My buddy Mark runs a restaurant here in Guelph named The Cornerstone. I often use him as a real world example of how we should be building applications.

Recently the location two doors down from the cornerstone became available and Mark rented it. Obviously people started asking him what he planned to do in the new space. His answer was that he had no idea. He simply planned to talk to people around the cornerstone and see what they’re looking for.

It isn’t easy but that’s how software should be built. It requires real listening and a true lack of ego to pull of. The reward is that you end up with a business, or software, that people truly need and want.

Where did Mark end up? He’s working on opening a store focusing on handmade local food such as bread, cheese, etc.

Oh lordy I wish I could say I don’t relate to pretty much all of these…

“There’s no way in hell this is going to be under thirty minutes. Why are you lying to me? It’s not possible. You know it’s not possible. You are a liar, sir.”

“You want to rank and hide comments on your “Completely open and honest corporate communications blog,” but only after an admin / editor has approved the comments that have been made? Do you not understand the concepts of “Completely open?” And for that matter, ranking and hiding?”

Were I not an Asteroid I’d be a Pacman apparently.

I am an Asteroid. I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I’m doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind. What Video Game Character Are You?

Dave Winer explains why he doesn’t like facebook or “Why Facebook sucks”. I’m with him on the “Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?” and he does a good job of explaining it. I don’t use facebook for one-to-one messaging but instead quickly bring conversations back to good old email. Why? Email works, why hand everything over to an app like facebook?

Cooper has a recent article about a design process. What jumps out at me was how many attributes their approach shares with some of the development processes we’ve been using/creating. We use a heavily modified version of scrum for a lot of our projects. The parts that are shared with Cooper? Two to three week deliverables, daily meetings, and embracing and encouraging collaboration over documentation.

I’m often viewed as a luddite when I suggest avoiding fancy pants, gadgety interfaces for software applications. A fictional example? SmartCompany wants to build an application that allows team mangers to take the score sheets from their sports team home, scan them and store them online, and then (insert features here)…..

High level meetings like this get me thinking about interfaces. In this useless example, paper is the interface and it currently works just fine. Why mess with it?

The problem I see over and over again is failing to recognize these successful interfaces and instead assuming that they pale in comparison to the new technological ones you’re planning to create and sell. That’s often not the case. At least for a minute take a step back and assume that the existing interfaces are there because they just plain work.

A good example of this thinking is ScanCafe. I haven’t tried them out, I’ve just read about them at CoolTools. What I like is that instead of building an application that requires users to migrate to a new interface (digital camera, scanners, etc), they’ve stuck with what user’s already know how to work with (prints, slides, negatives, mail, etc).

“Here is how it works: You pack up your images and mail them to ScanCafe’s headquarters in Northern California. They count them up, and repackage them before shipping the pieces to India. In India they are scanned, touched up, rotated and then privately posted to your account at their website. You then go through the images online and select which ones you’d like to keep.”

I’m moving on from my now almost 3 year old Dell Latitude laptop. Originally purchased as a desktop replacement, it and it’s lovely docking station served the need quite well for the first year or two. It’s since been relegated to the status of email, browsing, and remoting into my desktop. For that role it’s too damn clunky.

That combined with our dollar and a silly sale at Lenovo.com, which ends today!, adds up to me purchasing the ultraportable x61. To get the lowest price, around $1200, I had to ship it to a US address but at that price it was hard not to pull the trigger. I upgraded to 2GB ram and a 100 GB, 7200 rpm drive. There are reports out there of up to 10 to 12 hours battery life. That seems insane to me but even 6 would be a dream at that size and weight.

Now I have to wait calmly until I can get my mitts on it….