I’m excited to say that myself and my colleague from frog design, Tim Leberecht, are now blogging on Cnet. Our blog, Matter/Anti-Matter is one of Cnet’s network of blogs. We’ve left it pretty open what we are going to be talking about, preferring to let it emerge over time, but loosely speaking we are focusing on convergence of products, services and the web. Physical and the non-physical, get it?

But we’ll also be looking at divergence - how companies have to be constantly looking outside their core business for new opportunities. It’s this mix of convergence and divergence that is creating so much of the creative energy in today’s economy. Companies must be converging and diverging simultaneously, coming together and apart, like matter and anti-matter reacting when they come in contact.

Check it out and join us as we figure it out!

(By the way, forgive the goofy picture of us that’s there as of 9/25. We’re trying to get it fixed…) 

(Tim also has his own eclectic blog, iPlot.) 

I started using an application called Journler a few months back and if you’re like me in that you have to constantly keep track of lots of small pieces of information, notes, and documents, you should check it out. (It is Mac OS only.)

I keep Journler open 24/7. Whatever I’m thinking about or need to remember (other than calendar/to-do’s) goes into it. If I didn’t have it, I would be far less organized and efficient.

I’d been using Chronos’ SOHO Notes for several years for the same purpose, but got fed up with the difficulty of transferring the database from one machine to another, which I unfortunately had to do several times in a row due to some flaky MacBook Pro’s. So I sought out another solution and came across Journler, and overall it does the job at least as well as SOHO Notes for much less money, and with a much more responsive user community and developer, and in general feels more stable than SOHO Notes. It also gets updated far more regularly.

Basically Journler allows you to keep all kinds of things - text, photos, pdfs, audio, web pages - together in a single organized structure that is easily searchable. It saves me time by not having to think too much about where to save a miscellaneous item, and worry that I won’t be able to find it again later.

There’s no way I can catalog all the capabilities and features that Journler has, so extensive are they, but here are a few things I do with it:

• Take meeting and call notes. Journler is great for this because everything you type is saved continuously, you don’t need to worry about losing notes. The notes of course are easily searchable and sortable. Journler by default sorts everything chronologically, so you can easily go back to something that you can’t remember what it was called but you know you wrote it some time in the previous week.
  
• Keeping track of work-related industry data and analysis. I ingest pdfs and websites (which get cached complete with images, formatting and links) so that I don’t have to worry about bookmarking or losing them
• Notes for blog postings and articles. Again, constantly saved so worry-free. Journler has blog integration so you can post directly to certain types of blogs (though I can’t get it to work with the Squarespace service I use).
• Quotations and anecdotes to sprinkle into presentations
• Packing list for traveling
• Job candidate interview notes
  

Journler has pretty good text editing tools, taking full advantage of OS X’s capabilities here. Lists, paragraph formatting, text highlighting are all easily done. Tables can be inserted. Photos and video can be captured using an iSight camera. Audio annotations can be inserted using the microphone. Journler taps into the iLife media library if you use that. Frequently needed notes can be bookmarked for instant access. Notes can be inter-linked and documents can be attached to a note.

Notes can be sorted into manually created folders, and you can also make Smart Folders just like in iTunes based on criteria. For example I have one folder called Meeting Notes that looks for any note tagged with “meeting note” (tags autocomplete by the way) and brings it in, regardless of what context it was in. 

Journler is very fast at searching. It can search inside pdfs, so even finding obscure references inside documents is not a problem. It is also very good at ranking results so I often find things I’d forgotten that I even had. Very handy when going through my collection of analyst reports and trend articles. You can organize things by folders, categories or tags, which gives a lot of flexibility (perhaps too much). Word searches can be done, and Journler also offers a criteria/text-based filtering mechanism similar to OS X’s Finder.

The one thing I miss the most from SOHO Notes that Journler has no equivalent for was its drawer that popped out from the side of the screen that stored every item you ever placed on the system clipboard (i.e. cut/copy items). It was super handy when having to take a bunch of stuff from one document to another. But there are other solutions that do just this, so it’s not a show-stopper. The only other thing I miss is Notes’ full-screen mode that just has the text of the note you are working on on-screen, and blocks out everything else. It’s great for distraction-free thought.

