April 17th, 2012 in My Life |
It has been quite some time since my last dedicated post here, so I decided to take the opportunity to write about one thing that really excites me and that is the major drive of my current life.
I quit my job at my last company and I’m self-employed now, working on various app and web projects for myself or third party companies. One of the more prominent apps is, for example, InstaDesk a Instagram client for Mac OS X.
After working in a employment setting for more than 10 years, I longed for more freedom. The freedom to move to any city in the world, the freedom to go jogging in the early afternoon and continue working in the evening, the freedom to go shopping in the morning, or the freedom to work through the night. I longed for flexibility. In the end it was this (and several other personal things) that led to me quit my job and start on my new adventure.
What excites me so much about this, is that I can move to any place and any city anywhere in the world now – as long as it has a good Internet connection.
Take Gibraltar, for example: A small (20.000+ Habitants) city around a rock (which houses Barbary monkeys) that lies right next to the Spanish region of Andalucia but belongs to the English crown. So you get the great southern European climate, the sun, but also the English language, the kind English people, and can walk over to Spain for vacation or visiting the beautiful city of Cadiz. Even more, Morocco is only 15min away by boat. Gibraltar even has it’s own airport.
Best of all, Gibraltar has a terrific Internet connection. It is home to many Internet based startups (especially poker companies seem to like it there) and thus has data lines that put the neighboring Spain to shame.
It’s opportunities to live in places like these, that makes my current endeavor so exciting for me.
On http://www.stacksocial.com, InstaDesk can now be bought as part of a fantastic Mac bundle. Say hello to the Mac Photo Effects Mini-Bundle!
You get three cutting-edge Mac Photography Apps for less than the price of just one:
FX Photo Studio Pro ($39.99 retail) – Bring a brand new image processing experience to your Mac. Get access to over 170 magnificent photography effects.
Color Splash Studio ($1.99 retail) – A brand-spanking new Mac App lets you create amazing photos with selective colors in a snap. No similar app offers the same!
InstaDesk ($4.99 retail) – This Instragram Client for Mac OS lets you easily browse your photos or explore your friends and not only that, but you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows to boot.
That’s right, you can get all three of these stellar apps for a measly $35. That’s $5 less than the cost of FX Photo Studio Pro alone!
AND if you’re one of the first 500 people to buy this bundle, you’ll get *four extra licenses* for both FX Studio Pro and Color Splash Studio to share with your friends.
This bundle ends on Oct 26, 2011.
Get it here:
http://www.stacksocial.com/
“In many ways an apps‘ icon is an integral part of the product.”
- From a marketing perspective, it incorporates your branding: It has to be easy to decipher, easy to recognize, and it should employ the main strengths of your brand.
From a usability perspective, it needs to give the users hints about your apps main functionality. But it is strongly advised not to overstimulate this: If the actual app fails to fulfill the expectations that the icon sets, you will burn your users.
- From a graphic design perspective, the icon has to look beautiful, strong, and not out of place when it is composed into its actual environment (i.e. the iPod Screen, or the Mac OS X Dock).
- From a semiotic perspective, the signs and symbols that you use should have a shared and distinct meaning in your audience. If you intend to use symbols (like a note, a truck, a cup, a newspaper, or a book) you should make sure that they fit the attribution you are trying to apply in general.
- Finally, the icon is the entry point into your app experience. And in most App Stores (iPod / iPhone, Ovi, Android …) the icon also represents your advertising in the store. It is the first thing people see, and the icon quality can influence the decision whether people like to request more information or not.
Now, that does not mean that only perfect icons will lead to success (as Google has shown time and time again), but if you have limited other advertising resources at hand, then it is certainly advisable to optimize the hell out of your icon.
Read the rest of this entry »
Via www.alleyinsider.com
„Twitter will eventually be worth more than $1 billion, possibly a lot more."
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via lesswrong.com
„Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens – not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children.
[…]
"In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence.""
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via arstechnica.com
„Acquisitions are about enabling growth in a hot new market, and not about sustaining revenue in a mature one."
ars technica on why Apple won't buy AMD
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via paulgraham.com
„But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."
Paul Graham on Addiction
Published from QuoteVault.org
One of my friends recently linked to this impressive quote from Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame, writing in 2006:
If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.
(footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p. 228),
Hackers and Painters)
It reminded me a, at least as I see it, equally impressive forecast by Fake Steve Jobs (née Dan Lyons). Back in 2006, in one of his parodical pieces, he contemplated what Steve Jobs might want that mythical iPhone to be like, and wrote:
So as soon as I got back to the Jobs Pod I sent out an email to the iPhone team: We’re back to square one. Starting over. Tabula rasa. Throwing out everything we’ve done so far and making a new phone that just makes phone calls. Small, white, gorgeous, as few buttons as possible. Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less.
Keep in mind, this was in 2006. Back then there was no iPhone, and nobody knew if Apple intended to ever build one. Even more, when people thought what this mythical unicorn could be like, they came up with this, this, this, or that.
Via www.info.ucl.ac.be
„The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves."
On Literary Criticism
Sounds about right to me.
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via www.nytimes.com
„I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.
“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”"
Just found this gem while browsing through my QuoteVault archive.
Mr. Tevanian, the Mac OS X lead System Architect, on whether Microsoft could / should rebuild Windows from the ground up, as Apple did with Mac OS X.
Published from QuoteVault.org
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