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Igloo Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-21T23:00:00-05:00

Igloo has some funny new Sandwich videos to lighten your day (and maybe convince your boss and/or IT to upgrade your intranet to something more human). Check them out:

(You can also get a free 30-day trial and bring back Cake Fridays here.)

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

When Designers Interview Engineers

2013-05-16T11:42:39-05:00

The reality for most designers is that we are very likely to work at companies whose principal line of business is not design, but something else — media, services, widgets, what have you. This is slightly less true if you’re in the studio or agency world, but certainly if you do interaction or product design, you’re probably working in an environment that’s engineering-focused first, and design-focused second (or third). There’s a tech sector, but there’s no ‘design sector.’

Thankfully, as the design profession has matured designers have learned to assert themselves effectively in these situations. That includes having a say in the process of hiring new team members. Just as engineers and product managers (who more often than not come from engineering backgrounds) will often interview potential design hires, it’s becoming increasingly common for designers to interview engineering candidates too. I’ve done it a lot over the past several years, and it’s not uncommon at Etsy.

For designers though, interviewing an engineer does not always come naturally. In part this is because the language of engineering is so concrete and therefore more widely assimilated, and the language of design is comparatively soft and resigned to niches.

What to Ask

If you’re a designer interviewing an engineering candidate, I think what you want to know is basically “will I be able to work with this person?” I’ve found that the easiest place to start is to inquire about the candidate’s past experiences working with other designers. What was the arrangement like? Who did what? What bumps in the road did they hit? What were the easiest and hardest things about working with those designers? What did they learn about how design intersects with their job?

I also find that the simplest questions will often yield the most effective answers: did the engineering candidate enjoy working with designers? Was it a good time, a necessary evil, or a burdensome chore? There can be a world of insight in the answers that come back.

There’s also the more neutral ground of asking the candidate to talk about any products, services, features, user interface details etc. that they’re fond of. The way they describe that product or feature, the details they call out, and the reasons they give for being sympathetic to it — all these things talk directly to what they value in their own work.

Design Topics Are Fair Game

None of what I’m suggesting here is particularly innovative, of course. Most designers would come up with them on their own, given enough exposure to engineering interviews. A slightly more interesting idea is to have designers asking engineers about design topics.

It’s much more common for designers to be expected to master the engineering vernacular than vice versa, but that shouldn’t stop designers from asking engineers what they know about design. Designers might hesitate to ask if the engineer understands anything about typography, color, images, branding systems and logos, but I say why not? It’s perfectly fair game to ask if an engineer understands why a given design solution works, why some typography looks better than others, or what makes a good design good, and a bad design bad. An engineer who understands these things is a tremendous asset in shipping great products, and designers are best equipped to assess that.

It might be true that most engineering candidates will likely answer in the negative to these queries, and the interviewer should to set his or her own expectations accordingly. But even if the engineer displays some scant, perhaps intuited knowledge about design, or even a genuine if uninformed interest in design, that’s valuable.

More to the point, it’s one small step in establishing a certain baseline in the relationship between designers and engineers, one in which the dynamic of understanding one another is less of a one-way street. Designers working in the technology sector have spent about two decades now learning to speak in the engineers’ tongue. We should see what we can do about making the inverse true as well.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Mad Mimi Email Marketing Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-14T23:00:00-05:00

Mad Mimi is a design-oriented email newsletter service founded in 2008. Developed to provide a mobile-app-like feel, and with a drag-and-drop email composer, Mad Mimi offers a simple, elegant user experience that helps customers create, send, and track beautiful html email campaigns.

Mad Mimi also offers robust APIs, integrations, and add-on features. This makes it a perfect fit for today’s visionaries, artists, and entrepreneurs, including great digital brands like Fancy and StumbleUpon, who use Mad Mimi to communicate with their customers.

Best yet, Mad Mimi is free for up to 2,500 contacts. We hope you’ll give us a try or support@madmimi.com with questions.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

PDFpenPro 6 from Smile Feed Sponsorship

2013-05-07T23:00:00-05:00

PDFpenPro is the advanced version of PDFpen. PDFpenPro does everything that PDFpen does, such as add signatures, edit text and images, perform OCR on scanned documents and export Microsoft Word documents. It also has the ability to create a PDF form, build a table of contents, and convert HTML files to PDF.

The new PDFpenPro 6 adds document permission settings. When you share a PDF, you can restrict printing, copying, and editing of your PDFs. You can also use the new automatic form field creation tool to convert a non-interactive form into an interactive PDF form with text fields and checkboxes automatically added.

PDFpenPro 6 is available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store for $100. A free demo can be downloaded on the Smile site. Find out why Macworld calls PDFpenPro “the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications.”

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Creative Cloud Is Not Suite

2013-05-07T12:47:45-05:00

Late in December of 2010, I paid US$750 (including taxes and shipping) for an upgrade copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5. I’m still using that software on my Mac at home, and find that it covers most all of my needs. If you amortize that cost out over the roughly thirty months that I’ve owned CS5, it comes to about US$25 per month.

When I first did this math, I expected that figure to be significantly lower than the cost for Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, which offers the same applications as the Creative Suite but via monthly subscription. Existing CS customers can subscribe to Creative Cloud for US$30 a month. Over the course of thirty months, that comes to about US$150 more than what I paid in December 2010. That’s not nothing, but it’s a fair price to pay considering that CC always provides the latest versions of Adobe’s software.

Of course, thirty months is an arbitrary number. I could probably use CS5 for another twelve months, at least, before I would really need to upgrade it. In so doing I’d effectively drive the price down to around US$18 a month, saving me US$510 over the cost of subscribing to Creative Cloud during that extended period of time.

However, as Adobe announced yesterday, going forward the only way to get access to the new versions of Adobe’s key software will be through a Creative Cloud subscription. If you want to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. now you must pay a monthly subscription fee. Which is to say, you can no longer buy a single, standalone version and let it amortize out over as long as you like.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on each customer’s needs, of course. Some people will appreciate the ability to pay only for the months that they need. For businesses and startups, in particular, the ability to put a legal copy of Adobe’s apps in an employee’s hands for US$50 a month (the cost for new customers) instead of several hundred dollars is sure to be a boon.

But for folks like myself, who find that only every second or third of Adobe’s major releases truly warrants the financial and technological hassle of an upgrade, losing that option is not so appealing. It feels less like innovation and more like manipulation.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Fresh music from Steven Jengo Feed Sponsorship

2013-04-30T23:00:00-05:00

Arrive in the office, make a cup of coffee, open up your email, and turn up your favorite song. We know how it goes.

Check out Steven Jengo’s new single, Summer of 2042.

Fresh tunes with a softly different touch; with that kind of familiar sound, simple and melodic, deep and lazy, freshly brewed for your listening pleasure.

Take care when driving at high volume. Find more at jengo.com.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Best Headphones Ever

2013-04-26T09:35:32-05:00

The best deal I’ve gotten lately is this pair of DJ-style headphones from the unassumingly fantastic technical retailer Monoprice.com, best known for selling incredibly cheap cables of all sorts. I’ve been a customer for years (and if you have any kind of cabling needs, you should be too), but I was surprised to realize lately that they are trying to branch out into more general consumer product categories.

Monoprice is tackling headphones and computer models — and soon high-end audio equipment, car audio, and home automation hardware — with the same pricing strategy that they brought to cables: they “try to make sure that we’re about fifty percent below what a retailer would be selling that product for.” In many cases, they easily clear this bar. The company’s earbud-style headphones, for instance, start at less than US$3 each. The headphones I bought cost just US$21. (Warning, each customer is allowed to buy just ten pairs. Sorry.)

Adding More to Cheap

You can get cheap headphones in just about any dollar store, of course, but Monoprice’s have been widely reviewed as being comparable to headphones in the US$100 and up range. They also sound excellent, as most reviews attest to. In short, they are a ridiculous bargain, but even better, they include an incredibly smart design feature that I haven’t seen before in these DJ-style headphones (admittedly, I’m no audiophile and know very little about the category beyond having owned a few pairs of Sony MDR-V6s): the wire from the headphones is not fixed.

There is a standard, 3.5 mm audio jack at the bottom of the left headphone into which you can plug any standard male-to-male audio cable (including either of the two that ship in the box). This means that should the cable fail — and in these kinds of headphones, it’s the cables that almost always go first — you don’t need to toss them into the trash, open up the earpieces to solder in a new wire, or even pay someone to repair them for you. All you need to do is buy a US$3 replacement cable. Like I said, incredibly smart, and a huge bonus that I would have paid well over US$21 for. Making something for cheap is one thing, but adding great design to it too turns it into an amazing product.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

At Home with Facebook Home

2013-04-24T22:24:33-05:00

I took a so-called “stay-cation” last week to work on the house. I also spent a bit of time playing with Facebook Home on my HTC One X. I was excited to try it, because the prospect of adding a layer of elegance on top of my One X, which is awkward in just about every way, was very appealing.

