Smarterware

Four Google Apps Marketplace Apps Worth Trying

2010-03-11T11:18:03-08:00

For my latest column at Fast Company, I took a spin through the just-launched Google Apps Marketplace and found four apps worth hooking up to your domain. (One of my picks, TripIt, does a smart job of merging your existing account with your Google Apps account, too--the model for how any service that plugs into Google Apps should work.) Here's the full story.

Three Ways You Can Help Build ThinkTank

2010-03-11T10:48:40-08:00

Hi all! I've been working furiously on ThinkTank over at Expert Labs for about six weeks now. Once in awhile I'll post an update on where we're at with the project. This is such an update, and it's cross-posted from the Expert Labs blog.

ThinkTank development has been going strong, but we need your help. If you're a ThinkTank tester and/or a web developer, join the mailing list, fork the code, install ThinkTank on your server, and help us build the software and documentation. If you don't know what you can do or where to start, here are the three main priorities for ThinkTank right now:

1. Facebook Integration. We've been working hard to make ThinkTank an extensible platform that any social network can plug into. We've just abstracted ThinkTank's Twitter functionality into a plug-in prototype, and it's time to try out plugging in another data source. Its popularity makes Facebook the next logical choice. To start, we need to add Facebook Connect functionality to the ThinkTank webapp, which will allow users to grant ThinkTank access to their Facebook account (much like you can via Twitter OAuth right now). If you've got experience implementing Facebook Connect in PHP, please help us build this plug-in.

2. Google Buzz Integration. Buzz may have just launched, but its instant adoption by millions of Gmail users (and its open APIs) makes it a perfect fit for ThinkTank. Like Facebook, we want to develop a Google Buzz plug-in that will feed posts and replies to those posts on Buzz into the ThinkTank database. Keep in mind that ThinkTank's plug-in framework is still under development, so we'll be refining it as we work on getting new services interfacing with ThinkTank.

3. Documentation. A big barrier to users and developers getting involved with ThinkTank is the lack of thorough documentation. While we've gotten several pages started in the ThinkTank wiki, we need more. If you've installed ThinkTank or plan to, document your experience in an installation guide. As you dive into the code and grok the app's design, add and edit the developer's guide. Documentation is one of the more tedious parts of developing code, but it saves future users and developers so much time, and it's the perfect way for non-coders to help out with the project. You don't have to ask permission: if you've got helpful information to share about using or developing ThinkTank, dive right into the wiki and press that Edit button.

While these are the project's major priorities right now, ThinkTank has over 30 open issues large and small. If you're interested in improving ThinkTank for your personal use as well as helping better-inform public policy, join us on the mailing list, follow and fork the project on GitHub, install ThinkTank and contribute what you can.

Thanks in advance for your time and interest.

This Week in Google Video Podcast Now in iTunes

2010-03-09T19:07:11-08:00

I've been a slacker posting up the YouTube videos of each week's This Week in Google episode, so I'm getting back to it. This past week was particularly fun for me because Jeff, Leo, and I were joined by Kevin Purdy, my colleague from Lifehacker who shares my enthusiasm for Android. The TWiT folks also tell me that TWiG video is now available in the iTunes Store as well; here are the feed links for TWiG video both large and small.

Latest Videos: Time Blocking and Google Wave for Business

2010-03-09T09:55:42-08:00

My latest two videos are up at Fast Company: one's on firewalling your attention with time blocking, and the second is on three ways to use Google Wave in your business.

The time blocking piece is actually a personal confession about my hermit tendencies. Sometimes I just shut everything off, fall off the face of the planet, and have some uninterrupted me-time. I've had co-workers say to me, "Um, where did you go today?" and the answer is usually "To my happy place, a distraction-free zone." As you'll hear in the video, at my last office job, I actually used to schedule a meeting with myself complete with a conference room to get away and focus on something for awhile. Here's the 2 minute, 37 second clip.

Read the whole script at Fast Company: Avoid Office Distractions with Time Blocking.

The second clip is my quick answer to the age-old question about Google Wave: "But what do you actually use it for?" Here are three use cases for Wave in your business.

To dive deeper into Wave use cases, check out 8 more in Chapter 10 of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Rework: 37signals’ Recipe for Running a Business

2010-03-09T09:02:34-08:00

37signals' new book Rework is a fast, inspiring read for anyone who's thought about starting a business but froze at the idea of quitting their job, getting investing, and working 24-hour days.

As they do every day at their blog, in Rework the Signals break down their minimalist philosophy into a series of essays written in uncompromising language. Expect a table of contents full of sections entitled things like "Learning from mistakes is overrated," "Planning is guessing," "Outside money is plan Z," "Throw less at the problem," "Skip the rock stars," and "Meetings are toxic." While it's billed as a business book, at its core Rework is a get-up-off-your-ass, stop-talking-and-start-doing book--a productivity book that uses 37signals as its main case study.

People who follow 37signals online know that they are opinionated and contrarian--sometimes to the point of abrasive. At least one person thinks their small business philosophy is downright dangerous. Personally I give 37signals credit for having a strong point of view, a well-executed shtick, and for having shipped some fantastic software products. (At Lifehacker we lived in Campfire.) My advice? Take the book with a grain of salt. After reading it you don't have to cancel every meeting you have at your company. But, if you shorten a few, you've gotten something out of it.

To get a taste of how the book reads, download this PDF excerpt with essays on why workaholism, business plans, and meetings don't work. The book is available today in bookstores and on Amazon.

