Jess McMullin has posted an interview he did with me a few weeks back, on his bplusd blog (a very good read all around). We touched on a lot of different topics in our 45 minute conversation, which he summarizes as:

• Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
• Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
• Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
• Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
• Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

 It was a lot of fun to do, thanks to Jess for suggesting it and putting the effort into doing it. You can download the full mp3 from his site.

MacWorld has been running a series of reviews comparing Microsoft Office 2008 to Apple’s iWork suite and they have been pretty bizarre in their perspectives. As someone who is a longtime Office user (both on Mac and PC) and who has been using iWork for the last few months for Keynote and Numbers, it’s been frustrating to read them as they seem to have missed the boat on some pretty fundamental things (and strangely for a Mac publication, in a non Mac friendly way).

Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m a fan of Apple products, but I’m not a “fan boy”, and I use XP with Parallels every day, as Outlook is clearly superior to Entourage and Powerpoint on PC is clearly superior for production on a PC than on the Mac (Mac version is better for presenting however).

I haven’t really used Pages so I’m not going to comment on that, but Numbers and, in particular Keynote, I’m now quite familiar with. Using my complaints about the MacWorld article as an excuse, here are some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up for a while on these two applications.

Numbers/Excel

 

I have to say that I’m not a big fan of Excel, but I know plenty of people are, and I work with many who are Excel power users and appreciate its capabilities for dealing with very complex analysis. My typical needs are much simpler, and I also often use a spreadsheet for personal use to collect and compare information about purchases, for example at the moment I have one going about different camera lenses (picture above). Excel also has some interface annoyances that I don’t like, for example:

• When you “cut” a cell, it doesn’t actually get cut until you paste it, thus violating the rule that other apps go by
• When you copy and paste a cell, it takes the style formatting of the cell, when 99% of the time all I want is the content. This usually then requires and additional step to fix the formatting for the pasted cell. (If cutting, I also have to go back and re-do the formatting for the one I cut from).
  

Numbers fixes these and goes on to address some other things:

• Including pictures into Numbers is nice and simple, with the alignment guides present in all iWork apps, which makes using it more fluid. Pictures can live outside the grid so you can easily place them wherever you want in relation to data just by dragging the picture or the sheet itself around.
  
• MacWorld complains about how Numbers doesn’t warn you if you try to drag a cell onto on already populated cell, as Excel does. Fair enough, but Numbers if far better about being able to drag stuff around on the sheet, whereas Excel again ignores typical drag/drop conventions. (And what other app warns you about replacing something with something else? How annoying would it be if Word did that? That’s what the undo key is for, it’s not a big deal.)
  
• MacWorld complains that Numbers doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut for adding a line above a range of cells. True, but it does have a one-button click for achieving that. And how often do you have to do that anyway?
• They complain about the automatic summing capability in Numbers, but I can’t see any difference in how they function
• Last, and most significant, they miss the point entirely about what Numbers is trying to do, or rather not trying to do. It is not trying to beat Excel at the power-user game. It is explicitly intended for “average” users doing relatively straightforward things, and who have common tasks like home or small business budgeting, making purchase decision comparisons, etc. The templates it provides for this are infinitely better than Excels (and not just on aesthetics). The multi-table in a sheet concept that it uses is brilliant, and makes working with multiple types of data in a single view much more fluid. True, it does make freezing panes impossible (conceptually it’s hard to see how this will work), but it offers so many other things in comparison. The Excel reviewer leaves a comment to the review about how a “moderately sized” spreadsheet of 3000 cells by 40 cells bogged down Numbers. Dear God, how many people work with that size of spreadsheet other than power users? Completely misses the point of what Numbers is aiming for.
  

Keynote/Powerpoint

For all the valid bitching about Powerpoint presentations, I appreciate the things that this workhorse application does well. However, Keynote’s visual style and production capabilities have won me over and it is now my default tool unless I’m worried about some exotic compatibility issues with Powerpoint users down the road. Of the three iWork apps it’s the one that goes most toe-to-toe in terms of conceptually attacking the same goal.

The things I appreciate about Keynote are:

• Despite MacWorld’s protestations to the opposite, I feel Keynote’s handling of themes and layouts is far superior to Powerpoint, and makes managing a lot of masters far simpler. It’s very easy to tell which pages have which masters (and to change them), and its method for grouping masters makes them conceptually simpler. I also like how I can apply master rules to just a single item on a page, not just the whole page.
  
• The automatic alignment lines are a god-send and make putting together multiple elements on a page a snap and is a huge timesaver over Powerpoints finicky grid and snap capabilities. This was not even mentioned in the MacWorld article, but is one of those things that makes a big difference to someone who puts together decks almost every day like I do.
• MacWorld did not talk about how Keynote allows subgroupings of slides in the “flimstrip” mode which makes crafting a narrative arc of a presentation much easier, essentially creating chapters. Powerpoint still has rather primitive story-telling tools. Again a seemingly small feature but one that is a big help if you use the app frequently.
• Keynote’s thumbnails are much clearer, and making scanning the flow of a document actually possible in the light-table view, another workflow improvement
  
• Per-paragraph line spacing and tabs (Powerpoint treats all text in a text box the same). Avoids having to create multiple text boxes in many cases.
• Auto-flow columns of text
  
• The article does mention Keynote’s  path animation tools, and I’ve used these to create quick and dirty UI mock-up animations.
• The instant alpha tool is brilliant, and since I use a lot of images in presentations it is a big time saver by avoiding a roundtrip through Photoshop (though Leapard’s Preview tool can do many of the things I would have used Photoshop for in the past).
  
• I’ve found PPT imports to be almost flawless, and almost equally flawless on export (assuming you’re not doing transitions that are not cross-compatible)
• The flexibility of the presenter display is very nice, and the dual clock (actual time) and timer (elapsed time) are great, though I wish they didn’t have seconds, mostly I’m concerned just with hours and minutes. It’s also nice that the timer doesn’t start until the first mouse click (so that the title slide can be up for a while, which often happens before a talk). It would be great to pause the timer while in rehearsal mode, or to reset it. Skipping to other slides in the presentation is not as intuitive at Powerpoint, however it definitely can be done and is easy once learned.
  

Having said that there are some downsides to Keynote that bug me:

• The page is always stuck to the top-left corner of the artboard, which is both visually distracting and means that objects getting animated in from the left or top can’t be accessed.
• There are not enough zoom steps (MacWorld mentions this too)
•  Items have to be ungrouped before properties (text size, fill etc.) can be adjusted, even if all the objects in the group have those properties in common. Also, I do miss Powerpoint’s “regroup” function.
• Its image mask tool (cropping) drives me batty, and requires several steps for cropping a single side, which Powerpoint sensibly only needs one step to do.
• I’d prefer it if drawing lines took place in the usual point-to-point drawing method, rather than dropping a default line on the page that is sure to be wrong, and always requiring multiple steps to get it how I want.
• Music can be on one slide, or carry through a whole show, but it can’t be started on one slide and stopped on another. This is a pretty glaring omission given how well Keynote handles other multimedia functions.
  

Overall, however, the workflow and visual capabilities of both Numbers and Keynote outweigh their relatively minor (for me) problems. They have bumped Powerpoint and Excel off my dock, only Word still soldiers on (and I use Nisus Writer Pro for personal writing anyway…)

Listening to a radio program this morning about the possible Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Cnet’s Michael Kanellos argued that one of Yahoo’s problems has been its inability to kill off unsuccessful properties. Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social networking tool and Google Video (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well). 

To be fair to Yahoo, they have recently stopped Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just today announced they are selling their music service to Rhapsody. But it’s also fair to say that Yahoo has gone beyond being a “one stop shop” (1990’s portal thinking) to a company that neither employees nor customers really know what it is about. I would tend to agree with Kanellos that an unwillingness to draw boundaries around what’s in and what’s out has a good deal to do with that. (Full disclosure: both Yahoo and Microsoft are clients of frog design, where I work, though I have no inside knowledge of the merger at all.)

In the book Code Name Ginger which chronicled the development of the Segway Transporter, there was a great phrase — “drowning puppies” — that describes the mindset necessary when tackling innovative products and services.

The challenge is this: you’ll have lots of great ideas, but you will only be able to expend finite resources to bring a small number of them to market. If you try to spread resources across them all, they will all be starved and unhealthy. So you have to prioritize and not fund some of them. This is very difficult because, just like puppies, these ideas bounce around joyfully and are so shiny and perfect and full of future growth and promise. But the sad fact is you have to drown some of your puppies. It’s a harsh phrase, but accurate.

Yahoo has continued adding property on property, service on service, but has not done enough drowning of puppies to allow shifting away from less successful areas. Regardless of whether the merger happens or not, let’s hope they can regain some of their focus both for their employees and their customers.

