The Post Money Value

Rent-A-Coder Fun - Follow Along

As I start my trek in Newfoundland chasing Icebergs, I thought I'd get a little coding project started: Cloning Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I've posted a job up on rentacoder.com which outlines a fairly easy requirement. I'm looking to get a native Mac application that is look and feel like Windows Live Writer. It doesn't have to share files or do anything particularly fancy, just the basics.

Assuming I can get it done where it can post stuff to this blog, I will release the source code into the wild and see what grows.

Stay tuned, should be fun.

Kindle Fun for the Whole Borders Family

I really like the Amazon Kindle. I have two, one as a loaner and one for personal use. It's a great way to carry stacks of books in a simple device for reading.  Just recently on a trip to the U.S., I took the device into a Borders bookstore.  There, at the new non-fiction table, I checked out the new books by looking at the covers, thumbing the book, etc, and -assuming I wanted it- ordered it on the spot via the Kindle's wireless connection. Lots of money saved.

After doing this twice, a store person came up, asked me what I was doing and after hearing my answer, got into a serious lather trying to stop me by explaining the store's policy against people grabbing 'pricing research'.  I thought that was a bit of stretch but admired the attempt at some type of response.

I made the suggestion to the manager who happened to come along that maybe having a Kiosk in here allowing me to locally download electronic copies either with my hard copy or as an alternative would allow them to make some money off of me.  Cut a deal with Sony for branded E-book devices they were hawking.  I knew, of course, this person had no control over the chain. 

The reaction was, however, funny and sad at the same time:

[Laughter] Right. I'm working for a technological backwater. If it was up to these people, we'd be using an abacus for checkout.  Use your Kindle all you like, I have one as well. Just buy something, I need this job.

Fun, eh?

More Lessons from Fruit - Habit Changes

I can't tell you the number of business plans that have, as a central  theme, this huge requirement to change somebody's habits.  In the course of discussing this issue with the entrepreneur, it becomes really hard to convince them that changing people's habits - forget perceptions- is a seriously non-trivial task.

A Workflow Example

Consider my previous blog point about Entourage and the back up issues, specifically the lack of what I called proper back up and archive services.  While I think it is a seriously bad problem, the Mac Operating System (Leopard) can somewhat deal with the situation BUT there is a habit change.

In Leopard, time machine is touted as basically system wide snapshots of your machine. If the machine is hooked up or connected over the air to a large hard drive, clones of the machine are made in the background on the external device. If something blows up, no problem, time travel back to the time you want and, presto, life is good.

No habit change for Time Machine, just turn it on. Easy enough.

With Entourage, well, that's another matter. In order to get this to all work correctly, you do have a few habit changes. First you have to use local folders (ie pull the data off the exchange server) and second, if you are a laptop guy (the MacBook Air in my case), you'll need to either remember to plug in that USB drive or buy the external device made by Apple which allows you to come home/office and have Time Machine see the device and start backing up over the air.

You can't just take a full snapshot of your machine in the state she is in with the shared/exchange folders only. If you do and then restore to a different time, the local changes get wiped out when you sync with the server as the exchange server always wins.

The Right Mouse Button (aka Secondary Click)

92% of the personal computing world uses, gets, and understands the right mouse button. Currently around 8% of the world is all about every way possible to avoid it.  Along comes the gestures in the track pad.  A two finger tap = the right mouse click. Brain dead simple, right? I've been showing this to PC folks and virtually all of them think it is an unnatural act. Comments like "that's not it is supposed to work" are repeated to me over and over.

Simple change in the face of big perceptions of what is 'supposed to be the right way.'

The lesson here for you is to watch carefully what habits/perceptions, no matter how small (or in my case how big) have to change when your product or service is used. 

They will impact your take up rate.

Memo to Harvard: Canada is NOT part of the U.S.

I'm standing here in The COOP which is the bookstore (I think) jointly representing Harvard and MIT. I'm in the U.S. Travel section. It has a great selection, in the U.S. Section, of Canadian travel books. In the U.S. Travel section. Harvard.... There is a sliver of hope. As I type this two others just walked up and started to rant at an employee on this very point.