Summary of my opinions on web apps:
1) Web apps are mostly a waste of time.
2) The web apps I actually use end up using provide a lot of day-to-day happiness (a long tail of sorts).
3) I think web apps are a close second in terms of the ratio between the amount of effort I spend trying new things and the reward I get. Music has the best ratio, web apps next, and then web site links, TV shows, movies, and books.
Note: I’m talking about averages and looking rewards on a day-to-day level. My favorite books and movies have changed my perspective on life more than any web app probably will.
4) Web apps are a good conversation fodder. Introducing someone to a web app that pique their interest wins you mega-points. I thought that this would only work with other people who are constantly trying new apps, but the opposite is actually true. The trick is to focus on telling a story about how a particular web service or product makes your life better every day and make the link to a problem the other person probably has right now.
5) It’s just a matter of time before there is a good app for just about every task. That’s the fundamental motivation for me to keep trying new apps-I know there will eventually be one that will solve my problem the way I like.
6) I don’t worry about sticking to a specific set of tools. Apps come in and out of my life as a result of many small decisions. Tools that are hard to learn or make it hard to migrate are probably not worth my time anyway.
7) The problem about how to cope mentally (and on a cultural level) with information everywhere, all of the time is entirely separate.
We don’t generally experience chronic pain when the fine-grained features of design have been ignored; we are simply forced to work harder to overcome confusion and eddies of unease … these [feelings] can in the end always be traced back to nothing more occult than a failure of empathy, to architects who forgot to pay homage to the quirks of the human mind, who allowed themselves to be seduced by a simplistic vision of who we might be, rather than attending to the labyrinthine reality of who we are.
— The Architecture of Happiness
To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms of our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.
— The Architecture of Happiness
I went to a lunch hosted by Adobe about a month ago where they presented on Adobe AIR. It sounded like a promising idea. And now that I’ve begun to think more about the little things that would help me be a lot more productive, I think that separating web apps from web pages is at the top of my list.
I use Gmail, Google Reader, Pandora, Google Docs, Basecamp, Highrise, Delicious, and Facebook (borderline case) on a regular basis. I would probably use more web apps if I could remember to use them. It sucks that most of the applications I use to organize my life are all lumped together in one window. I thought AIR would either a) help me get the best of both worlds with my web app (collaboration/social feature but give the web apps the same respect desktop apps get) or b) really push the boundaries between the web and the desktop. Sadly, all of the AIR apps I’ve found are toy apps that do one esoteric feature. It’s a whole new frontier. Why focus on trivialities like printing a map or a way to measure pixels. There are already Firefox plug-ins and Dashboard widgets that do those things. I want ports of apps like Basecamp and Google Docs.
I am not sure if the sad state of affairs is a result of a limit on Adobe’s side or the APIs of these web apps, but most users don’t even know what an API is. Acrobat, a more mature Adobe product, is annoying in that it fragments your web experience, but I appreciate it when I’m reading a research paper because it renders documents well. But why does AIR actually do?
One app, PeekAgenda, was promising. It was linked directly off from Adobe’s web page, but when I installed it (after having to install AIR), the application complained that the code is based on a version of AIR that is no longer supported. AIR hasn’t been around that long. What’s going on? I didn’t bother to figure it out. I just uninstalled AIR.
The only way to make Europeans happy is to make DNA-free food.
— Dr. Craig Venter, on GMOs and politics
Art is experience in terms of experience.
— Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist
Preparing for the interview has made me realize that learning is like painting a bridge. You start from one end and work your way towards the other, but by the time you’re working on the far side, you have to go back and touch up the first coat. It’s like when I learn more advanced math, I end up losing my basic counting skills. Unfortunately, this seems true for most types of knowledge.
Five years later, the salad bar strikes again. There are so many meetups and speakers in town. All my hobbies and interests are given the chance to explode. Writing feedback sessions, photowalks, tasting menus, author readings, live music, and more!
A cool Google reader feature would be a way of lumping together posts from different feeds that point to the same story. Maybe call the subsequent feeds “echoes” or something. This could be similiar to how conversations are handled in Gmail.
