"If you're not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with anything." -- Sir Ken Robinson

I don't know of any projects where I've gotten the UI right the first time. Every redesign has started with a good concept, topped with average ideas but each time the design improves. If you're not ready to make a mistake and then admit when you're wrong; you'll never come up with anything good. You'll follow the same trends you see on cssmania and you'll copy your closest competitor.

Be wrong today and then tomorrow too.

Watch this while you eat lunch ---

Here's the concept, you need a cab at a certain place at a certain time and you have a new iPhone. These iPhones have GPS and Google maps. hmmmmm

Request a Cab

Date/Time
Google Map Current Location or Drop a Pin
Select from Area Cab Vendors (optional)
To Location (optional)


Also build edit function, if the requested time and date has past they cannot edit the request.

I find it hard to write and talk about good UI, I think I know why. We received this feedback about the new LessAccounting.com design.
--------------
Jeremy Consulo of Consulo Studios said...
"I really like the new UI. I can't pinpoint exactly why it's better. It just feels more polished and solid."
--------------
Whoa! Good design/UI just feels better. There are general rules to follow but for the most part its about feeling. Thanks Jeremy for that spark!

So how do you "know" when you've created or found a good design?

Since iPhone apps and Xcode are the buzz words of the week here's an idea and even a mock-up for you. The idea is a training app for counting cards using the hi/low method. Wouldn't you like to train your mind to count cards on your iPhone? Of course you would, so just nod and continue reading.

How does card counting work? Each card has a numeric value. Keep a running tally of the sum of the values as the cards come up. Here are the values:

2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (small cards)...................... +1
7, 8, 9 (neutral cards)............................. 0
10, J, Q, K, Ace (big cards).................... -1


How app works:

• Start the Game
• Select a Speed Level (Slow, Medium, Fast, Faster)
• Select the number of decks in the shoe
• Start the game

The app shuffles the decks and shows the cards. It keeps track of the count. At any time the user can stop to see the actual and true counts that the app has tracked, they will compare these to their counts. Restart the game anytime.

Advanced Features:

• Choose the number of players
• Have the user enter their count before reveling the counts. That way you can keep statistics of their improvment.
• Create table banter. Occasionally have the other players say stuff, like "Yay!," "That was close," "Shit!," "Busted," "ha ha ha," "You're not supposed to hit on sixteen, that should have been my king."

There are actually two methods of counting cards: The running count which I just explained and the true count. True count is running count divide by the number of decks left in the shoe.

Here's a link in case you wanted to investigate this further. More on counting cards and the two counts

Here's a great quote.
"Your successful past will block your visions of the future." --Joel A. Barker

My father has said many times while talking about his friends' business mistakes. "They thought everything they touched turned into gold." A newer version of this expression would be "they're drinking their own Kool-Aid". Its easy when you are successful to get into a rut. Its easy to stop learning and stop pushing yourself to grow. Once you find a successful pattern its hard to change. Drinking your own Kool-Aid will paralize your forward thinking and it will numb your creativity. A taste of success is no time to relax.

How to choose a consulting company to build your app:

1. Don’t use an NDA.
   • This means that it will take longer to find a company because you will first have to screen who you even want to talk to. This is a good thing. With certain exceptions, time to market is most important to the investors who want payback as soon as possible. An extra week or two of searching will probably payoff in the short run.
   • Read yesterday’s post about NDAs being stupid.
2. Get recommendations from a friend or ask around.
   • This is obvious. It’s only useful if you have friends.
3. Read their blog.
   • Does their company philosophy match yours? Very important.
   • Do you find yourself shaking your head up and down when you read them?
   • Do you feel inspired when you read them?
4. Call them and talk to them.
   • Did you get along with them?
   • Did they make time for you? Did they talk to you or did they just say “We like your idea and will be glad to help, when can we start?”
5. Choose a small company.
   • It is really, really hard to find top developer talent. The odds are a company with a large staff has not found a lot of top talent. Who will be working on your site? If you are OK with a consulting company that will give you mediocrity, then it doesn’t really matter. But if you want something that is among the best on the net, you have to use a boutique company.
   • A company who has chosen to stay small is a company that really cares about what they put out.
6. Ask them what consulting companies they would recommend.
   • A great consulting company will want you to succeed even if it’s with another company.
7. Choose a company that is picky.
   • A great consulting company can afford to be picky. Being picky also means that they want to do it their way, and that they are very concerned with the end result, not just your money. These are very good things.
8. Pick someone you trust. And then trust them.
   • Unless you have a proven track record of successful web apps, any company you pick will have more experience at this than you do. Let them help you, even you are sure you’re right. (Don’t pick someone with less experience than you.)
   • If you are worried about not using an NDA, then embrace this constraint: Only pick a company who you trust will not steal your idea. If you don’t trust anyone that much, search or talk more with the companies. You should have faith and trust in them before you begin.

