The Russians Used a Pencil

Last year Tom and I wrote a book, entitled It Will Be Exhilarating, about our experiences making products and forming a company. We wrote it to offer guidance and inspiration for those charting a similar path to us, and it covers topics such as running a small business, creating hardware products independently, launching a Kickstarter project, and tips for promoting your products. We’ve received some great feedback–it truly seems to be helping and motivating people with their own projects. 

We have decided now to make this book free to read online. You can check it out at http://exhilarating.studioneat.com/. The page is responsive and retina ready so it should look nice on any size screen. Bookmark the page to the home screen of your iOS device for a chrome-free reading experience. And, if you’d like to read on your ereader of choice, the ebook is still available for $5. 

Please let us know what you think!

This year, Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, sold out in less than two minutes. Many developers were unable to acquire a ticket, and thus a discussion has erupted about how to “fix” WWDC. The knee-jerk response is to significantly expand the conference, but Jeff Lamarche gives some good reasons why this would fundamentally change the tone and vibe in a negative way. A SXSW-ification, if you will. Daniel Jalkut suggests a more extreme route, getting rid of WWDC all together. My general impression is that people are happy with WWDC in terms of its size; it’s clear the main problem is the demand for tickets far exceeds the supply. 

To me, this becomes a fascinating design problem. Let’s say, in this exercise, that Apple wants to keep WWDC as is, in terms of the number of attendees, location, and number of Apple engineers on site. We can then focus on a single problem: how to best distribute the 5,500 (or so) tickets. 

John Siracusa suggests a lottery. I think he’s half right. 

My proposal is for Apple to take some cues from the New York City Marathon. The marathon, like WWDC, is an event where the demand far outstrips the supply. They break applicants into two categories:

• Guaranteed Entrants
• Non-guaranteed Applicants

The non-guaranteed applicant is entered into a lottery. The coveted guaranteed entry, however, is achieved in a few ways:

• Seniority: Finish at least 15 previous New York Marathons.
• Sympathy: Lose the lottery for 3 consecutive years.
• Elite: Post a qualifying time in an approved marathon. 
• Legwork: Run at least 9 New York road races throughout the year, and volunteer at an additional one. 
• Charity: Join an approved charity organization and raise a certain amount of money.

I think a model like this could work for WWDC. For example:

• Seniority: Attend at least 10 past WWDCs. 
• Sympathy: Lose the lottery for 3 consecutive years.
• Elite: Win an Apple Design award the previous year. Or perhaps have an app in the overall top 10 within the past year?
• Legwork: Not sure about this one. Maybe volunteering to distribute badges before the conference? This could also be where “Student Scholarship” fits in.
• Charity: Join an approved charity organization and raise a certain amount of money.

Any tickets not given to guaranteed entrants would be put in the lottery. I think something like this is a bit more equitable than a straight up lottery, and certainly more so than this year’s rolling of the browser refresh dice. 

One last note. I’m surprised the aspect of badge sharing hasn’t been mentioned more. Two or three people can get a ton out of WWDC, even if only one body is allowed in Moscone West at a time. I’m sure badge sharing already happens unofficially, but if Apple were to officially endorse the idea, it would effectively double  the number of people who get to participate in the conference, while still keeping the numbers where Apple wants them within the facility. 

Recently I’ve been sketching some UI concepts for an iPhone app in my Field Notes notebook. I typically start by drawing a rectangle that crudely approximates the real life size of an iPhone screen, but I figured there might be a better solution that keeps the spirit of the quick and dirty UI sketch, while making sure the screen is the correct size and proportion. I decided to have a custom rubber stamp made. 

It works pretty well! I added little tick marks around the border of the screen so I know where the status bar, nav bar, and tab bar in both portrait and landscape should be placed. If you’d like to make a stamp of your own, you can download the file here. Most cities should have a custom rubber stamp shop, I got mine made at Capitol Rubber Stamp in Austin. The stamp ended up being about $35, and the large ink pad was $15.

Tom and I are super psyched to launch our new Kickstarter project today. It’s called Simple Bracket, and it’s an iPhone app for filling in March Madness college basketball brackets and competing with friends and family. The project page fills in all the details about the app (and contains our best project video to date) so be sure to check it out. Even if you are not typically into college basketball or filling in brackets as part of an office pool, now would be a good year to give it a try! 

