So what is Loose Leaf?

Loose Leaf is a brainstorming and note taking app that’s ideal for use in a coffee shop meeting. It’s a perfect piece of scratch paper, or loose leaf if you will, ready for your back-of-the-napkin-no-longer doodles to help you get your point across during an informal meeting. You can draw, type, cut or create small scraps of paper, import and annotate images, and quickly export anything meaningful to a more permanent home like Evernote.

Sound like a lot of features? Don’t worry, there are no tap-to-hold popup menus, no overwhelming brush texture properties, no arcane MS-Word-feeling image formatting. Loose Leaf is simple and intuitive, and no more intimidating than a simple sheet of paper.

Loose Leaf is good at one thing – helping you get your idea out and on paper quickly. Loose Leaf maintains the sheet-of-paper metaphor without skeuomorphism. Loose Leaf is fast, simple, fast, and simple.

Want to find out more?

Then sign up at http://milestonemade.com/looseleaf/!

Most of my time has been spent on two iOS applications that I hope to announce soon, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with the Adonit team on their new iOS SDK. They’ve done an absolutely fantastic job with their Bluetooth connected Jot Touch stylus, and it was a lot of fun to help out with the iOS side of their development efforts.

Their new SDK provides:

1. Extremely quick setup
2. Provides 2047 distinct pressure values from the Jot Touch
3. Advanced Palm Rejection
4. Works with your gestures, not against them
5. Easily configure the two stylus shortcut buttons

The latest and greatest Jot Touch 4 is shipping to resellers now. I can confirm this is the best stylus I have ever used, and I’ve tested quite a few! It’s precise, has fantastic battery life, feels like a real pen, connects fast, just feels right in the hand. If you’re an iPad note taker, you owe it to your self to get one of these.

If you’re a developer, clone the new Jot Touch SDK on Github and run the example app. Peek through the Getting Started Guide and spend a few minutes to integrate the SDK into your app!

The past year I’ve been working at Visere, where we’ve done some fantastic work for the team at Unstuck (even winning two Webbys!) and Jawbone, among others. In fact, the team at Jawbone was so happy with our work that they decided to acquire Visere outright and bring the team on full time, and I’ve decided to take that opportunity to branch out on my own once again. It’s been nearly 5 years since Jotlet, and I’m eager to get back into the game at the ground level.

These past few years my head has been slowly filling with new ideas and new apps that I’m eager to build. I’ve already started work on two new iOS apps that I’ll be revealing over the next few months. I’m also getting back into Here, File File! development, which I’m extremely excited about. No one on the team has ever been able to devote full time to the project, so I’m bullish that we can finally make significant updates to the app. Last, I’m just happy that I’ll have time to spend on Columnizer and Jotbook again – just some fun small projects to keep the mind working.

And the best news?! I’ve moved back to the great state of Texas! Since I’m working for myself now, we’re able to move back home and be much closer to family. Instead of $2000 in plane tickets and a 6 hour travel time, we’re a mere 20 minute drive from both sets of parents. Cailyn can finally see her grandparents on a regular basis, which is just awesome for everyone.

First steps: pull this site out of the rubble heap and get it cleaned up, get Columnizer updated, get demos prepped for the two iOS apps i’m working on, and get something brand-spanking-new released in 6 months. Wish me luck!

Page 11ish:

I had come to realize that my sense of myself had changed very little over the fifteen years or so. Despite getting married, having children, moving several times, and switching careers, I didn’t feel profoundly like I was profoundly different than my 30 year-old self; so why should I see my 60 year-old self as a different person? (The Grant study’s participants likewise showed a great consistency over the decades in their personality and psychological makeup.)

The paper talks primarily about risk profile and personality, but I think this is true about a number of my traits. While I also see my personality and risk profile relatively unchanged with age, I also constantly focus on how I’ve changed over those years, why, and for better or worse? “What part of me do I most want to be gone in 5 years?” or “What would I rather see in myself that I don’t see yet?” Every year, my goal is to be ashamed at how naive, foolish, and unfocused I was the year before – my hope is that this strategy will push me to be always more focused, productive, responsible, and good to my family than I am today.

