UPDATE: Bummer! The CEO of the company behind the software (apparently, a one-man-band) has been hired by Twitter, but they don’t intend to keep the service online. :-(
(another one posted on the SWAT blog – no time for translation, sorry!)
My email inbox is the most valued piece of “virtual real estate” in my life – and I am not alone in using the “act on it or archive it” approach to email. Every email that remains in my inbox is a survivor – a call-to-action item, in the best GTD style. And it works: a near-empty inbox makes me more focused, productive and relaxed.
There is, however, a small crack in this routine: some emails do not require immediate action, but cannot be archived and forgotten either, and they keep lurking in my inbox, stealing bits of my attention every time I go there to check for new stuff or find higher-priority things to do.
Enter I Want Sandy, a web application that combines email and calendar in a very smart way. It allows me to literally time-shift email: I just forward it to her, with a subject such as “Remind me to read this tomorrow in the afternoon”, and the email comes back at the specified time (I can be as specific as I want – she is quite good at guessing the details when I get vague).
This way I can keep in my inbox just the items to which I need to pay attention on the spot. Everything else vanishes and returns only when it is the proper time for it to be handled. And soon I started to using her to remind me of less-important things (after all, it’s just sending an email) – also uncluttering my iCal/Google Calendar.
After having been captured as a user, I started wondering – as a developer – what makes this application so interesting. Of course it uses technology in a very smart way, provides lots of features besides the ones mentioned here and has interesting origins, but I strongly believe it stands out from the crowd due to three usability factors:
a) Besides supporting sophisticated ways of interaction (such as Twitter and SMS), its core is pretty much the combination of two very tried-and-true technologies (email and calendar), but in a very novel approach: by using email as an interface to calendar;
b) It presents itself in a way compatible to its paradigm shift. I know that it is an application and not a person – but the metaphor works so well that not only do I really feel as if I’m asking someone to help me rembember my stuff: I also refer to it as a person (as you have seen multiple times in this text – it’s unavoidable after you begin exchanging more emails with her than with anyone else);
c) It simply works. For every request that a cleverly constructed algorithm can reasonable be expected to undertand, it does what I expect it to do. Comparing it to clumsy, more-misses-than-hits systems (such as the ones on Google Calendar and Outlook) reminds me of the quantum leap of going from Yahoo/AltaVista to Google.
(One might argue that “c” is a technology issue – but I see it more as focusing the technology efforts on the right place than anything else.)
Will it be a hit? Nobody knows. But it is a rare case of a real novel approach to an existing, “solved” problem. I would have been proud of creating it – and still hope to be able one day to help creating something as ingenious as this.
Motocicleta é um lance polêmico: muita gente troca o carro pela moto para tentar fugir ao caos do trânsito, mas há implicações no que diz respeito a segurança e ecologia (esse último ponto é o motivador do phase out da minha Honda Biz, que hoje é o “plano D” de transporte para a faculdade – quando ônibus, trem ou taxi não são viáveis – e muda de dono no final do ano).
O paulistano não precisa de estatística para perceber que a maioria dos motociclistas da cidade não usam a moto como meio de transporte ou para fins esportivos, e sim como meio de sustento, através da profissão de motofrete – ou, como é popularmente conhecida, de motoboy. Desta forma, buscar uma alternativa ao uso desse serviço é o próximo passo lógico para quem pensa em reduzir a poluição na cidade.
Neste contexto surgem os bikeboys ou biciboys, organizados em empresas que oferecem este serviço de forma equivalente ao prestado pelas suas contrapartes baseadas em motoboys. O Willian Cruz tem um excelente post no Vá de Bike, no qual ele mostra não só a cobertura que a imprensa já fez deste tipo de serviço, mas também lista telefones e websites de várias empresas que o prestam.
Tive uma experiência positiva com a Bike Courier – apesar de não poder combinar o serviço por e-mail ou pelo website (o que seria um tremendo diferencial – eu daria total preferência para alguém que permitisse passar endereços, horários e todos esses detalhes sem ser por telefone), fui muito bem atendido.
O preço varia conforme a distância percorrida (empresas de motoboy variam nesse ponto: a que eu mais usava cobrava um valor fixo pela hora do motociclista), mas no pior dos casos empata com o custo do equivalente motorizado (até onde pude verificar). O tempo é bem razoável – tirando entregas ultra mega urgentes (as quais tem lá o seu grau de incerteza com motoboys, especialmente terceirizados), você pode contar com o mesmo tipo de prazo que espera de um motoboy.
Uma atitude insignificante? Talvez. Mas vale, nem que seja pelo simbolismo – se mais pessoas souberem que você usa e fizerem o mesmo, isso pode mudar o quadro de poluição na cidade.
When we talk about Apple, mankind is pretty much divided into three camps: lovers, haters and developers. Seriously, I never thought the day would come when I’d say such a thing, but the fact is: Apple needs the other Steve. No, not Woz (he is on-and-off there, but that’s another story). I mean our our sweaty, chair-throwing, monkey-dancer friend Steve Ballmer:
You can say anything you want about Microsoft – but one thing is undeniably true: they treat third-party developers as their most valuable resource. Since the first ages of 16-bit Windows consolidation, it was clear that as long as their platform was the mainstream software-running machine (and the minimum bar for hardware support in the PC world), their reign would be safe.
