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September 29, 2007
Strengths Finder 2.0 test results
I just took the Strengths Finder 2.0 test, here are my results:
Command
Self-Assurance
Activator
Individualization
Achiever
Reading this list, I start to wonder if they are trying to say "You are a cocky S.O.B." Off to read the meanings.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
How I would change Adium
A trip through the past
So I've been working on Adium for what, 4 years now, as a Project Manager (part of that time was not as a PM). In that time, I've always tried to pin down what the next priorities are. In general these items would be really chaotic, and would require consulting all of the development team. Priorities for Adium were based on the needs of the development team, and more important, significant others of the development team.
For instance, when Evan's girlfriend (at the time) wanted a specific feature that we had said no to for years, he made it the next day. And thus, priorities change. Evan is the Lead Developer, and true Project Lead for Adium, for those who need to know.
This has worked well for years. There aren't too many people working on Adium at any given time, roughly we hang around 5-7 dedicated folks working on Adium, in their spare time, doing whatever it is that they feel is necessary. This could be for themselves, or it could be for someone else.
About 2 years ago I started to question this whole line of thought. The then Project Lead, and Co-Lead Dev, Adam Iser, also questioned this, so we started discussing things. What would it take to change Adium in such a way that it would make us truly happy again. I've said this a few times, but I've been happy with Adium since before .50, everything else since then has been icing. If you follow that analogy, we've got about 5 miles of icing put on top since then.
So what did Adam and I discuss? A lot of things, but we kept coming back to the 80/20 rule, and how it applied very well to what we were wanting. Later on I found out that the Trac project goes so far as to do a 90/10 rule. Basically this means that anything you add or change should be relevant to 80 percent, or in the case of Trac, 90 percent, of your audience.
I hadn't really thought about this for about six months or so. Previously I had been discussing this with David, I would try to explain it, but I wasn't doing a very good job. He asked me to type something up. A discussion I had on #macsb on freenode with Daniel Jalkut, maker of MarsEdit 2 (what I'm using to type this post) about this very thing. His stance is that he'd prefer that people in general try using desktop applications for blogging, but that'd he'd prefer to make MarsEdit polished, and not win on features. I believe this is the same sentiment that Adam and I were expressing to each other, but not in so few words.
Rawr
Adam went so far as to make some mockups, which I critiqued. We went back and forth, him showing me a png, my commenting, his refining. We nicknamed it Rawr. The results were the following:
Chat Window
Buddies Pane
(ignore the unified buttons in the toolbar)
Some concepts just won't die
During this period Adam and I both believed that the contact list/buddy list is a very old concept that, well, sucks. My opinion of it hasn't changed much in recent years. So why is that?
At least with Adium, people are constantly constantly changing their contact list so that it blends into their desktop, hiding it in plain sight. Other people need it to look like a standard contact list, like this one:
Standard Contact List
To me this was just something that people with smaller contact lists would use. If you become what is referred to as a heavy instant messenger user, with something around 300+ buddies, then it starts to become unwieldy. You can tack on things like search fields and status sorting, but in all reality this just feels like a kludge.
The Nitty Gritty
So what did we think was important to people? Well, a few things. Hence:
So how would I change Adium, I've always wondered that.
Here is my short list of things I would change about Adium:
1) We would no longer have a contact list. Period. A long thin list of contacts is hard to manage conceptually beyond 50 contacts. I have trouble finding the person I want to IM right away. For the five or six people I want to know about all of the time, I'm more likely to open a tab with them in it than to do anything else.
2) I would change the focus. I would emphasize the developer/SO thing more, actually. I would ignore requests from anyone except for this small sample audience. Bug reports, fine, fix the bugs, but don't implement things that your core audience does not need.
Believe it or not, this wouldn't be so bad.
3) Scrap everything. I don't mean throw away code we have, I mean remove any non-essential functionality. Come back to the core of what IM'ing really is. Everything that someone wants that doesn't fit what the devs/SO's need would be put into a third party plugin.
