Author: paolovalde

Multi language stream using Facebook Lists

I have been playing with lists on Facebook lately. Initially I considered them reading lists (a way to aggregate stuff from a selected several sources in the same page), and they are, but you can use them also as distribution lists, and this is much more interesting. Thanks to lists I think I have solved one of my long-standing problems on Facebook: multiple languages.

Facebook - Create List

I don’t have a huge number of  friends on Facebook, I have tried to keep my social graph consistent, and while I cannot say I know personally every single contact I have, I can say in most cases I’m connected to people I know of. Overall I’m pretty happy with the content I find on my Facebook page, my real problem is posting: considering that about 20% of my connections are not Italian, which language should I use?

My solution so far had always been posting everything in English (wrongly assuming that all my Italian contacts can read some basic English). This approach kinda works as long as I’m posting original content, but it did prevent me from re-posting all the interesting stuff I found in my stream which is in Italian. And with 80% of my contacts being Italian it’s a lot of stuff.

So I finally decided to go through all my contacts and manually create a list of my Italian friends, so now I can easily post in Italian for my Italian friends and in English for everyone else.

The UI to do this could be much easier, and probably Facebook could be doing this automagically, but still, it’s a nice step forward.

Good habits: walking and meditating

Disclaimer: this is not a New Year resolutions post. I just want to take post about a couple of new habits that I have adopted for the last couple of months. Will they last? I hope so.

The first one is walking. Working from home can bring laziness to amazing levels. When I realized that I was spending too much time sitting and decided that I needed to move. We live surrounded by a beautiful countryside, so all I had to do was get to the door and start walking.

I have been using RunKeeper to track my activities (I can tell you that since November 1st have have walked for 168Km). I’m not trying in any way to make my walking sound “sporty” or competitive. It’s just walking for 4-5Km every day. I do admire a lot all my friends who run. But I just walk. I do believe that a gentlemen will walk but never run. ;)

The real challenge is walking every day when I’m not travelling. Even when it rains, like yesterday. So far I have been pretty good.

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The second habit is meditation. I had been interested in the subject for a while, then I followed a link posted by Loïc to an iPhone app named Headspace. I went through their free “10 minutes for 10 days” program, and I was hooked. After that I did “15 minutes for 15 days” and “20 minutes for 20 days”, and now I have just started the more advanced “Discovery” program. I’m pretty much recommending this app to everybody I meet.

Of course two months of walking and meditating can hardly put a dent in a life of laziness, fat, anger and stress, so while I can’t say that I’m seeing significant changes, I am enjoying the process very much. Which I guess it’s the whole point.

Color of the year

The color of the year for 2014 is Pantone® 18-3224 Radiant Orchid. Now you know.

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When I started working in graphic design, having a Pantone color book was one of my main goals. They were rare and expensive, back when Macs screens were still black and white and it was the only way to manage colors. And they were cool little objects, I think I still have mine somewhere.

Back then most colors fit in 3 digits numbers (I still remember how one of the first logos I designed used blue 300 and grey 428). At some point 4 digits colors started appearing, and they were kinda exotic. Amazing how we got all the way to “18-3224”. Looks like there’s still a lot of colors to invent.

Anyway, it’s good to see how Pantone has been able to modernize and be still around after all these years. These days I think that the Pantone product I use more is my coffee mug :).

Google: a lousy evil empire?

I’m a fan of every conspiracy theory as any other geek, but this whole narrative about google gaining control our whole life has a big flaw: Google Plus.

I mean: I have 4 active email addresses that I use every day, and they are all on gmail. I use google for every search, google maps, google calendar, google docs both on my Mac and my mobile devices. I use Chrome for most of the time when I’m on my Mac. And then they shut down the aggregator I was using, they force me to have a G+ account to comment on YouTube, in other words the pretty much have full control of my digital life, and still…

…they haven’t managed to get me interested to Google Plus. Nor any other of my friends, who in most cases have pretty much sold their own souls to Google like I did.

Now, I’m not saying that they are not evil… but surely so far it doesn’t look like they are very good at using all the power we gave them in order to control us.

Games of Drones

So, with PrimeAir Amazon is planning to deliver goods to our doorstep using drones in 2015.

By 2018, PrimeAir will reach us wherever we are, even walking down a street. In 2020 GoogleMaps RealTime will be deployed in major cities, and Facebook extensive network of drones will keep track of our friends like it never happened before.

A tiny blue Twitter drone will flutter a few feet behind us, giving a whole new meaning to the term “follower”. Some of us will deploy personal WordPress drones, which we will be able to customize with all kind of widgets.

I’m not sure about Apple drones… But you can bet that they will be über cool, and everybody will want one.

VIP dinner guests

After lengthy discussion over drinks last night, here’s the top ten list of people I’d like to invite to dinner and have a nice chat with (sorted, Sir Paul coming first).

  • Paul McCartney
  • BB King
  • Mikhail Gorbachev
  • Sting
  • Bill Clinton
  • Giorgio Armani
  • Jony Ive
  • Steven Fry
  • Madonna
  • Brad and Angelina (Monica kind of insisted on Brad coming along…)

Workspaces

On the second day the history of this very blog, more than 11 years ago, I posted a picture of my desk.

I like taking pictures of the places where I spend a lot of time. Even after all these years, they still feel very familiar (no idea why I needed 4 computers back then…).

To keep up with the tradition, here’s a fresh picture of my desk, at home, in San Martino. I love working here.

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Can’t but wonder where we will be in another 11 years.

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.