And that translates into treating their developers well. Yes, they have to pay some fees here and there, but they are rarely left behind. MSDN and competent MS staff reveal all you need to know to develop any sort of application for Windows; backwards compatibility is taken to extremes; and all sorts of developers (from corporate form cut-and-pasters to low-level hackers) are treated as first-class citizens.
In contrast, no matter how sexy the platforms are that Apple makes available for your software to run on, they make it painstakingly clear that users are number one. Cupertino doesn’t mind at all if a tiny minor new feature creates one or a dozen hurdles for developers every other week. This is not “right” or “wrong” (and both approaches have shown their results), but it is something to be aware of when you consider developing for an Apple platform.
This was not seen as much of a problem for most developers, since Apple has always been a niché market (even with Mac OS X putting the Macintosh onto the radar for people outside the Mac cult). However, January 2007 saw the announcement of the iPhone, and since then the handset has received pretty much all types of review – from the Apple fanboy praise (blind to the most obvious flaws and limitations) to the most radical states of denial that ignore the (r)evolutionary aspects of the platform.
In the end, however, the number of iPhones on the market (no one has the exact real number, but it can be extrapolated to be at least 4 million after the worldwide 3G expansion) was the only important thing for developers – those numbers turn it into a big enough market to be considered by anyone that wants to deploy sophisticated mobile software applications.
(J2ME possibly beats those numbers, but having a unified platform for development is an advantage that Jobs has pushed since the early days of the first Macintosh – even when it was almost against common sense).
Development was not allowed by Apple during the first year of the iPhone’s existence, but developers found ways to bend the rules, using alternative ways to build their apps. Distribution was, however, the main hurdle: users needed to “jailbreak” their devices to get applications via alternative channels such as Installer.app (a simple, yet fragile distributed system) and Cydia (a wrap-up of the apt distribution system, which is one of the backbones of software distribution in the Linux world).
The introduction of the App Store (Apple’s official distribution system) changed the landscape, not only by introducing a legal (and ubiquitous) alternative for developers to distribute apps, but also by giving them a nice opportunity to piggyback on iTunes as a distribution channel. This approach of not having a middle man is an enabling factor for thousands of small-scale developers: one little dirty secret of the mobile application world is that mobile operators (which own the distribution and revenue channel) rarely talk to small developers – they have to market their apps by means of “publishers”, which pretty much stifle innovation and initiative in this field.
Even if you want to distribute your application for free, there are operators and handset makers that will make it hard (if not impossible) for users to download your app or transfer it via Bluetooth from other devices. Apple’s App Store distributes free content for free (well, you have to pay $99 for the iPhone Developer Membership, but it’s a fixed, once-off cost).
It’s not all roses, however: Apple imposes all sorts of restrictions – ranging from technical ones (you can’t let an application do background processing) to operational (registration as a developer takes some time to be processed; your app can’t duplicate functions on Apple’s apps; if they don’t like it you are out; you must submit source code to their approval, and nobody knows for sure how compatible with licenses such as GPL their model is). Besides that, the code signing process can be a burden to developers not used to it (even if you decide to ignore Apple and limit yourself to jailbroken iPhones).
It is a “my way or the highway” situation – but recently the first handset with Android (Google’s operating system for mobiles) hit the market. Some consider it underpowered, but others are excited by the tricks it has on its own (while some even question its openness). It is a welcome addition not only for users/developers who won’t be interested on Apple’s offerings, but also gives iPhonophiles the hope that competition will put some pressure on the Big Cupertino Brother to force it to relinquish some of the grip it has on the market.
I have high hopes that this will happen. But even if it doesn’t, it won’t stop a legion of developers (myself included) from working working on their $0.99 app, in the hopes that will be useful for one million people – and that its success will contribute to their own retirement. That is a really hard argument to beat, and it will keep the iPhone going for a long time. But unless we start to see some retired iPhone Developers on their yachts, Apple would do themselves a favor by treating iPhone developers a little bit better – or they will jump ship at the first opportunity – be their destination may be Android or otherwise.
Nem todo mundo entende ou curte, mas eu acho as animações do Lev Yilmaz geniais. Elas são quase todas autobiográficas, e consistem nele finalizando seqüências de desenhos e narrando os acontecimentos. Meu primeiro contato foi o hilário “I Have To Get Ready”, que é o retrato máximo da minha realidade matinal:
Também encontrei passagens da minha vida em “A Typical Conversation With My Mom” e “Conversation”:
Eu poderia citar vários outros geniais (como “How We Didn’t Date Each Other” e “Horny“), mas o fato é que eu gosto de tudo o que esse cara faz – tanto que encomendei duas edições do fanzine dele – que vem com alguns quadrinhos e um DVD com vários desses filmes em alta resolução (e material que não está no site ou no YouTube).
Pensando na adminsitração da cidade de São Paulo, meu voto iria para Marta. Mas num momento em que o mundo volta sua atenção para a questão da corrupção e cada vez mais se vê discrepância entre discurso e atitude quando o assunto é cidadania sustentável, acho mais sensato escolher a Soninha Francine como candidata.
Sobre a possibilidade de a lei eleitoral proibir um cidadão de declarar seu voto na internet: eu considero essa interpretação tão danosa para o estado de direito democrático que nem elaboro a respeito. Ao invés disso, reproduzo declaração retirada – pasmem – do site do Kassab (cujo partido de democrata só tem o nome):
“Impedir um cidadão de se posicionar politicamente não é uma forma de censura? De cercear sua liberdade de expressar sua opinião e impedir que a sociedade discuta suas opções em uma eleição e vote conscientemente?”