Trac does something similar to this with their trac-hacks website (it's currently down or I'd link to it). They have a huge list of add-ons that make Trac work better in general, and only implement the functionality that they believe 90% of everyone would use. Some people find this weird, but it's not hard to install a plugin.
4) I'd work on polish more. We recently dropped 10.3 support, with 1.1. To me that means we can finally start adding functionality that is 10.4+ without having to maintain 10.3 failure checking code, and all sorts of other stuff.
This also means that we get to move to 10.5+ only as quickly as possible. If none of the devs have 10.4, why support it?
5) Change the UI to match up more with the Rawr mockups. Keep a buddy bar of some kind for the 5 or 6 people you typically care about, and then put the rest of the contacts into a bookmarks looking UI. Setup smart groups, and you have a winning combination for finding contacts easily.
6) Go prefsless. Seriously. Get Adium down to not requiring any preferences whatsoever. After this is done, keep it that way.
7) Move stuff out of the menus that are no longer applicable. Remove stuff in the menus that could be confusing.
Now, this would never happen, because what we have now is what makes Adium awesome. However, what if we had an Adium-Lite? Basically the same back end infrastructure, but really parred down to the nuts and bolts of things. This is what I thought would be useful about 4 months ago, but I have since changed my mind in that it may just be a distraction. I don't know if that'd be useful or not. It'd be interesting to try it though.
It's an interesting quandary to think about, and to be in. About 2 years ago we changed away from our featureset being ruled by "so many features you'll crap your pants" to "a good balance to be the most awesome IM client, period". I think we've achieved a lot of the latter in the last 2 years. Yes, Voice and Video are coming, sooner or later (I get so much crap for this one at work, they think it's funny!).
Anyhow, so what do you folks think? Would an Adium-Lite be something that would be useful? Maybe the IM client for your mom type situation? I've gone over and over on this, and I'm not sure where it would fit, but I think it'd be useful.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 12:20 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
September 24, 2007
My whole belief system is destroyed
Since I was the age of 5, I have always held 2 things to be completely and utterly the truth. Recently I found that, in fact, this was not the case.
It all came about one day while at work. It was a normal day in Houston. Hot, yet exciting. I quickly got dressed after waking, left to work, badged into the parking garage, walked to the elevators, badged in at the elevator, rode the elevator up to the floor, got out, badged into the doors, and got to my desk.
It was at this point that I realized that I was hungry. I discussed this with a coworker, as I typically did when hungry in the early morning in order to gather a large list of foodings to gather for the people there, in order to make a single trip.
However, on this occasion, I was shocked. The person I spoke with, we'll call him "Chad", because that's his name, Chad said to me "Why not try a plum?". He of course was referring to the fruit bowl located in the kitchen area. I retorted to him "My god man, that's purple fruit!".
This is when I revealed to him my dark past. For I, along with tens of others (my rough estimate, based on a poll in first grade) had decided long ago that...
Yellow and Purple Fruits and Vegetables are the Greatest Evil known to Man.
After this rebuttal to a seemingly innocent suggestion, Chad responded with "What about eggplant?" I responded with "Tried it, evil."
"Squash?" "Ugh" "No corn?" "No, corn is disgusting." "What about grapes?"
This was indeed a valid question. I quickly said "I love grapes. Green grapes. However, purple grapes taste different, and I tend to avoid them."
He then told me to "Just eat the damned plum." So I did.
My god.
The experience of trying the plum sent shock waves through me. The plum was sweet, but not too sweet. It had substance to it. In fact, it was as good as a kiwi fruit. Had my boyhood friends lied to me about the evils of yellow and purple fruits and vegetables?!
I expressed my disbelief for days after. Shortly after that, I came to realize this:
Yellow Fruits and Vegetables are the root of All Evil. Some Purple Fruits and Vegetables are the Armies of Darkness
I explained this to Chad. He responded that he had work to be done, and no time for such silliness, but I could see in his eyes that he, in fact, was in agreement. He knew the Yellow and Purple ones were listening.