Tom and I put a lot of thought into whether this should be a Kickstarter project or if we should just release the app straight up. It’s an unusual project for us, in that it is based around a specific event (March Madness) that takes place in such a short window of time. We ultimately decided that using Kickstarter was the best way forward, not only to fund the backend and continued development of the app, but perhaps more importantly, to get everyone together, excited, and on-board. When the teams in the tournament are announced on March 17th, there is only a 4 day window to fill in your bracket before the first games start. We hope Kickstarter provides, aside from the funding element, a way to get everyone excited and prepared in the days leading up to the tournament. 

Anyhow, we’re excited to see where this goes. Please have a look!

Federico Viticci interviewing John Siracusa over at MacStories:

FV: Aside from bugs, do you think some of Apple’s software problems are related to rarely saying “Yes” to feature requests/suggestions from its users?

Do you think Cook is more open to listening and reversing course quickly? (I’m thinking Maps, Ping)

JS: No, I think it’s a result of Apple’s admirable drive towards simplicity going a bit awry. Simplicity is great, as iOS has shown. But there’s a difference between conceptual simplicity and visual simplicity. Just hiding controls does make things appear simpler, but it doesn’t actually make them any simpler. The complexity is now just hidden. Similarly, removing features that few people use is a good idea, but like any good idea, it can be taken too far. At a certain point, you’re just making your application worse for everyone, even new users.

You can’t always tweak or refactor an existing application into the beautiful thing you’re envisioning. Sometimes the only way to achieve true simplicity is to start over with a new concept for the whole app.

One year ago, I was out running an errand with my wife and noticed that the runners in the New York Marathon were passing through our neighborhood in Long Island City. We stood and watched for a while. It was quite inspiring, and I decided at that moment that I would run in the marathon the next year, a goal as arbitrary as it was ludicrous. I had run cross country in high school but never competed in a race over 12 miles (a marathon is 26.2) and I had basically stopped running since I graduated nine years prior. 

The New York Marathon typically has about 45,000 runners, and yet it is difficult to gain a guaranteed entry spot if you are not an elite runner. One such way, however, is to run with a charity organization. After some research, I decided to join Fred’s Team, a charity that raises money for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Cancer is something that has affected my family in recent years, which is sadly not an uncommon story. I’m glad running this race and raising money for this charity has allowed me help towards the goal of eliminating cancer, even if only in a small way.

And this is where you come into the story. I need your help. If you would like to donate, I would be more than grateful. But I’ve got something cool to announce today. I am selling a beautiful, limited edition, letter pressed poster designed by none other than the amazing Jessica Hische. She was incredibly kind of come up with a design based around one of my favorite quotes by Steve Prefontaine. This thing is going to look amazing, and will look great in your study, office, nursery, workroom, etc. I am selling it for $35 (shipping included) and of course, all of the profits will be donated to Memorial Sloan-Kettering. This is a great chance to own an awesome poster by a kick-ass designer, and to do a little good while you’re at it. What’s not to like?

Additionally, $5 of every purchase will be donated to Red Cross disaster relief. Fortunately it looks like the marathon will continue as planned, but the surrounding area has been hit very hard by the hurricane. Every little bit helps. 

You can order the poster here. It’s only going to be on sale for a limited window, so get it while you can!

Tom and I are happy to announce Frameographer version 1.4 is now available in the App Store, which adds support for the iPhone 5, among other things. 

It was actually pretty tricky to figure out a way to make our previous design work on the new, wider screen of the iPhone 5. We took some cues from Apple, specifically iMovie and the default Camera app, to find the best way to utilize the new screen real estate. 

Here is the Project view on the iPhone 4/4S:

And here it is on the iPhone 5:

It’s a simple change, but it actually makes the Project view feel quite a bit roomier. 

The Capture view saw a more dramatic update, going from this on the 4/4S:

To this on the iPhone 5:

I’ve only used it for the past couple weeks, but the new, full screen 16:9 viewfinder in Capture mode is awesome. Big improvement there. 