A brief run through MacWorld gave two major impressions:

1. It was packed. Even more crowded than CES (though much smaller of course)
2. The signal-to-noise ratio of interesting products was way better than CES

Let’s take a look at some of the things that caught my interest from a design point of view, starting with Apple.

Apple

The MacBook Air really is quite breathtaking. It feels great in the hand, and the break from pure rectangular geometry makes it more interesting to tumble in your hands. It’s sort of a giant iPod, taking on the pillowed look. The corner radii are much larger than previous MacBooks, giving it a softer aesthetic. I had been wondering when Apple’s designers would get tired of the strict geometric style and start to branch out - this appears to be it.

For someone (not unlike myself) who spends quite a bit of time in transit and on planes, the light weight and small size (won’t get squished by the airplane seat in front of you crashing back) are perfect. While many have expressed their opinions about where Apple should have left in/cut features, my one quibble is with the exclusion of an ethernet port. Yes, there’s a dongle adapter (extra $), but it’s one more thing to remember and carry for those still common hotels that don’t have wireless. And since it only has one USB connector, it will tie that up, so you’ll have a choice of ethernet or, say, usb key. Also, it requires a video out adaptor, but I carry one of those anyway for VGA projectors.

The MBA is another example of Apple pushing the envelope on connectivity and data transfer methods. The original Mac adopted the nascent 3.5” floppy disk, Apple was one of the first to adopt 802.11, it switched to USB and dropped legacy proprietary connectors, and it created the Firewire standard (which made it slow to adopt USB 2…). Every time people have complained that the sky is falling, but each time Apple has judged the timing just right and has hit the adoption curve at the right point, and it all works out.

Belkin

 

Here’s something blasphemous: My favorite booth at MacWorld was not Apple’s, but Belkin’s. It knocked my socks off.

Think back a few years: Belkin was a ho-hum manufacturer of unsexy cables and nondescript PC accessories. Then came the iPod and they recognized a good thing when they saw it. They jumped on the iPod shooting star and produced a nice line of interesting, well thought out accessories. But essentially they outsourced their aesthetic to the iPod, piggybacking visually as well as functionally on that core device.

Now Belkin is turning into a design and innovation powerhouse in its own right.

In their attractive booth they were showing an amazingly wide array of products, from a hip messenger bag, an HD TV “beamer”, a Skype phone, and Podcast Studio. All were interesting, stylish, well-made with nice materials and fit and finish, and an emerging aesthetic that, while not totally unique, is starting to create a strong Belkin personality.

One that caught my eye because of its genuine innovation in a totally boring product was their Conserve Surge Protector. It is a thin 8 outlet surge protector (stifled yawn)…with a remote control. Huh? Actually it’s brilliant: You use the remote to turn off the powerstrip when you don’t want it sucking vampire energy. The remote can be used to control one or multiple strips (they have selectable RF channels), so conceivably you could turn off a whole bunch of them in one go in an office or house.

There are two non-switched outlets so you can turn off your energy sucking plasma and leave your TV on to record The Colbert Report. Ironically the power strip itself becomes a source of vampire energy, but it is far less than what is connected to it.

Lastly, the remote looks like a giant on-off switch, about the size of a playing card. It can be attached to a wall-mount, so you don’t have to worry about losing it:

Let’s hope Belkin can keep up this pace. My hat is off to them.

OmniGroup

OmniGroup is one of my favorite Mac application developers. They make slightly niche, slightly quirky, but always very well crafted and innovative applications that take full advantage of the technologies built into the OS. Omni were showing off their new OmniFocus application, for those who are fans of the GTD approach to task management.

They were also showing (in beta) version 5 of their oddly-named but wonderful application OmniGraffle. This is usually described as diagramming application similar to Visio, but this does its wide range of applications an injustice. I use OmniGraffle all the time for all manner of activities, from resource tracking to brainstorming to creating quick and dirty websites. At frog design it is used by many folks for more traditional information design and taskflow analysis.

Version 5 fixes some of the small niggles from the previous rev, like how the automatic hierarchical tree building works (think org charts). But it also introduces new features like true beziers, improved master pages, a dramatically improved stencil management palette, and an overall streamlined interface that should make working in it significantly faster, especially if on a laptop (goodbye floating palettes).