Extras:

1. Once you pick someone let them do it their way.
   • Don’t play armchair quarterback. They will make your product/idea/business better if you let them.
2. Do you feel like you can’t afford a great consulting company? How can you afford not too?
   • Maybe you should reconsider how serious you are. If execution is everything, only talk to people that have already executed well. They are rarely inexpensive. (Rarely as in never.)
   • It is always cheaper to pay someone more to do it right the first time.

People are always asking us to sign NDAs. We sign most of them. Signing them has become a necessary step to open the discussion of someone’s idea. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve signed an NDA and the idea winds up being, “I want to build a website that is just like this other one, except with better navigation.” We have a bunch of NDAs in our filing cabinet just like this. And they are worthless. This is because an NDA only covers things that are not already publicly known. If an idea is 97% stuff that is already out there, even if its out there by others, that NDA is only going to cover the 3% that is new.

Paraphrasing Fight Club: “Your idea is not special. It is not a beautiful or unique snowflake.”

The 3% coverage NDA is also unnecessary because ideas are worthless. An idea might not be worthless because it’s a bad one, although it might be bad (we’ve seen a lot of bad ones). It’s worthless because ideas in general are worthless. Anyone can have a good idea, and they do. What has value is execution. The ability to take an idea and transform it into something real, something people love, something someone will pay for. I’m not talking about having insert your most hated consulting company here take your idea and create the latest, greatest PHP based ASP.NET WS-* compatible collection of HTML and bad CSS that is only a website because some color-blind “designer” figured out how to point a DNS entry at it. I mean something that people LOVE. (People has to be more than your obviously overly kind mother.)

To illustrate the point of how worthless ideas are. Here is a list of five good ideas (how good they are obviously depends on your own perspective).

1. Monetize Twitter.
   1. Collect the public stream.
   2. Have people pay you to send an @ message to any person who uses a certain key word.
   3. We do this sometimes with people who mention “Quickbooks.” I send them a message asking them to checkout Less Accounting.
2. Social network for finding golf buddies.
   1. Create a profile and find people to play golf with. Kind of like match.com for golf without the expectation of sex.
3. iPhone pizza search.
   1. Show me all the pizza delivery places that will deliver at the current time, their menu’s, coupons and dial the number for me.
4. iPhone/photos/gps/cloud.
   1. Upload your photo to the service.
   2. It will forward to flickr.com or your favorite photo site, but it will also show you all the photos taken in the same place that others have uploaded.
   3. It will show you all the stories that people have written about those places.
5. Screen cast tutorial site.
   1. Create a site where people can upload tutorials they have done and you will pay them for each viewing (which you charge for).
   2. People can rate the tutorials and the amount paid can be be a formula that includes popularity and quality of the tutorial and author.
6. iPhone police notifier.
   1. Two buttons, one for cop going in my direction, one for cop going in opposite direction. If the cop is not moving, still just click one of the two buttons.
   2. Display a warning when you are approaching a cop. Call the app “Bacon.”

Note: I said I’d give five, but I gave six because they are so easy to come up with.

It’s not your fault.

I think it’s human nature to think that ideas are valuable. I certainly get excited thinking I’ve created something precious when I have a new idea. I feel like I should guard the idea and not tell anyone until I have developed it. What I should do is tell my circle. I should have a circle of people who are smart and we all talk ideas through. Cultivate an idea until we either give it away or execute.

Tomorrows post will talk about how you can choose a consulting company without using an NDA.

In the past few years I have successfully surrounded myself with nerds and geeks. These people are awesome and most of them I probably would have stuffed into their own lockers in high school. (Although, to be fair many of them would not have fit in their lockers.) For those of you just entering the realm of the geek you are probably more than a little shy. You might be wondering how to start a conversation with these interesting highly intelligent tech folks. Here's a few things all nerds have in common.

They like...

• Robots. The more, the more awesome.
• They like to think they're Ninjas. They're not, most haven't played a sport.
• Star Wars, almost the same thing as liking robots but robots in space are way cooler.
• Compliments. Ask them what they've worked on and tell them you've heard good things about it.
• My group likes Macs, hide the fact you use any non-Apple products.
• They think they are way smarter than you. They are.
• Although they can fix your computer, they don't want to.
• If they don't get your joke, don't explain it to them, just let it go.
• If you have spare schwag, give it to them. They love that shit.

Now what all tech conferences have in common:

• Tech Shirts, nerds love them, conferences have them.
• Hot Tech Chicks, there's always at least one hot chick at the conference everyone drools over.
• Long nights of drinking or werewolf.
• Talks that seem way more interesting to those around you.

Now that you know the facts, here's a few lines to start conversations with geeks at tech conferences.

• "Boy -insert speaker's name- is freaking insane, he's like the next darth vader."
• "Who's the hottie? I'd let her give my computer a virus."
• "I'm sick of beer, Steve Jobs only drinks 18 year old scotch my friend, 18 year old scotch."

So now you know the facts and have my conversation starters, go make some new friends at your next tech conference.