Frameographer 1.4 is a free update, so grab it now!

I saw a fantastic movie on Netflix Instant this weekend: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The film is a documentary about Jiro Ono, an 85 year-old sushi master and proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a Michelin rated 3-star restaurant. 

Here is a quote from Yamamoto, a food critic featured throughout the film:

All of the sushi is simple. It’s completely minimalist. Master chefs from around the world eat at Jiro’s and ask: “How can something so simple have so much depth of flavor?” If I were to sum up Jiro’s sushi in a nutshell: “Ultimate simplicity leads to purity.”

I actually found a lot of parallels between Jiro Ono and the late Steve Jobs. Jiro has dedicated his life to his work, and to his relentless pursuit of perfection and excellence. 

www.gottaregister.com takes something that is annoying at best and confusing at worst, and makes it incredibly easy and simple. I used it to register to vote and was very pleased by how easy it was. If you haven’t registered yet I suggest you do the same! 

If you’re wondering why it’s been relatively quite here on The Russians Used a Pencil, I have a decent excuse (I hope). I only have so many words per week I am capable of outputting, and they were all dedicated to Studio Neat’s new book, It Will Be Exhilarating: Indie Capitalism and Design Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century. 

Tom and I wrote this book to offer guidance and inspiration for those charting a similar path to us, and covers topics such as running a small business, creating hardware products independently, launching a Kickstarter project, and tips for promoting your products. After shipping the Glif, I wrote up a comprehensive blog post about everything we learned along the way, and it seemed to prove helpful to quite a few people, so we thought, why not expand it into a book?

It Will Be Exhilarating is available directly from us as an ebook bundle (containing epub, mobi, and pdf files) and on Amazon Kindle and the iBookstore. 

We’d love to hear what you think!

Remember that one scene in Back to the Future II? Doc and Marty had just arrived in 2015 Hill Valley at the beginning of the film, and it’s raining. Doc checks his watch, says “wait five more seconds,” and sure enough, the rain stops. We don’t have hoverboards or flying cars or rehydrated pizza yet, but accurate weather forecasting is finally here, and it’s called Dark Sky. 

Dark Sky is an app for iOS that began as a Kickstarter project and is now available in the App Store. The goal of the app is to predict the weather in the immediate future, ie. within the next hour. This is a smart goal for two reasons: 1) weather data is much more reliable when making immediate predications vs. long range forecasts, and 2) our lives are filled with “short-term outdoor activities,” where this type of short range prediction is immensely useful. Let me give you an example. 

Last weekend, my wife and I went to Brooklyn to meet some friends for a rooftop cookout. The weather was looking pretty gloomy, and it had been raining on and off. We couldn’t decide if we should attempt to grill on the roof, or just play it safe and cook indoors (lame). Enter Dark Sky. With the app, we knew exactly when it would start raining, and when it would stop. We actually waited at the doorway of the rooftop with all of our cooking materials, and the rain stopped at the extra moment Dark Sky predicted. Dr. Emmett L. Brown would be proud. We cooked and ate our burgers during the rain lull that Dark Sky predicted, and made it back inside before it started raining again. 

Dark Sky has earned a solid spot on my second iPhone screen, I suggest you check it out. THE FUTURE. 

Hot on the heels of version 1.2, Frameographer 1.3 is now available in the App Store. With it brings a couple features, one of which is pretty nifty. 

On the Capture screen, you can now pitch-to-zoom, just as you would in the native Camera app. There is one key difference between these two zooms, however. In the native Camera app, any zooming done will degrade the image quality, as it is simply enlarging and cropping the digital image. Frameographer, however, uses what we are calling “Smart Zoom,” which preserves the image quality. Allow me to explain.

Movies exported from Framographer are 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels). The iPhone 4S camera captures images at 3264 x 2448 pixels. Because a full resolution image has more pixels than needed for a 1080p export, zooming in simply resizes the viewport, but keeps the capture at full quality. In essence, when you are zooming in Frameographer, you are not enlarging a digital image, you are changing how the image is cropped. 

The zoom is roughly 2X, which we have found to be quite sufficient for most cases when a tighter composition is desired. Frameographer 1.3 is a free update and is available in the App Store.