One of the really cool things about the service is that you can sign up to test features before they are released to the entire user base.  Right now I’m testing the new smart add feature, it’s awesome and i just noticed a really cool touch that I thought deserved sharing.

See the small window with the ? in the top left, it lists the shortcuts that you can use in the smart add box.  Seems pretty simple right?  The little window actually stays open after you click the question mark until you explicitly close it using the x.  Why do I think this is interesting?  Because it allows me to see those shortcuts as I’m using the tool, it doesn’t force me to go to another window or stop and hover over a link to get the info, it makes learning the app a lot easier, it removes the friction between becoming and advanced user.

Hint to anyone that buys me presents and might be reading this blog, you should probably consider buying me all the lost season box sets, kthxbye!!1

One thing that has slowly crept up on me though is that this type of attitude is starting to gain some real ground in the music world. Historically it would seem that sometime after the 60’s and the era of the power trio, musicians decided that adding more to bands was the way to go. Another guitar player here, a keyboard there, heck throw in another drummer and a triangle player for good measure! and even more so lately you have big bands like The Go Team (7+ members) and The Arcade Fire (5+ members).  Now I don’t have anything against any of these bands (in fact I love the go team and the arcade fire), but it seems like the culture of bigger is better is getting out of hand!

Now I know in recent history the popularity of electronic music has soared and often times is a single person mixing records or composing using a computer this doesn’t seem as revolutionary to me as the advent of small rock bands.

Lately, and especially with new rock type bands you are starting to see a lot of 3 and 2 person setups

• Death from above 1979 – bass and drums
• Rodrigo y Gabriela – 2 guitars (fantastic too btw)
• White stripes – Guitar and drums
• Yeah Yeah Yeah’s – singer, guitar, drums
• Muse – guitar, bass, drums

These bands are realizing that great music can be made with less, embracing the constraints (whether by choice or otherwise) and not only succeeding but excelling at what they do.

Where have you seen people embracing constraints? Or creating constraints to foster creativity? I think it’s a fascinating topic and would love to hear more about it.

Spread Firefox

Anyways, this is a fantastic video on the topic of “Humane Computing” and I think it’s well worth your time to sit down and watch it all the way through.

Away with applications, the death of the desktop

I’ve never used the Slick Edit product but I’ve got lot’s of experience using Atlassian products (Jira and confluence) and would love to get my grubby mitts on a copy of bamboo since I am a huge fan of the other Atlassian products I’ve used.

So head on over and find out how you can win some of this software (hint, writing a blog post about it get’s you 25 tickets in this raffle style give away)

So as part of our company alignment and implementing the Rockefeller Habits at Q4 our quarterly theme was moving rocks together. We set aside a room with a video camera and plates with peoples names on them, if you felt the urge to recognize someone you could go into the room and record a short video message and give the person a rock. The end result would be that someone would *win* and get a prize.

Well we watched all the video’s today, which was hilarious and very very inspiring at the same time. It’s amazing that you can work with a group of people every day for months and years on end and sometimes never know what they are doing, seeing those people recognizing and rewarding there peers is a great way to better understand what the people you work with do on a daily basis.

Anyways as part of the moving rocks theme, the person with the most rocks at the end of the month would win a prize, and much to my surprise I was the winner this month (the first month). I’ve got to say it’s a great feeling being recognized and rewarded by your peers (this months prize was 100 at Canyon Creek). Even though it was me that won this month I think this is an amazing step for a small company to take and really makes me feel appreciated and valued.

One thing I personally have to do for the next month is give out more rocks, I want to make sure someone else wins next month and this has just inspired me to give those rocks out. If anyone at work is reading this, you guys are all an integral part of an amazing team, YOU ROCK!

Future plans include (some might happen, all might never happen)

• an offline version of backpack
• a to-do list application that is driven by backpack lists
• a WPF client for doing various backpack things (reminders, journal and status updates)
• update status on multiple targets (backpack journal / status, twitter, pownce etc)

If you are interested in this at all please have a look at the code and let me know if you are interested in using it or contributing. Oh and any / all feedback is great too.

(video source: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter)