Month: September 2013

Here’s why I unfriended you

Recently you posted something along the lines of:

“those who post about food/cats/running/kids/… must have some kind of problem”

Now, I get it: it’s a kinda funny cheap shot, and yes, your post did collect a bunch of likes by some other looser.

But, to answer your question, I actually enjoy pretty much what my friends post on Facebook. I like their food and cats pictures, and I post plenty of those myself. I secretly envy every run they make in the park and every time the blaze through the city on their bicycles. I enjoy keeping up with their life. There’s people I have hardly every met, yet I’m keeping up with their adventures day by day. And quite often I learn something from them.

Whenever I get bored with the content that somebody posts I just hide it, or unsubscribe. It would probably be a little less shocking if they would call it unsubscribe instead of unfriend.

But my point is: you are entirely responsible for what appears in your stream on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network out there. If you don’t like it, change it, don’t bitch about it.

I don’t like people bitching about it. Here’s why I unfriended you.

A few notes about the Civici platform

Partecipa.civi.ci is the first deployment of a new platform developed by the <ahref Foundation.

It’s an e-democracy application designed to collect and sort proposals from members of a community. Our goal is to make it scalable from a condo to a country.

Continue reading “A few notes about the Civici platform”

iOS 7 – day one notes

I was ready to fall in love immediately with the new os, and I must admit it didn’t happen last night after upgrading my iPhone 5.

This morning I do like it a little better.

Sometimes I don’t like good design at first sight. There has been more than one occasion when my first reaction to projects that had been developed for me has been “meh”, yet I ended up loving it later and even much much much later. I guess that new design languages made to last for a long time require some time to adapt. Not saying that this is the case, just saying that it could be.

It’s clearly the first OS designed for post retina display devices, it does work on the old ipad, but the smaller symbols and thin lines are clearly designed to work well on high resolution screens.

It’s unstable, it did crash a few times since yesterday. No big deal, you get back to the application so fast that it’s just a glitch, but I do hope it won’t crash while I’m writing this, and the very fact that I’m thinking this is a bad sign.

I have more than 50 apps queued up for updates (it was 0 a couple of days ago), it looks like most developers are embracing it. It’s more than one third of the apps I have installed on my phone updated within 24 hours from the release of a new OS, quite amazing if you think about it!

Intensity of the mundane

This morning I spent 10 minutes reading this post: Our new extrusions are in – and they are AMAZING

I’m not interested in aluminum extrusions, and I don’t plan to buy any, yet the post is a brilliant example of what Euan Sample, quoting Rob Paterson, calls “the intensity of the mundane”:

In the right circumstances nerdiness and passion about even “boring” subjects can be really fascinating.

But it so hard to convince people in companies to speak with their own voice, and even when they try they often go all “adult” ending up sounding fake. Yet the very same people use their own voice with their buddies on Facebook.

It’s a long road…

Ranting about professions, tools and respect.

This post by Glenn Fleishman about Yahoo’s new logo is absolutely brilliant, and it’s a great lesson about what graphic design is [via DF].

But I don’t really think that the problem is the “engineering mindset” or the “designer mindset”, I think that one of the main issues we face today is lack respect for other professionals’ expertise.

A part of the problem is probably the wide availability of tools, Fleishman writes:

Too many people think graphic design is not a specialty, but something anyone can do, because the tools to make decent-looking Web pages, newsletters, books, and the like are readily available.

This of course applies not only to graphic design but to pretty much every aspect of human life that is producing some kind of software tool: you are not a designer just because you have Illustrator, you are not a musician just because you have Garage Band, and you are not an engineer just because you have a scripting utility installed on your computer (and you are not a manager because you have Powerpoint ;-).

But the real trouble is that, unlike Marissa Mayer, a lot of people don’t even have these tools on their computers, they just assume that having them is all you need to be a professional designer/engineer/musician/etc. Actually I would argue that if they did have those tools installed, they might have learned that there is very little you can do with them, unless you have training, talent and experience.

My job is all about being in a strange middle place where I’m not a designer, an engineer or a manager, and I’m incredibly lucky for the opportunity of working with brilliant designers, engineers and managers, and to try to expose each group to the complexities of the other professions, learning new lessons every day.

We must not only learn to respect other professions, I think that today we all have the means to try to understand a little bit about other professions. This not only will give us the ability to work better with others, but it will also help us distinguish real professionals from guys who just have a bunch of apps installed on their computers.