But Journler is also only $10 as a donation. It’s really stunning what developer Philip Dow is able to pull of for that.

If you want a broader overview of applications that do similar things to Journler, here’s a nice review. As the author says: 

Journler is an incredible bargain, and my hat is off to the developer who’s building this marvelous package. Journler is a cornucopia of Cocoa and Mac OS X goodies, and it takes advantage of every opportunity Apple’s engineers are providing to extend Mac software to the latest and greatest possibilities. Just a quick look at the full range of Journler’s capabilities makes me drool about its potential, and I’m in awe of the programmer’s skills and his generosity in making this hard work available for free.

Journler website 

Chronos SOHO Notes 

There are a couple of people I’ve been trying to catch up with for a while who I’ve lost track of and can’t find them via the usual means. I figured I’d try crowdsourcing here, if you don’t mind.

First person is Jonathon Hayes. He was the industrial designer on the Xbox 360 but has since left Microsoft and I think is now an independent consultant. He interned at Sun Microsystems while I was there in the early 90’s.

The second person is Takuya Kawagoi. Last time I was in touch with him he was creative director at Sony Ericsson in London, but I believe has gone back to the Sony mothership and may or may not be still there. 

If any of you happen to know how to get a hold of these guys, please email me at richardsona at mac dot com.

Thanks! 

I just finished reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, and if you are in the business of having to present ideas to others and get them acted on (and if you read this blog you probably are), then you need to read this book.

Authors/brothers Chip and Dan Heath have put together one of the most succinct and valuable resources for helping communicate ideas effectively and inspiring others to action. They have a simple mnemonic to help remember the vital elements (and they admit it’s a bit corny): SUCCESs:

• Simple: Strip away all the cruft and get at the core idea. Easy to say, hard to do. What often gets in the way here is what they call “The Curse of Knowledge” - knowledge that is in the head of the person trying to communicate the idea. This tends to make people add to much detail, but also leave out the basic underlying message which for them is a given (but is non-obvious to someone unfamiliar with the idea).
• Unexpected: Shake people out of their expected conventions of thinking. This doesn’t have to be earth shattering, but crafting of the message in such a way that the problem you are trying to solve becomes more stark is important.
• Concrete: Engage the emotional as well as the rational when communicating by making the problem tangible: use props, scenarios, prototypes, familiar examples. Make it personal.
• Credible: Through appropriate use of details you bring credibility to an idea so that it can stand on its own and be repeatable to others. The ideas should punctuate the broader idea, but your story can’t just be a collection of details. Outside experts can provide credibility and details, or the details may come from personal experience.
• Emotional: Understand how people’s emotions induce or inhibit them from action, whether it be because of self-interest or altruism
• Stories: Stories have an amazing power to inspire and galvanize people into action, more than seems rationally possible. Including stories as part of your message makes it more engaging, lively, and ultimately more impactful. Keep the stories short, like parables (the Good Samaritan parable for example), as these are easily memorized durable and portable nuggets that can be passed from person to person. People are very good at abstracting principles out of stories, so they are an efficient communication tool.
  

I have to admit I was skeptical going into this book as I’m not usually a fan of business/pop-psychology writing that strings together a bunch of anecdotes as it often misses an analytical framework that helps you abstract it to your particular situation. But the Heaths do a good job of providing that framework, and the many, many anecdotes that they have serve that. Not all the chapters are as good as the others - the ones on credibility and emotion are not quite as strong - but you come out at the end of it with a sense that you have really learned how to communicate complex ideas more effectively.

Made to Stick website

Made to Stick on Amazon 

Take a few minutes out of your day and look at this beautifully made and choreographed computer animation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It exposes the structural underpinnings and gives a wonderful 360 degree view of the structure that shows it off better than any photo that I’ve ever seen.

Watch the video

See still renderings and surface wires

Modeled, rendered and animated in Luxology Modo on a Mac. 

Tip of the hat to the ever vigilent Dan Hill at City of Sound.