Soon we will need to strike down all of the Yellow and Purple Fruits and Vegetables who oppose human kind. Will you join the struggle, or will you sit on the sidelines eating your yogurt?
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 05:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 10, 2007
Music Video in Growl 1.1.
So with the release of Growl 1.1, there's kinda this problem with Music Video. It can take a full second to get onto/off screen, rather than .3 seconds. We never noticed this in testing, but it's turned into something that people are going back to .7.6 for.
As such, we're going to put out 1.1.1 sooner than expected. This thread on the group explains the problem in detail.
Evan just fixed the problem today. We're going to put a release of 1.1.1 out after we can test it. This will also include some localization fixes, and a fix for installing on a non-English system.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2007
Natuba
So I've started using something called Natuba.
I think this is a great idea. I no longer have to give someone 20 urls to stuff I want them to see, when I can just hand them 1 url. So instead of going "oh, here's my facebook, and my myspace and my friendster, and my twitter" if I had all of those, I could just point them at this one page just for me:
With social networking sites, it seems that all the cool kids switch between sites almost hourly. This seems like a good way to keep up with a person without having to know every little site they switch up to. Very nice.
Also, I'm trying out marsedit 2. So far, it's pretty nice, very easy to use. Worth looking into.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 02:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Growl Global Positioning System
So with Growl 1.1 the single biggest feature took about 2 years to make. I made a point of making sure this was in the changelog, the knowledge that it took 2 years is something that should either make users proud that we worked on it for so long to perfect it, or scared that we did, or just go "wtf". This guy certainly did the wtf (on tuaw and on macupdate). Gruber also did a wtf at the name.
So I guess I should explain what it does. Actually, it's pretty geeky. In 0.7.6 we had Growl just firing notifications. However, you couldn't tell it where to put notifications (except for bezel). Plus, notifications from different styles would overlap each other, so say if you had Adium and Cyberduck notifying you with different styles at the same time, one would post on top of the other. From a usability perspective.. well, there was no usability.
The really neat bit is how we resolved that. Growl now not only knows where a notification is, but it also understands that there are sections of the screen. So each of the options to select to display to is a section Growl knows about. It knows how to reserve a section of the screen for usage by one notification, and if another notification of a different size needs to be displayed, it knows if it has room, reserves it based on some logic, and then displays it.
Plus! We made it so that if one row filled up, it would go over to the side and start a new row, rather than continuing down the row and into emptyness. This would be really bad if you got a lot of sticky notifications at once (notifications that stay on screen until clicked) that appeared down in the unseeable/unclickable area below the viewable area of the screen. People who setup GrowlMail or something else to watch their email, and then get 400 notifications, know what I'm talking about here. It's a real memory issue, usability issue, and damn well sucked.
Plus! This system also is how we were able to allow users to specify different sections of the window to show off different displays. So say if I wanted Adium in the bottom left, and Cyberduck in the top right, I can do that. Scale that out to 30 apps, and it works pretty well.
So ya, that's what this does. Neat huh? It took so long to make due to the fact that it was pretty complicated, and also due to the fact that everyone who works on Growl does so in their free time. It was however unacceptable to release any kind of a 1.x release without something like this in it.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 01:04 PM | Comments (18)
Turning a dmg into an iso
I'm getting tired of repeating this on irc, and of people finding bad info on the web. Here is how you turn a dmg into an iso on OS X:
1) Open a terminal.
2) cd into the directory where the dmg is located
3) Type this in (where newfile is the name of the iso you want, and yourfilename.dmg is the dmg)
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -o newfile.iso yourfilename.dmg
(This was found by cbro and erasei on #macosx on efnet a long time ago).
If you are in #macosx on efnet and need this, type this command:
?? dmg2iso
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 01:48 AM | Comments (2)
September 08, 2007
Growl 1.1 is out
Growl 1.1 is out. It's been more than 2 years since we've released a major revision of Growl.
Specifically, this release is .8, .9, 1.0 and 1.1 all bundled into a single release. I hope everyone likes it.
Posted by Chris Forsythe at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)