Download here: https://github.com/adamwulf/Columnizer-jQuery-Plugin/zipball/1.5.0

GitHub here: https://github.com/adamwulf/Columnizer-jQuery-Plugin

Project page here: http://welcome.totheinter.net/columnizer-jquery-plugin/

My sister is traveling to Sri Lanka and has a longer than expected layover in Mumbai. I log onto the internet, purchase a hotel for her while she’s on her flight, and a driver picks her up at the airport.

So far so good.

That international purchase triggers an alarm on my account, so the next day when I’m shopping for groceries my card gets declined.

Even supposing a mastermind criminal stole my card and bought $400 in Mumbai, here’s what just happened:

1. master mind steals card

2. master mind buys so much stuff for $400 in Mumbai

3. hapless customer buys a ham sandwich

4. sandwich declined!

Guys, if you’re smart enough to know that 99.99% of my transactions are in Portland, Oregon, and suddenly there’s a transaction in Mumbai. If you do anything, please reject the Mumbai transaction and continue letting me buy my groceries in Portland, Oregon.

Your state-of-the-art-from-the-year-2000-security is not making my money any safer, it’s just annoying the hell out of me.

I hate you Capital One.

In Google+, like many websites, there is a Send Feedback button. It is unassuming.

But when you click it, you don’t get a boring “yeah what?!” text box, instead, in true Google fashion, the Google analyzes the page before the form shows:

And then it asks you to draw on the page to annotate your feedback!

You can draw boxes and select elements on the page. It’s quick, easy, slick, amazing, neat, and useful.

Extremely polished stuff. If i were to guess, the quality and usefulness of the feedback they receive is unparalled compared to other sites feedback mechanisms. Extremely cool stuff. I wish they would package it up as a product, maybe paired with Google Analytics, and let any site user embed that feedback system into their own site. Extremely cool.

And the fact that it’s on Google+ is particularly interesting. Its such an easy to use and useful tool that I wish I could use it to share content with others. Browse to site, “neat!”, click share/crop tool, click “post to Google+”, done. Reminds me of Scoble’s interview of Convofy (forgive Scoble’s lousy recording, but that few minutes of the video is pretty slick stuff.)

Update:

Turns out it may very well be its own Google product according to this Quora question. Tell Google here to be notified if/when it’s released.

Glasses-free 3D Time Crisis on iPad:

This is Time Crisis 4 for iPad. It uses Glasses-free 3d for a stunning gameplay experience. This is true anamorphic 3d, which means you don’t need glasses to get a full 3d effect. Just tilt the iPad and the iPad2′s camera tracks your eyes so everything looks like real 3D! Watch the video from cnet below for a quick what’s-what on how it works.

I predicted games like this 4 years ago with the release of the first iPhone. The combination of the front facing cameras and accelerometers in the iPad 2 make this an unbelievable gaming experience.

The Bad News:

This is still not real! There have been exactly zero first/third person shooters that use anamorphic 3d for awesomeness. The screenshot above is a [pretty impressive, i may say] photochop by yours truly.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the year 2011. We have robots driving robot cars and playing robot tennis. Random people sending iPhones into outerspace just because they can. How do we still not have awesome anamorphic shooters on the iPad?!

The Good News:

For a relatively small development budget you could have a proof-of-concept-version-1.0-anamorphic-3D-on-rails-first-person-shooter-for-iPad-2-and-iPhone-4, and you would make $10 million.

Free Business Idea:

Step 1: Just build something like:

1. Use anamorphic 3d first person shooter. Something akin to a Time Crisis for Area 51.
2. Easy gameplay: spray and pray style shooting, tap to reload. that’ll be 98% of it right there.
3. Just make 10 minutes of gameplay, and then repeat it.
4. Maybe some aliens? Or zombies?
5. Or both?!

Step 2: Collect money

1. Turns out people have a long history in falling over each other to give away their money to pretty-graphics-and-novelty.

Or, if you just like to program a lot:

Email me. Twitter me. Linkedin me. Get in touch. We won’t wait for the world any longer. We’ll do this thing.

