variations on a particular type of application. These applications claim to be “your outboard brain” or “your digital filing cabinet” or similar. They go by many names: Yojimbo, Together, ShoveBox, Evernote, DEVONthink. There may be differences in their implementation and appearance, but these applications are all of the same sinister ilk. They are Everything Buckets.

An Everything Bucket, since you’re probably wondering, is what I call applications that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. They’re virtual scrapbooks, applying a lightweight organization system to (often) unrelated data of varying types. These applications typically employ a proprietary database, or at best, build atop the SQLite database technology that Apple ships with Mac OS X. They usually default to storing information in Rich Text Format (RTF) or Portable Document Format (PDF). They are Not A Good Idea.

Why Everything Buckets Are Not A Good Idea

Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?”

This proposition should not sound great. If you think you’re going to save time in the long run by throwing your data into a big bucket now, then sifting through it later, you are mistaken. There are better ways.

The Filesystem

If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.

On Mac, an application called Finder provides a pleasant interface to listing, organizing, and previewing information in a filesystem. It’s free, and it’s running on your Mac right now. Oh sure, it’s got some quirks, but for the most part you’ll find it reliable. You can create directories, and even create directories inside directories (a feature that Yomjimbo currently lacks).

Everything Buckets are selling you a filesystem, and removing the step of creating and saving a new file within that filesystem. That’s their primary value. Whatever organization scheme they may claim to offer, you can replicate on the filesystem. I promise. Even tags (symlinks, aliases – look ’em up).

If you still feel like paying $39 for a proprietary second-rate filesystem, well, bless your heart. You’re the stuff a software developer’s dreams are made of.

The Search Illusion

Most Everything Buckets also let you search. Let’s talk about that.

We live in the age of search. “Why can’t I just Google for it?” is a common complaint from anyone who’s ever misplaced a file and doesn’t know better. In response to this complaint, desktop search technologies like Spotlight have emerged. How do they work? They sift through your structureless data periodically and build a structure from it. This structure is called an index. Without an index, searching through all but smallest quantities of unstructured data takes ages. Once again: computers work best with structured data.

So while you, the user, are presented with the illusion of “Googling” for that phone number you threw into your Everything Bucket, your computer is constantly hauling ass to make up for the fact that you couldn’t be bothered to put the phone number in your virtual address book. “What do I care how much work my computer does?” you say, until the next time the Spotlight indexer kicks in and your Mac grinds to a halt.

This posits a stronger correlation between Everything Buckets and things like Spotlight than I really mean to put forward. The point is that if you don’t do some organization of your data up front, you probably won’t like the ways in which it’s done for you later.

With an Everything Bucket, you also miss out on opportunities to do interesting things with data. Once data is normalized and structured, finding correlations is faster and easier. Remember the first time you really got a spreadsheet to do something cool for you? You can’t do that with a big steaming pile of RTF files.

Applications That Actually Do Things

One of my Rules For Computing Happiness is: “do not use software that does many things poorly.” Everything Buckets violate this rule up, down, and sideways. They’re poor filesystems, poor text editors, poor databases, poor to-do lists, poor calendars, poor address books, poor bookmark managers, and poor password managers. At their worst, they’re even poor web browsers, poor encryption systems, and poor synchronization schemes.

The corollary to that rule is: “use software that does one thing well.” When you need to store some data, there are so many wonderful applications to pick from. From recipes to receipts, photographs to music, journal entries to to-do list items, there’s a great application out there for what you need to do. Chances are good that the right application structures your data so that you can get more out of it. Use an application that actually does something more than holding data. You’ll be happier.

If you don’t want to be forever accumulating applications, store stuff as plain text on the filesystem. It’s dead reliable, you can shuffle it about however you want, and you’ll be able to search through it quickly, even without an index.

Conclusion

Get your brain out of an Everything Bucket and in to an application (or two, or three) that adds some value to your data. Of the culprits named above, at least DEVONthink can claim some intelligence in finding correlations between documents. But chances are good that if you think about the task you’re really trying to accomplish, there’s an application out there for it that will make your life easier. Do some research on a site like I Use Thisor MacUpdate and find an app you trust.

Your computer wants your data to be structured. Throw it a bone.

[Reposted from: http://al3x.net/2009/01/31/against-everything-buckets.html]

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Google Drive Updates



Google Drive team announced during Google I/O 2012 two new ways to get things done in the cloud (1) offline editing and (2) iOS integration.

From what I can tell, offline editing works by having Google Docs save to a local cache, which then automatically syncs once it detects a stable Internet connection.  Ideally, the future will see us living in a world where local governments provide general Internet access as a public utility.  Until that happens though, offline editing is definitely a welcome addition to anyone trying to stay productive on the go. And given the news in South Carolina, the days of municipal broadband access might take awhile before it comes to fruition.

Playing well with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch is simply playing catch up since many more people actively work on these devices than on the various Android devices.  However, I’m sure internal executives were fighting against this as long as possible because they don’t want to give any ground to their competitors.  Case in point, did anyone  else feel like Google generally avoided mentioning Apple in most of their keynotes?  I understand that Google doesn’t want to give their competitors any air time, but perhaps they could poke fun at them by calling them a “fruit company” or variation thereof.  To avoid the rest of the industry seems like an elephant in the room, but I digress.

At the end of the day, Google Drive (and as an extension Google Docs) is still the closest product out in the market today that truly matches the vision of creating a simple tool that allows you to create, organize, and share all your great ideas.

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/06/announcing-your-two-most-requested.html

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Working with Designers and Developers



Great designers have a mindset of constant exploration and are never fully satisfied with what they have produced.  As a result, their bias is to always continue refining their work, rather than to reach a final and concrete solution.  As a product manager, this means you need to give designers as much leeway as possible to explore many varied pathways, while offering just enough guidance to keep the process moving along.

On the other hand, great developers have a mindset of logical progression and they love the feeling of closing another ticket in their queue.  Consequently, they are willing to stay up extremely late finishing a project once they are able to see the end of the line. In other words, once they can envision how to complete something, they are driven to make it happen. As a product manager, this means you want to show programmers a clear vision of what is possible, but also give the developer enough scope to avoid inhibiting their ability to come up with a creative solution.

The value-add of product managers in these scenarios is their ability to make the necessary trade-offs between the two extremes of endless exploration and actual accomplishment. Great product managers have a mindset of constant balance since they are wired to come up with the best possible product given the real world constraints.   In addition to adding strategic, analytic, and market insights, product managers bring clarity and structure in a world of uncertainty.

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Corporate Rebranding



HP Rebranding

HP Rebrand

“The temptation with so many of these projects is to go for a mark that attempts to do too much, cover too much ground, present the many faces of a multi-faceted organisation - as in the current vogue for flexible systems. But HP’s problem was that it had too much going on. It needed a single, strong voice behind which its 300,000-odd employees could unite. And Moving Brands has provided it elegantly.”

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/december/moving-brands-hp-logo

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Quote of the Month



Courtesy of: http://www.someecards.com/

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