You probably have heard by now that there are some security issues with all the versions of Ruby and that you should upgrade your Ruby to get the fixes. The holes mainly involve buffer overruns and a particularly nasty vulnerability that only affects non-Unix based operating system. These effect Ruby versions 1.8.5, 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.0. (Since I only use 1.8.6, that’s all I’ll talk about here.) The solution is to update 1.8.6 to version 1.8.6-230. Unfortunately p230 breaks rails and almost everything else running ruby. So what is a boy to do? Well Hong Li has come to the rescue. He has back ported the changes to p111 so the rest of us can apply his patch and secure our 1.8.6 machines at p111. The fix involves downloading Ruby 1.8.6-111, patching the source, compiling ruby and restarting your apps.

Here is how you do it:

• Run the following commands:

  
  > wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
  > tar zxvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
  > cd ruby-1.8.6-p111
  > wget http://blog.phusion.nl/assets/r8ee-security-patch-20080623.txt
  > patch -i r8ee-security-patch-20080623.txt
  > ./configure
  > make
  > sudo make install
  

• Restart you mongrels and any other Ruby applications.

Notes:

• While patching I would get the following:

  
  index 410cc6f..c8278b7 100644
  |--- a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
  |+++ b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
  --------------------------
  File to patch: 
  

  
  * Just give it this path: lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
• Sometimes the sudo make install would fail with an error:

  
  /bin/sh: ./miniruby: No such file or directory
  

  
  * Just run “make clean” and then ./configure, make, sudo make install again.

_{Thanks to Wilson Bilkovich for pointing me in the direction of Hong Li’s patch.}

Okay so I don't hate them but they are getting on my nerves. They report the news and the reporting sucks. It's gotten boring. So boring they make me want to shut my computer off and go play with my son. What a waste of time. What happened to opinions, real opinions? I am tired of reading about the latest Facebook feature or how LinkedIn is worth a billion dollars. If you're going to write a review on an app, give me something besides a "nice" summary. Rip the app apart, why does it suck, where are the cool parts? I am sick of hearing who got VC funded and who is in the dead pool. VC money means crap to me, I don't care how much they swindled you into taking. Bloggers, I want to be inspired by your thoughts, I want to be energized by your opinions. I want to be angered if I disagree with you, I want to feel something other than that you wasted my time.

The latest episode of Rubyology is up and ready to be downloaded. This week, Chris and I interviewed Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard.

Warning:

1. The audio is a bit poor in some places but it clears up quickly. If you can sit through those parts, it’s a really good interview of Ezra.
2. The podcast is 120 minutes long.

Take the time to watch Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. There are many great quotes in the video one of my favorites is...

"Brick Walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things."

There are many great quotes about facing or overcoming adversity and Randy's is one to remember.

Here's a few other quotes about adversity that I like

• “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”
• “Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember”
• “Adversity is a fact of life. It can't be controlled. What we can control is how we react to it.”
• “There is no education like adversity”
• “Adversity introduces a man to himself.”

There's always a point in your career as a business owner or boot strapper of an app that you'll look at greener pastures. The Dip of adversity only makes it harder for people to follow and overtake you.

Here's my issue: How can a web consulting company NOT have their own products.

I've heard people say that a web company can either do services or products, that you can't do both. I say you're wrong mister! How can't you do both? How can someone sell their services to a client, who's paying them to successfully build/launch their product when the web company can't do it for themselves? Maybe its not that they can't do it, its that they're too scared or just don't want to have their own product(s). That make sense, right? It doesn't make any sense to me, have you ever taken music lessons? I took guitar lessons for several years growing up, a prerequisite for being my teacher was that my teacher had to be able to play the guitar as well. On my first day my guitar teacher didn't say "well I can instruct you to play the guitar, but I don't really play the guitar. I'm a guitar teacher not guitar player, you can't do both."

Want to see a company's work in its purest form? Ask to see their own apps.

How can you have a product that you don't use? Well, that's another blog post.

We, LessEverything, just launched LessFriends.com. It's yet another useless Twitter tool that people will forget about in about a week. We launched the site on a whim, I am sure we'll see great riches from it. :) Its a great tool for those people who are trying to be prom queen of twitter.

In the past two months I have been out of the “office” for at least four weeks, touring the world, attending and speaking at conferences, and I took a holiday. I am still behind. This week I was desperate for a break and an increase of productivity. So I did something that I didn’t even do while on holiday with my family….I took a vacation from Twitter and Instant Messaging. When I woke up Tuesday morning I closed Twitterific and iChat and any IRC channels that are not part of the communication chain of my company and declared bankruptcy on my email inbox.

The result is I feel great! I have no idea what I missed. Did anyone get married? Any kids born? Any cool new almost Web 2.5 site released? I have no idea. And I am fine with that. I hope I did not slight anyone who might have sent me any directs or @stevenbristol’s. If so I am sorry. In an effort to retain my increased level of productivity, I am going to be making some deep cuts regarding who I follow. I am going to try to keep my follow list to 10 folks plus a few more who only tweet rarely.

I feel almost as free as I felt when I quit smoking ten years ago. I am hoping to keep this feeling going.

I recommend trying a little Twitter break to anyone feeling a bit squeezed.