Johan Steenkamp

Google’s looming hegemony

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:34:13 +1300

“If we factor Google geospatial applications + its unique data processing infrastructure + Android tracking, etc., we’re seeing the potential for absolute power over the economy.”

An excellent article by Frédéric Filloux discussing the power of Google, Public Private Partnerships, and insight into how Google can insert itself into businesses worldwide.

springwise: Jeans store uses QR codes to make shopping easier...

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:55:01 +1300

springwise:

Jeans store uses QR codes to make shopping easier for men

We recently wrote about QThru, a system using QR codes to speed up the check-out process. Aimed at men who don’t like shopping, Hointer also uses the technology to break down the traditional retail model and help make clothes shopping pain-free. READ MORE…

dbreunig: The takeaway from Snapchat is that people are aware of the lifetime of web posting and...

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:26:13 +1300

dbreunig:

The takeaway from Snapchat is that people are aware of the lifetime of web posting and they’re tired of creating things that last a lifetime.

Thus generation aren’t merely conscious of how they’re represented, they’re considering how that representation will age. That’s amazing. It flies in the face of the argument that privacy will shift radically, that embarrassing digital histories will be the norm.

"First of all meetings exist because we need alignment and coordination. I would reckon that at least..."

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:32:18 +1300

“First of all meetings exist because we need alignment and coordination. I would reckon that at least 50% if not up to 80% of all meetings aren’t necessary at all. The issues discussed are essentially to maintain control over things that people should take care of by themselves. Meetings are there to fulfill the manager’s need. In a connected company people have a better idea on what their jobs are because they craft them themselves. They’re not automated, so control is less needed and meetings will become more and more optional.”

- Dave Gray, XPLANE

Nothing Insightful: What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 11:52:37 +1200

Nothing Insightful: What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs:

taitems:

Here’s what we know about Mobile Safari in iOS 6 so far, and what it brings to the table for front end developers. I expect there’s more to come in future betas and as people experiment with the current beta more.

Web Inspector via Remote Debugging

The pre-existing developer tools for iOS are…

Experimentation Is The New Planning

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:39:44 +1200

Interesting to see how the Lean Startup approach is gaining mainstream coverage and adoption

“Let’s be honest: You have no idea what’s going to happen to your industry. That’s why you build your organization into an engine of possibility.”

http://www.fastcompany.com/3001275/experimentation-new-planning

The End of Android Tablets

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:44:52 +1200

The End of Android Tablets:

parislemon:

Timely post by Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn. The Nexus 7 is good, but is it good enough to beat back the new Kindle Fire and more importantly, all the forthcoming Windows 8/RT tablets? We’ll see.

The Nexus 7 Nightmare

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 18:29:58 +1200

The Nexus 7 Nightmare:

parislemon:

In context, these scoops about the “iPad mini” are starting to read a lot like Apple itself quietly saying something along the lines of “Nexus 7? Bitch, please.”

Or: “Buyers beware. What you really want is coming soon.”

Why The New MacBook Pro is Tilted 70 Degrees in an Apple...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:57:41 +1200

Why The New MacBook Pro is Tilted 70 Degrees in an Apple Store
Carmine Gallo, forbes.com

Walk into any Apple Retail Store when it opens in the morning and you might notice that all of the new MacBook Pro notebooks with retina display are positioned at exactly the same angle. Employees who open the store use an iPhone app as a…

Ignore :hover pseudo class on touch devices

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 11:44:00 +1200

For desktop using :hover provides visual feedback as users move their mouse cursor over interface elements.

However on touch enabled devices there is no concept of hovering over elements. The :hover pseudo class can cause elements to display the desktop styling.

The easiest way I’ve found is the detect support for touch events and set a class on the body element:

<body class="touch-[true|false]"> ... </body>

A reliable way is to use Modernizr for detection. When configuring your Modernizr package include the Touch Events.

In your application you can then test using

Modernizr.touch // returns true|false

Use this value to set the class.

