5 Aug 2013
In the past month and a half of interning here I’ve made the role switch from Designer to Front End Developer. It’s been a really fun and rewarding process. I wanted to go over some of the new tools I’ve been learning about that have really changed my life for the better.
6 Apr 2012
I was hoping that iMessage was going to allow me to reduce my monthly iPhone bill… but it doesn’t appear that AT&T was going to let that happen.
23 Jan 2012
I bought a Motorola Droid in the summer of 2010. I wanted a smartphone so I could check my email on the go, replace my aging GPS, and browse the internet occasionally. I bought a Droid because Amazon had a great deal (it was basically free), and I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted with it. I rooted it within a week of getting it since that was the easiest way to get the updated version of the Android OS at the time.
I was really happy with the extremely easy and tight integration with all of the Google services I used (email and calendar mostly). But my wife really wanted a smartphone as well, specifically an iPhone. I was against the idea because I knew she’d have questions about how to use it, and without one of my own I’d be in the position of supporting two kinds of devices. When I started working for Planet Argon where everyone has an iPhone, I encountered my first small disadvantage…
20 Mar 2008
The Autumn of the Multitaskers
“Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity”
Jeff Raskin on ‘Intuitive Interfaces’
“Many claims of intuitiveness, when examined, fail. It has been claimed that the use of a computer’s mouse is intuitive. Yet it is far from that. In one of the Star Trek series of science fiction movies, the space ship’s engineer has been brought back into our time, where (when) he walks up to a Macintosh. He picks up the mouse, bringing it to his mouth as if it were a microphone, and says: “Computer, …” The audience laughs at his mistake."
Edge Cases are the Root of all Evil
“Most Edge Cases are presented in the conference room. You get a cross-functional team together to come up with some solutions to The Problem (insert meeting title here). You have people from all the departments that The Problem touches (plus a few more hangers-on who weren’t invited to the party, but personally felt that The Problem could not be solved without them). You brainstorm ideas, go on tangents and then finally inspiration strikes you.”
Easy, Intuitive and Metaphor, and other meaningless words
“Many tasks, that were once hard, can become easy. Learning to ride a bicycle as a child is precarious, often involving falling off, scuffing knees, and occasional tears. But as experienced cyclists riding a bike is easy. The process of transition from hard to easy is one of learning. All the time we spend in education is aimed at turning the hard into the easy. Not by changing the tasks at all – but instead by changing us.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the point-and-click navigation model of the mouse, although it can degenerate into mystery meat navigation if you’re not careful. I don’t expect web designers to create keyboard-centric websites; the mouse is a natural and intuitive enough way to navigate web sites. But so is the keyboard, in certain circumstances. What frustrates me is when web developers fail to pay attention to the most rudimentary of keyboard support in their designs.”
Blissfully Ignorant Shoppers Happier with Choices
“The researchers used three experiments to arrive at their conclusion. Two of them were consumer test-style experiments in which subjects were asked for their opinion of chocolate in one and hand lotion in the other. In each experiment, one group of subjects was given lots of information about the product, the other group much less. In each instance, the subjects who had little information were more optimistic about the chocolate or hand lotion than those who had more information.”
10 Oct 2007
Last night, while working late in the office, Andy noticed that Google now had Street View for Portland, Oregon.
Here is our current office location (for the next three weeks).
In a few weeks, we’ll no longer be facing this side of the block as we’re moving around the corner.
…and a closer view of the exterior of our new studio.
Thank you, Google, for putting Portland (streets) on the map!
22 Aug 2007
A week ago, we quietly opened up the process for accepting new orders for our brand new hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Here is what we sent out to all those who signed up on the Rails Boxcar mailing list.
We’ve been busy getting everything setup and tested for our newest hosting solution for Ruby on Rails. Boxcar, a pre-configured virtual server for hosting your business-level Rails applications, was developed out of our observations of how our Rails hosting customers are deploying their applications. Boxcar was designed to support the best-practices for Rails deployment.
Unlike a typical VPS, we’ve pre-configured Boxcar to allow you to follow just a few steps to get your Rails application up and running as quickly as possible. We’ve also given you more control over your environment to install additional packages, gems, and programs.
We don’t want your Boxcar to box you in… except when you want it to.
Boxcar will provide you with more privacy. Your application will be completely separate from other customers’ applications. You will also get excellent performance as you will not be competing for memory usage or disk space with other customers, which leads to more stability for your application.
All Boxcar customers will have access to a community-driven documentation project, aimed at helping everyone share tips
and tricks for configuring and maintaining your Boxcar.
For the initial launch, we’re offering 6 and 12 month plans, both of which have a 30 day money back guarantee. Prices start at $85/month for the twelve month plan and $90/month for the six month plan.
Go ahead and place an order
If you have any questions about our new Boxcar service, don’t hesitate to send an email to contact@planetargon.com or give us a call at +1 877 55 ARGON.
We’re excited about the launch of Boxcar and would like to thank all of our existing customers who have helped us design it.
Cheers,
The PLANET ARGON Team
13 Jun 2007
Earlier today, 37signals, posted an article, which referenced an in-depth review of Highrise by Robby. This review has various tips for getting started with Highrise, and how our team has integrated it into our internal workflow. We’ve been able to use a little GTD along with the Mail.app Act-On plugin to painlessly keep track of our new inquiries.
After trying many other products, none of which ever met our needs, Highrise has become a major fixture in our process for sales, contact management and networking. Also, Basecamp recently received a little spit and polish to give both products a common look and feel, which has made the integration all the more seamless.
19 Mar 2007
Earlier today, ComputerWorld published an article that lists what they believe are The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in ’07. In this article they list the following.
That’s right! You might have noticed that ComputerWorld has named Ruby on Rails, our development framework of choice, as the top technology to know about in 2007!
“Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications. One of the central tenets emphasizes using less code for application development by avoiding redundancy and following Rails conventions. This means increased performance and, ideally, decreased development times.”
It’s great to see that the technology that we decided to adopt over two years ago is still making big headlines!
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