Crumpler

I stumbled onto this booth and was immediately enchanted by the Escher meets Bruegel imagery and cardboard castle look. What could it be? There was no name on the outside, so you had to go in to find out. Hmm, sneaky…

 

Ah, of course, it’s those whacky people from Crumpler, who make camera bags with names like Six Million Dollar Home. So the outside continues their irreverent and (apparently) random approach to branding themselves. But if you do random consistently and rigorously, it somehow comes together.

By the way, if you look closely at the outside you’ll see the Crumpler logo, as well as James Bond’s white Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me.

 

 

As 2007 comes to a close, here is my eclectic, contrarian, and surely incomplete list of favorite things that appeared or I discovered in 2007.

Software

Nisus Writer Pro: My bar-none favorite word processor. The Pro version was introduced this year as a step up from the Express version that’s been around for a few years. It’s deceptively simple looking, yet smoothly incorporates a robust feature set with an elegant interface and beautiful display of type. As a processor of words (as opposed to wannabe page layout app) it is unparalleled. If you are in the wordsmithing business, try this app.

Journler: This app has been out for a while but I just started using it this year. It is one of the few apps other than Camino that I keep open 24/7. See my earlier review (note that Journler is switching from a donation to paid model)

Numbers and Keynote: These two apps are part of iWork 07, Apple’s “productivity” suite that somewhat competes with Microsoft Office. At $79 for three apps it’s a screaming deal. Since I don’t use Pages (see Nisus Pro above…) Numbers and Keynote have been the two standouts for me. At last someone has taken a fresh look at the spreadsheet, and Numbers succeeds brilliantly. Yes it is missing some power functions, but it is aiming at a pro-sumer audience and for that it is perfect. Finally, someone has done cut/paste correctly - Excel’s method of doing this standard operation has always grated on me where the cut doesn’t take effect until the paste has been done.

While not perfect and with some frustrating oddities, the new version of Keynote brings some excellent features like easy to use path-based animation, new evocative canned animations and transitions, and instant alpha masking. But it also has important small features that improve productivity, like per-paragraph formatting (as opposed to Powerpoint’s per-text-block), groupings of slides in the flimstrip, and object-locking. (This version of Kenote addresses some of my complaints about Powerpoint.)

Squarespace 4.0+: This blog runs on the Squarespace platform, and the new versions released this year have brought excellent new capabilities in site search, statistics reporting, as well as overall refinements. I’ve used several other hosted and non-hosted blogging platforms and Squarespace trumps them all in its ease of use, UI elegance, and personal customer service.

Hardware

Pentax K10D: Everybody else will have the iPhone on their lists (and rightly so), so I’m going orthogonally here to recognize a prosumer digital SLR from a second-tier camera maker. The K10D brought high end features like weather sealing, anti-shake in the body, lots of AF points, large viewfinder, built-in DNG support, and a novel approach to ISO adjustment to a new low price level (under $600 now). Plus I think it is the most handsome of today’s 10 megapixel SLRs, and has excellent ergonomics. It’s shown here with one of Pentax’s unique “pancake” lenses that are great for street photography.

Media and Events

The Decemberists, The Crane Wife. Strictly speaking this came out toward the end of 2006, but I didn’t hear it til early 07. It’s been on my “turntable” steadily all year and has remained fresh and interesting.
Children of Men: It’s been a good year for apocalypse movies, kicked off with the stunning Children of Men. Layered with meaning and symbols, and a tension-filled story to propel it along, and great performances all around. Peter Merholz wrote up a good review.
Charlie Wilson’s War: Who would have thought that insider deal making and arms deals could be so uproariously funny? This movie had the audience in stitches, while driving home some hard lessons about not “fucking up the endgame” as Wilson puts it in the closing titles. Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman are at the top of their game.
Made to Stick: At once common sense and profound, this book is a must-read for anyone that has to communicate complex ideas and motivate others to action. Read my earlier review.
Nobel Peace Prize: 2007 was a tipping point in environmental awareness, and the joint awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change was a key contributor. It will be looked back upon as a turning point in mass consciousness.

 

Cars

Fiat Cinquecento: Finally a car to truly challenge the small-car crown of the MINI. To see one is to want one. Will they bring it to the US? Let’s hope so. (Review)
Alfa Romeo Competizione 8c: Just beautiful. How much is it? Who cares? (Official site)
Audi TT: Pictures of this had left me cold, but seeing it in person is another story. Not as iconic as the original, but it evolves the form in a sophisticated way. (Official site)