You then use the touch-true class in all your :hover selectors

.touch-true a:hover { ... }

On a related note, if you want multi-touch gesture support in your JavaScript apps checkout hammer.js which also keeps your desktop/mouse events intact.

How Twitter and Facebook Destroyed The Blogosphere

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:38:00 +1200

This is a bit of a marketing post for blog platform Tribrr but it does pose and interesting question. I think Tumblr provides tools and a huge community for easy sharing. Value of Backlinks - well changes at Google mean the weighting is less anyway.

How Twitter and Facebook Destroyed The Blogosphere

The Future of the Internet: Do We Love Our Smartphones Too Much for Our Own Good?

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:25:28 +1200

“Is Apple limiting what we see on our smartphones? Is Amazon only showing us what they want us to buy on their tablets? Is sensitive information being censored from us by the telcos? In a tethered world, we’ll never know. The “crystal prison” is one in which everything works so well that we never question how things could be different. In that comfort, we are perfect customers, perfect consumers. But we will not be fully engaged citizens or fully creative individuals.”

The Future of the Internet: Do We Love Our Smartphones Too Much for Our Own Good?

Lean vs Fat Startups

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:43:44 +1200

Lean vs Fat Startups

rianvdm: “I worry that Facebook is killing meaningful...

Sat, 26 May 2012 22:30:48 +1200

rianvdm:

“I worry that Facebook is killing meaningful communication.”

(via Chuck & Beans)

Incremental values with CouchDB update handlers

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:53:00 +1200

Unlike most relational databases CouchDB does not provide an auto-increment function.

Simply counting the number of documents (of a specific type) only works if you never delete any of them.

A simple solution is to use a separate document to keep track of the count and update it by calling an update handler. You can use a single document to maintain counts for different types of document.

Lets say I want to have an incrementing numeric value when creating quotes.

I create a document with id = “quotes-count” and type = “quotes-count” to store the count value. The value is stored in a field called count.

Then in your design document create an update handler called counter:

counter:

function (doc, req){
if (doc.type == ‘quotes-counter’){
if (!doc.count) doc.count = 0;
doc.count++;
return [doc, toJSON(doc.count)];
}
}

Update handlers can only be accessed via PUT or POST. So to get the next count value simply POST to

http://127.0.0.1:5984/<my-database>/_design/<my-design-doc>/_update/counter/quotes-counter

This will return the next increment value.

Of course you can do other processing and formatting in the update handler function such as adding a prefix, year, month or other data to your return value.

OK so what’s the downside? Well it’s the same reason distributed systems and databases like CouchDB do not provide a built in auto-increment function. When you replicate the database your counter document will be updated to the latest revision based on replication source/destination.

This is only going to be a consistent and usable solution if you updated and replicate in one direction only.

So the problem remains - how to generate a nice, short, unique code with a very high level of certainty that duplicates will not occur across distributed systems.

"The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of such machinery that “if..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 08:25:22 +1200

“The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of such machinery that “if you could limit man’s wants it might be called ‘labor saving,’ but as there are no limits to his wants, the machinery really increases the power of production.” That is, the industrialized world wants more goods, not more time, and so the machinery doesn’t increase freedom and leisure, it increases production and consumption.”

- From Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows (via viafrank)

rianvdm: Nice illustration of the user-centered design process...

Thu, 17 May 2012 19:36:11 +1200

rianvdm:

Nice illustration of the user-centered design process from Louis Rosenfeld’s great article on Smashing magazine, Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead.

User Experience is the Science and Art of designing a Product

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:06:48 +1200

User Experience is the Science and Art of designing a Product

I wish I had...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:18:00 +1200

Paul Graham posted about a palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, who put together a list of 5 most common regrets dying patients had:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I didn’t work so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Paul points out that these regrets are all errors of omission - errors we make by default, making them very dangerous.

He has taken these and turned them around - from regrets into commands that he sees daily at the top of his todo list:

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

The Economist Argues for Open Research

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:12:00 +1200

The Economist Argues for Open Research:

dbreunig:

Highway robbery:

An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’ content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research.

The Economist’s suggestion? Government grants which fund academic research should require results be made freely available.