Leaving Jive is bittersweet. The people I worked with are amazing, I still believe it’s the best collection of engineering talent in Portland. The company is going places. I’m proud of my work there. I’ve been doing heavy lifting in JavaScript for nearly 6 years, but I’ve been stretching my iOS wings, and Visere gives me the opportunity to work on mobile development full time. It’s incredibly exciting to be working in a tiny startup again!

And this move solidifies it for me – I love small companies, and not just small: tiny. At Visere, I’m employee number 9. It’s such a breath of fresh air for my day to day responsibility to include: project planning, UI/UX design, marking, recruiting, coordinating, budgeting, sales, and of course, programming. I love the variety, I love the chaos, I love fighting for life, for market share, for mind share. And most of all I love the product I’m working on.

To date, Visere has been primarily focused on contract design work: you may know it from products like Microsoft’s Courier tablet, the Uncommong iPhone app, or Motorola Droid branding. We’re also working on a product very much our own, and I hope to have much more detail on it soon .

This might just be the best blog post I have read this year. It’s nominally on patients with delusions of parasitic infestations, but it’s so much more.

I saw a patient recently for parasites.

I get a sinking feeling when I see that diagnosis on the schedule, as it rarely means a real parasite.  The great Pacific NW is mostly parasite free, so either it is a traveler or someone with delusions of parasitism.

The latter comes in two forms: the classic form and Morgellons. Neither are likely to lead to a meaningful patient-doctor interaction, since it usually means conflict between my assessment of the problem and the patients assessment of the problem.  There is rarely a middle ground upon which to meet. The most memorable case of delusions of parasitism I have seen was a patient who  I saw in clinic who, while we talked, ate a raw garlic clove about every minute.

“Why the garlic?” I asked.

“To keep the parasites at bay,” he told me.

I asked him to describe the parasite.  He told me they floated in the air, fell on his skin, and then burrowed in.  Then he later plucked them out of his nose.

Much more here.

In his recent TED talk he mentions that the Tylenol incident led to tamper-proof caps — a perfect example of what Schneier likes to call “security theater”:

As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. I’ll give you one, a syringe.

So far this is typical Schneier. It’s a great point, but one I’ve heard him make many times before. In the next sentence, though, he breaks new ground:

But it made people feel better. It made their feeling of security more match the reality.

Bruce Schneier used to mock the theatrical dimension of security. Now it seems his thinking has evolved — and in a really interesting way. He’s alway viewed security in a relativistic way, and as a game of economic tradeoffs. Here he twists the lens to bring something else into focus: the relationship between how secure we feel and how secure we are.

This hit home for me, because is exactly the same way I feel about product development, especially mobile development. We can fight all day about mobile web vs mobile native, but that’s only half of the issue. An equally important piece of software development is making sure to set and exceed user expectations.

When developing software, step 1 should be: “What are my user’s expectations? Can I change those expectations before they even launch my app? How should those expectations change how I design the user experience?”

So far it’s been a good read, nothing terribly groundbreaking. The advice seems to come down to this simple process:

Confronted with apparently difficult measurements, it helps to put the proposed measurement in context. Before we measure we should ask five questions:

1. What is the decision this is supposed to support?
2. What really is the thing being measured?
3. Why does this thing matter to the decision being asked?
4. What do you know about it now?
5. What is the value to measuring it further?

All in all, simple stuff, but a great crash course and overview for finding metrics that matter, especially for new managers / leaders.

— begin old post —

I use Eucalyptus to read books on my iPhone. I love the feel of the app and the ease of downloading new books. The iPhone’s small backlit screen bothers me occassionally for reading. It’s almost perfect. What I’d love in an e-Reader:

1. It should do three things exceptionally well:
   1. read books (like Eucalyptus)
   2. read RSS (like Byline)
   3. surf the web (like a CrunchPad)
2. Should still ‘feel’ like a book, much like Eucalyptus does. It’s near perfect in this regard. Touch screen required.
3. Color screen (backlit is ok but not preferred)
4. Super easy to download / purchase books
5. Connect over wireless or cell network
6. 5″ x 8″ screen – ish, something about the size of those lousy romance novels in the supermarket checkoutline, and the thickness of an iPhone. The concept below literally folds like a book, showing 10″ x 8″ of screen space. awesome!