Facebook Home delivers on that promise, if not completely then at least on a few levels. Installation was painless, and the immediate experience of running what essentially amounts to a Facebook-fueled screen saver on my phone’s home screen is a powerful emotional moment. I found myself getting pulled into Home often, flipping through many more status updates than I normally do on Facebook’s Web site. Its full-screen pictures are truly beautiful; Facebook’s engineers and designers have pulled off some fancy trickery that makes just about every image — and every status update comes with an image — look great.

Thinner, Better

You might think of Home as a ‘thin’ version of Facebook, a slimmed down counterpart to the full site that has been gracefully translated for handheld devices. In fact, if Facebook were only this — just a simple way to keep up with what my friends are doing, without all the rigamarole of walls and likes and pokes and pages and the endless array of what feels like tedium and busywork — I would like it a lot more.

Neat as it is, this is basically all that Home amounts to, as there’s not much else. Unless you’re an avid user of Facebook chat (I’m not but I guess some people are) Chatheads is a nice implementation of a feature that’s more or less fine but not particularly remarkable. Home’s alternative launch screen is a modest improvement, but not so much so that it represents a clear win over the incumbent launch interface. Similarly, Home’s method of dragging your own picture to access apps (which I found to be consistently and metaphorically confusing) is the kind of detail that Apple or even Google would tend to not even bother announcing.

So even as I praise Facebook Home for being lean, I guess I was expecting a lot more. It’s true that the company never promised that it would be a replacement for Android, so I suppose there’s no justification in lamenting that it’s not. But I had expected Home to open up new vistas on my HTC One X; the reality is that it’s just papering over the view that was already there. Of course, it may very well turn into something more ambitious in time — in fact, I would be surprised if it doesn’t — but for now, as far as breakthrough software goes, I find it to be a really nice screen saver.

A screen saver with some weird glitches, it should be said. Swiping through status updates is buttery smooth, but any time you have to exit the app, the brittleness of imposing a layer on top of Android becomes apparent — the screen blacks out momentarily, or Home fully crashes as often as not, at least in my experience. The interface for unlocking your phone is still the stock Android interface, too, which breaks the spell of Home’s elegance a bit. I also found myself confused by what Home considers secure — even if my phone was ostensibly locked, anyone could pick it up and post a status update at will, without having to get past my PIN screen. It all made me regret my initially optimistic anticipation of the product. Home has a ways to go, yet.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Filepicker.io Cloud Connect APIs Feed Sponsorship

2013-04-23T23:00:00-05:00

Develop Smarter, Simpler and Better Connected Apps with Javascript

Imagine connecting your app to everything with just 2 lines of code - files from all over the web, across cloud storage source, social networks and devices. Filepicker.io provides a full file system API for your web and mobile applications that allows your app to upload, open, read, write, store, sync and convert files from over 17 sources including Dropbox, Google Docs, Facebook, Skydrive and Box. With the Filepicker.io Javascript API, request a file and receive a simplified URL. Then, upload the URL to your server or serve through your CDN. Filepicker.io includes a customizable drop-in UI widget and an API library allowing you to send uploaded files directly to your S3. Sign up for Filepicker.io today!

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

PDFpen 6 from Smile Feed Sponsorship

2013-04-16T23:00:00-05:00

If you need to do anything with PDFs, you need PDFpen. Add a signature, make changes, correct a typo, fill out forms, and more! Got a scanned document? PDFpen includes OCR to convert that scan into text that you can search or edit. Want to remove sensitive info such as tax ID numbers from your PDF? Use PDFpen to redact your private data.

The latest version, PDFpen 6, has improved interface and tools. And now you can export your PDFs to Microsoft&#174 Word format for sharing or editing. See the new features in action in this video by David Sparks.

Buy PDFpen for $60 in the Mac App Store or directly from Smile. Or buy PDFpenPro for $100 and you’ll get advanced features like form creation tools and document permission settings. Download the free demo!

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.