Don’t waste too much time on picking a perfect name for your product. It doesn’t matter very much.

One thing we learned early on talking to Basecamp customers: Many of them didn’t even know that the app was called Basecamp. They called it “GroupHub” or “ProjectPath” because that was their project URL. Didn’t stop them from using it (or paying for it) though.

And what about picking a name that’s available as a domain? HighriseHQ.com and Backpackit.com have worked fine for us. Search is the way most people wind up finding us anyhow.

Obsessing over a name is an easy time trap to fall into when you should be focused on more important obstacles (i.e. building something that people truly want to use).

Matt, 37Signals

However you feel about the concept of designing in the browser, the reality is that more and more designers are adopting this as part of their workflow. Some, like Andy Clarke, treat it as the biggest part of the design process, allowing the client to see flexible layouts, type, and rendering engine treatments on the fly as a design comes together; others, like me or Mike Kus, use it as an extension of our Photoshop work: initial design is done offline and is completed by filling in the gaps while in the browser. It’s certainly not my intention to write about the merits and pitfalls of designing in the browser here, but the key point is that if you don’t know how to write HTML and CSS, it’s an avenue that’s completely closed off to you. The design process can begin and end entirely in your graphics app, but because websites will not (and should not) look the same in every browser, the design will not actually be complete until it’s coded.

- Elliott Jay Stocks

…what you want is to interact with your data without the abstraction of a mouse and keyboard. Have you considered the difficulty in that proposition? If you’re curious, take a second and touch the screen of your laptop like you’re doing some work with it. Open and close some windows, move them around, open some applications, tweak some preferences, pay some bills. I think you’re going to find that the interaction model of the Mac OS exists specifically because you have a keyboard and a trackpad below your screen, and those two instruments allow for refined movements within a dense display of information. What the iPhone OS has done is to allow for the removal of that layer of abstraction, and let us touch our information with our actual fingers. And though our fingers are massive and clumsy, every removal of a layer of abstraction between us and our information represents an epochal shift in technology. Like every such shift, sacrifices must be made, and remedial solutions proposed.

- Adam Lisagor

Projects move along with much better momentum when we have the ability to give direct, face-to-face feedback on designs, as opposed to relying on the glacial pace of obtaining potentially clouded feedback over Basecamp or Notable.

There’s an undeniable sense of ‘being part of something’ that’s fostered by an office full of people working (this is especially important when considering small companies [like ours] or startups).

Observing the body language of co-workers provides the ultimate morale/interest meter. A designer working from home may complete a task without apparent issue, logging their time dutifully and posting the final product in a reticent message; working from the office, though, the designer might heave sighs and constantly furrow their brow, which will speak volumes to any remotely sympathetic person.

Only in face-to-face dialogue will you get the transparency and visceral honesty that is the foundation for good communication (and subsequent ideas).

- Mark Nichols of MetaLab

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

- Via Kottke

Brilliant editors and venture capitalists have the ability to get excited about a project that perhaps doesn’t match their taste–or to criticize it based on experience, not selfishness. This is a really valuable skill, as it requires empathy, experience and judgment, not just the knee-jerk ability to pontificate.

- Seth Godin

More and more often, we’re seeing products and services coming to market designed to appeal to the momentary attention of the clickers. The Huffington Post has downgraded itself, pushing thoughtful stories down the page in exchange for linkbait and sensational celebrity riffs. This strategy gets page views, but does it generate thought or change?

- Seth Godin

We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. Moreover, that liquidity will be constantly refreshed by a gusher of earnings from our many and diverse businesses.

When the financial system went into cardiac arrest in September 2008, Berkshire was a supplier of liquidity and capital to the system, not a supplicant. At the very peak of the crisis, we poured $15.5 billion into a business world that could otherwise look only to the federal government for help. Of that, $9 billion went to bolster capital at three highly-regarded and previously-secure American businesses that needed — without delay — our tangible vote of confidence. The remaining $6.5 billion satisfied our commitment to help fund the purchase of Wrigley, a deal that was completed without pause while, elsewhere, panic reigned.

We pay a steep price to maintain our premier financial strength. The $20 billion-plus of cash-equivalent assets that we customarily hold is earning a pittance at present. But we sleep well.

- Via Kottke

The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

Is this a metaphor? Sure. But it’s a worthwhile one. You have more freedom at work than you think (hey, you’re reading this on company time!) but most people do nothing with that freedom but try to get an A.

- Seth Godin

Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later.

The potential and scope for this is huge. See the demos page for a selection.
]]> http://raphaeljs.com/feed/ 0 http://border-radius.com/ http://border-radius.com/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:52:48 +0000 Editor http://gavinhall.com/?p=42 A quick and easy border radius creator (useful for when you dont have your regular tools to hand).

Five minutes to write a blog post that changes everything, or five minutes to deliver an act of generosity that changes someone. Five minutes to invent a great new feature, or five minutes to teach a groundbreaking skill in a way that no one ever thought of before. Five minutes to tell the truth (or hear the truth).

- Seth Godin

Experimenting with the form of the book is one thing, but E-book structure is not something we should make up as we go along. We shouldn’t pretend there aren’t any rules, nor should we import print-book concepts that do not work in onscreen books. The dominant E-book format of the future, ePub, can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites.

- Joe Clark

The problem with rallying behind a technology is that it traps us within the confines of its constraints. We easily shift “don’t know” and “not sure” into “can’t” and “won’t.” Creativity is dictated by programming languages. How sad.

- Dan Mall, A List Apart

True.

During the process I found out that, for some reason (apparently lack of hardware acceleration), Firefox and Opera do not support context.globalCompositeOperation = 'darker'. This was on the HTML5 spec before but got removed.

- Ricardo Cabello

The days of people sitting in front of desktop machines at home are over. Sales of mobile devices, laptops and netbooks have overtaken those of bulky stationary computers in the last few years. The power of processors now allows us to use smaller, more mobile hardware to perform the same tasks. So, if people use their hardware on the go, we should bring our systems to them.

- Smashing Magazine

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game.

This thing is wonderful, and not a million miles from a project we’re working on at Magnet.

I want to make things, not just glue things together.

- Mike Taylor