The iPhone hits just about all of this list, except it’s backlit and too small. Also, Eucalyptus is only free books, and the Kindle app (a) sucks to read on and (b) doesn’t have in app store.

The Kindle proper (device, not iPhone app) is larger, which is nice, and has a better screen for reading, but frankly, it’s ugly as sin. If they made blackberries in the 80s, they would look like a Kindle. yuck.

All this brings me to an article that came across Harper Studio (via Corr77, thanks!)  describing a French concept e-Reader / netbook from Editis. Click the image below for the 5 minute concept, skip to about 10% to see the eReader section, and yes, it loads exceptionally slow, but it’s worth it imo!

I’d love a netbook that actually looked and acted like a book. Swipe left/right to turn the page, tap for HUD screen, coverflow for book covers, etc. Turn it on it’s side, and the bottom becomes a HUD style keyboard and screens turn into netbook goodness. Fold it up to protect the screen and minimize footprint, throw in the bag and go.

I’d buy three, easy.

Highlights of the Khan system: Students learn single concepts at a time: step by step by step. First addition, then harder addition, then addition with decimals, then subtraction, etc. Each singular concept has tutorial videos as well as infinite computer generated problems to solve, and every problem has step-by-step hints available to help walk students through solving a problem.

My favorite part – by far – is the game machanics built into the system. A skill tree maps all of the provided concepts together, and the student earns “Energy Points” for every problem solved. This is just itching for energy point micropayments to upgrade your character/profile page. Even integrations with “real” games where you can spend Khan energy points on game time / upgrades / etc. It’s like Eve, but for real life and real skills.

Watch the video below and find out how your child will learn differential equations both faster and better than you ever did.

Khan Academy provides literally hundreds of videos ranging from basic arithmatic to organic chemistry to the Paulson’s bank bailout plan. The videos are on YouTube, iTunes U, and iPhone apps. Absolutely tons of content. Absolutely 100% free. Incredible.

Aurora – precursor to Jotlet

Everything was themeable, the entire chrome could change w/ a click of the button, and check out that amazing logo in the top right: one of Buck‘s first ever logo/headers This version was built pre-Firebug, worked in IE6, everything was built in tables. Liberal use of iframes also going on here.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

more here.

Alex Payne on Adobe AIR:

Humans are gifted with extremely sensitive bullshit detectors. The average computer user may not internalize the difference between an AIR app and a native app, but he knows when something doesn’t feel right or work correctly. Your tech-stunted uncle may not ever request a “native app” by name, but he’ll sure complain about his computer acting funny. People aren’t dumb.

You better believe that this isn’t just about AIR. As mobile apps become a mandatory part of doing business, more and more cross-platform mobile frameworks are cropping up. As with every cross-platform framework to date, only one in a pile of the resulting applications might even begin to pass for native. These apps just ain’t right, and people can tell.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: cross-platform code is good, but it should never define the user interface.

more here.

From the Cultured Code’s FAQ page on cloud sync:

We will be doing a large scale test with quantifiable data to estimate server and bandwidth costs. It is not yet clear whether or not it will be necessary to pass any of those costs to the user base. This should not be taken as indication that there will, or will not, be any cost. A final decision will be made later based on the aforementioned testing.

They need to offer a cloud service for free. Its like they don’t understand how unhappy many of their customers (and former customers) are.

The company also doesn’t understand the concept of ‘if you don’t have anything to say, keep your mouth shut.’

[via Federico Viticci]

Now open Twitter for Mac. Tap and drag from top to bottom on your Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad and the list scrolls down- as you’d expect for any normal Mac app. Except that Twitter still feels like an iOS app even though its on my Mac, and this won’t change anytime soon.

I can’t get over how awkward it feels to have the same scrolling gesture produce the exact opposite results. I suppose it’ll eventually become second nature, but I suddenly feel all upside-down when I’m working on my Mac!

Any one used Smart Scroll before? How long until OS X changes scroll direction to match iOS?