HTML5 takes another huge step forward with Chrome Packaged Apps. Packaged Apps open-up the desktop to HTML5 developers. Reusing all of the skills mastered for the web and mobile, Packaged Apps empowers developers to create complete app experiences that can be run anywhere you find Chrome: Windows, Mac, Linux, and, of course, Chrome OS!
These apps do not run in a “browser.” They run as independent, standalone apps with their own shell. Chrome powers the entire experience, but for users, Packaged Apps are not a browser experience. They’re an app experience.
Another piece the my mosaic of ideas. This outtake from book “Anything You Want” by Derek Sivers resonates with my own thougts.
I am trying to propagate one obvious to me: Web apps are ideally positioned to be very successful in getting done a variety of jobs for businesses and make a lot of money along the way. For now, that seems uninteresting to others.
Thanks to Jiří Sekera for reminding me about this one.
I was fortunate enough to get to talk at Future of Web Apps + Future of Web Design double conference in Prague. First, I would like to thank to Future Insights (previously Carsonified) and personally to Cat Clark for the trust in me to give me the speakers wild card.
Bellow are my slides and complete text of my 30 minutes speech. I spoke from memory so I have probably digressed on a few places. Also, please, forgive any typos or grammatical errors I’m basically posting my notes and I had no time to do thorough proofreading.
The Economist: “In The World in 2013, which is published today, we predict that the internet will become a mostly mobile medium. Who will be the winners and losers?”.
I firmly believe, now more than ever, that the tablet is taking the place in the hearts of many consumers as the new personal computer. This again cements in my mind the fact that this market will be much larger than the notebook and desktop market ever was and I believe even closer in size to the smartphone market than people realize.
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What I would be worried about if I am an Apple competitor is that the iPad and perhaps specifically the iPad Mini, becomes the tablet that large portions of the market cut their teeth on.
Enterprise customers have been locked into overpriced, underperforming software and equipment for a decade or more, and the’ve been loath to spend money to change things. But now it seems a huge transformation is about to occur, driven by mobile devices, cloud platforms and the software-as-a-service business model.
But his vision is too narrow. This is not just about building better products against SAP or Microsoft. This is about opening whole new market niches which couldn’t be approached before. Ultimately it will be about more than trillion dollars.
Coincidentally, I will be speaking about this next week at FOWA in Prague.
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
Good write-up of the thinking behind the basics of SaaS pricing models by Ray Grieselhuber.
As a startup, if you want to survive, you have to pick a model. Everybody starts off by thinking they are low on the complexity scale (“our product is simple!”) so they believe self-service is an efficient model for them. But complexity, in this discussion, has nothing to do with simplicity in the user experience (elusive in its own right) but the complexity of your user acquisition and total cost of service.
The market is changing so quickly and the value is so enormous in the marketplace. This is the future of computing and I’m not saying just personal computing I’m saying all computing. This is in many ways the future of civilization and how money is made. The stakes could not be higher.
Some good thinking done by Chris Norström. Solves the confusion of the classical “iPhone slider”, where you are not sure if the visible status (OFF) is the active one, or you have to switch to get to it.
You get all the Bootstrap UI element but even better, you get all the great Glyphicons not as PNGs but as Omnigraffle shapes allowing you to resize them without losing quality and to color them or doing anything else you could do with a shape.
All in all, this is my new favourite wireframing stencil.
Quick tip: To install, just drag the stencil file to the OmniGraffle icon at the Dock. Then just press Cmd + 0 to show the Stencils panel.
Article written by Kontra and goes along these lines.
Apple’s software problems aren’t dark linen, Corinthian leather or torn paper. In fact, Apple’s software problems aren’t much about aesthetics at all… they are mostly about experience. To paraphrase Ive’s former boss, Apple’s software problems aren’t about how they look, but how they work.
I love Ive’s speech on the Steve’s life celebration event they had at Apple campus in October 2011. Especially the beginning of it.
Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”
And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.
And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
This may sound a bit too abstract to you, let me provide you with more tangible example.
Famously, when Albert Einstein was struggling to extend his special theory of relativity to gravity, he at one time imagined a man falling from the roof who is not feeling his own weight.
So what? Everyone knows that one feels weightless when falling. Well, that is why we call Albert a genius, because he was able to glimpse something important, something deep, in this piece of everyday obviousness.
The thing is, when a man falling does not feel gravity, it is really the acceleration that provides the equivalence here. And he then kept working from this perspective. He worked on it hard. Like I mean really, really hard. For eight freaking years he worked on it. He worked on it so hard that at the end he was physically exhausted and ill.
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
— Albert Einstein
The result? Total change of our view of the universe. There is actually no such thing as gravity. It is all warping of space and time.
The Takeaway
Be careful with your simple ideas, be protective of them, work on them. Work on them for much longer than others do. Stay with them beyond the easy first conclusion you might have made. You will probably not change our view of the whole universe, but you may change the world and that’s not too shabby either.
The trouble with this approach is that you have to be able to pick the right ideas or be able to recognize when you are on the wrong path with one.
Which brings me back to Steve when he answered the question “How do you know what’s the right direction?” in The Lost interview (time 01:06:20), he said (after a pause to think):
You know, ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying, he said: Good artists copy, great artists steal.
” by Derek Sivers resonates with my own 