Rework

Panic’s Envy-Inducing Project Status Board

2010-03-08T18:21:00-08:00

Panic is a software company that makes useful tools like my personal favorite, Transmit for the Mac. They've also made a beautiful project status display that helps their team keep on top of what they're working on, and what important dates are coming up. Click on the thumbnail to see the full version. The board is actually an internal web page that auto-updates support email queue numbers, how far along each company project is, day over day revenue comparisons, the company calendar, and Twitter messages. Here's the effect it's had on the team:

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

Brilliant! I am dying for one of these for my own personal use. Panic, will you add that to your project list? For the nitty gritty on how this board was built and what kind of display it's on, check out the full post at the Panic blog.

The Panic Status Board [The Panic Blog]

How to Make Your Personal QR Code

2010-03-08T09:11:36-08:00

Ever since I installed a barcode scanner app on my phone, I see QR codes everywhere--so naturally I wanted one of my own. If you too are a barcode-scanning fool, point your phone's camera at this QR code and you'll get a link to my personal web site. Fun!

A QR ("quick response") code is a square barcode that makes getting URLs, location coordinates, any text or contact information onto a phone quickly. With a barcode scanner app installed, you just point your phone's camera at the code to read its contents. Here's what reading this QR code looks like on my Android phone, using an app simply called "Barcode Scanner."

To find a scanner application, Google "QR Reader" and the model of your phone. (If you've got a favorite scanner app that you're using, let us know in the comments.)

Encoding a regular URL is a fine use of QR codes--especially lengthy and complicated URLs on movie and event flyers--but one of my favorite uses of QR codes is swapping mobile app recommendations with your friends. Since you can't search the Android Market on the web or in desktop software, you're always stuck tapping in search terms by hand. The App Referer app generates QR codes for every one of your applications. So if you want to "give" that app to a friend, you call up the QR code, and your pal can scan your phone's screen.

You'll also see QR codes on web pages, in store windows, on business cards, and on conference badges. You can generate your own QR code with the information you want others to be able to read onto their phones quickly too. This QR code generator can embed a URL, text, a phone number, or an addressed and ready-to-send SMS message into a QR code.

If you Google "QR code generator" you'll find others, but beware of generators that force a redirect through their site when someone scans the resulting code and gets a URL. (For example, this generator has options to encode Google Maps coordinates, social network information, and Vcards and can print t-shirts and stickers from the codes it generates, but if you enter a simple web site URL it creates a redirect through the qrstuff.com site.)

Speaking of stickers, now I just need to print a few with my code to stick on my laptop, phone, and conference badges.

Better Gmail 2 Updated

2010-03-06T11:41:54-08:00

Google's Gmail tweak broke some of the more popular features of my Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension this week, including Folders4Gmail and Hide Spam Count. Thanks to the quick work of Arend v. Reinersdorff, the problems have been fixed. If you're a Better Gmail 2 user and your labels aren't collapsing properly or your Spam count is showing when it shouldn't, hit the "Find Updates" button in Firefox's Add-ons dialog to get the fix, or download the most recent version directly from Mozilla Add-ons. Thanks for your patience and for using the extension. As always, news and discussion about the whole series of Better extensions is always posted on the mailing list.

The Evolutionary Reason for Depression

2010-03-02T09:12:02-08:00

If depression has an evolutionary purpose, it's certainly not obvious. Depression makes people consider suicide and less interested in sex, which does not encourage the species' survival. But two evolutionary psychologists theorize that depression's purpose is enhanced mental skills. Sadness focuses the brain's attention on a conflict, and makes you better-equipped to make good decisions.

A fascinating New York Times magazine article entitled Depression's Upside explains that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is the part of our brain that controls what we pay attention to.

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. [...] Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.

Therefore, when you're depressed, your brain kicks into total-focus mode, and sets you into a cycle of rumination on the problem at hand.

The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Not everyone agrees with the positive spin on why depression exists, mostly because there are so many different types of depression--some triggered by events and problems, and others that persist for years without an obvious cause.

Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”

Still, those who suffer from depression do get the benefits of enhanced mental skills.

Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.

These mental boosts are often responsible for quality creative output.

In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

(Emphasis mine.)

Even though I quoted it at length, this whole article is worth the read, especially for folks who tend toward depression. Knowing about the ways sadness can benefit you just might make you feel a little better.

Depression’s Upside [NYT via]

Taking on the 750 Words March Challenge

2010-02-28T21:44:24-08:00

In his web-site-turned-book Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, Stefan Sagmeister says keeping a diary supports personal development. I couldn't agree more. Writing is a form of thinking, and journaling is a great way to help yourself think personal issues through.

I've fallen off the journaling wagon lately though, but inspired by former Lifehacker editor D. Keith Robinson's tweet tonight, I'm getting back on using Buster Benson's 750 Words webapp. The concept of 750 Words is simple: every day, you type 750 words--the equivalent of three pages--of stream of conscious, whatever you want, free writing. You earn points and badges for every day you type any number of words. Your entries, which are private by default (despite the somewhat alarming Facebook Connect login), can be exported at any point. Buster's one of the kings of personal data visualization (just look at the guy's homepage), so it makes sense that when you're done writing you get all these interesting analytics and charts about your piece, like how long it took you, what words you used the most, and what you talked about. Explore the public stats page to get a taste. Here's a screenshot of the data I got after writing my first entry tonight, a literal braindump of the most random thoughts I had about today.

Despite just completing a 39,000 word book manuscript and spending four years blogging daily, writing those 750 free-think words tonight wasn't easy. Still, I signed up for the 750 Words March challenge, promising myself a mint chocolate chip shake if I file 750 a day in March. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, thanks to Buster for creating such a quirky-cool webapp. Looking forward to spending time in it this month.

750 Words