Seasoned Musings

Startups. Entrepreneurship. Technology. Food. Music. Film. Travel. Life.

A Handy Dandy Paper Template Generator

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Was looking around for something like and stumbled onto this. It’s still early but there are already 3 useful templates (lined, graph and blank) which I’ve already imported into Note Taker HD on my iPad and made good use of.

If you still make notes, draw things, etc. then you still need paper and I’ve got a new project you might like. It allows you to create that paper and print it right from your browser. It’s only in an alpha form at the moment (which means not all of the features are finished yet), but you can already put it to good use and print out several kinds of paper

via PaperQuik – You can try out my new project today | JohnMunsch.com.

Quick Hands On With OSX Lion

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Messing around with Lion. So far so good.

Mission control might actually get me to use spaces and dashboard more than I currently do.

I’m going to reserve judgement on Launchpad since I am a huge fan of LaunchBar. That said I could see using it for apps I don’t use on a day to day basis since I can’t remember them all by name. Maybe as a multiple dock replacement

Finder has received some love with AirDrop integration and file arrangements in views (types, modified dates, app creators, size, labels,et al)

Full screen view feels odd as it’s a kiosk or windows paradigm, but I could easily see using it to stay focused. One thing at a time right?

Looking forward to upgrading in about a month once the dust has settled, all the upgrade woes are known, and all my apps are Lion friendly.

Hardware sidenote, I’d never played with the Bluetooth Magic Trackpad and I do like it more than a mouse – it needs more gestures though.

Lowest Common Denominator User Experiences

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There are a two UX trends happening now that are absolutely infuriating and cause me to waste precious time every day: awful Mobile versions of sites, and popup login boxes that don’t respect browser password managers.

These atrocious mobile versions of sites are replicating like cells because the publishers seem to think I have a circa 2000 era cellphone and want to force a lowest common denominator experience upon us. Between iOS and Android devices, there are probably about 200M users whose devices can render the real experience, so let us choose how we want to experience it. And while you’re at it, please stop disabling pinch and zoom…

The other huge gripe is that they have “full site” links, always at the bottom of an incredibly long scrolling page, which when clicked does one of two things: it doesn’t work whatsoever, or if it does, it loads the full site at the root level (ie the homepage) of the site and not the page you were viewing. Neither of these are solutions by any definition of the word.

As for the modal login boxes, they too are replicating because they’re perceived to be an acceptable UX design pattern, which they’re not. By ignoring browser password managers, they too cause a negative experience. I have my laptop locked down, but if for some reason someone gets in, I am not going to be too worried about whether the intruder has access to your blog or SaaS, so stop coming up with new ways to make me waste cycles. Just honor our choices and settings…

Kindle: There Ain’t No Stoppin’ It Now

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Kindle will win and the reasons why are plentiful.  It may have to share the pie with other players but those will only be small slices. 

I’ve posted before on a platform based reason why Kindle will win but if you missed it, here it is:

Then there’s the obvious advantage that Amazon has due to its status as the premier online retailer for reading materials. 

The thing that sealed it for me is the genius of the product team and how they keep rolling out incremental features or UX that actually makes the core product better and not more cluttered of confusing.  If you’ve ever made anything you know just how hard that can be. 

Sure having it available on all desktop and mobile platforms makes all the sense in the world. 

Making the text reflow nicely across those devices? Great.

Having your reading library and current position in each of your books automatically sync across all of your devices?  Pure magic.  

Adding bookmark/dogears, highlights and notes and having those sync too? Awesome. 

This morning while reading Brad Feld’s “Do More Faster” I went back to reread a couple paragraphs and noticed a line that was underlined/hyperlinked.  I didn’t remember the link being there last week when I originally read that chunk nor did I highlight it myself. I also figured that I was on the subway and not online so it couldn’t work right?  Turns out it was a sentence highlighted  by most readers of the book.  In essence they’re passively crowdsourcing potentially important bits of the book I was reading. Genius. 

The sentence in question?:
“It is said that with knowledge workers, the best employee is 10 times more productive and impactful than the average employee.”. Amen to that.

Oh, and yes, you can turn off the feature.