This Week in Tumble Design – February 14th, 2010

February 14th, 2010
by Nicky Hajal

Weeks go by so fast. The most notable thing that happened this Week was getting caught up in a fun Live Q&A Project for another site. It sord of through me off my plans, but I think it was a worthwhile mini-project.

I received some edits on our YCombinator Application and rewrote quite a bit of it. Satisfied, I submitted it. We still need to put together a quick video.

Here’s what got done on Transissimo

  • Translation request notifications
  • Failed logins displayed correctly
  • Interface to edit language profile
  • Back-button support for pagination (this ended up being quite complicated)
  • Broke ground on gender support

Gender support is another one of those things that seems fairly simple but takes a good bit more thought and work than one would expect. I am happy I got as far as I did with it this week and hope by the end of next it will be complete.

I am liking the pattern I’ve been in the past couple weeks; I accomplish a whole bunch of small-medium tasks and about half of a large one. My goal is usually to check of 2 things a day.

It’s also worth mentioning that the game design aspect of transissimo has really been solidifying recently. There is so much work to be done implementing it in the future but it is nice to see it coming together on paper.

This Week

  • Transissimo
    • Gender support
    • Translator comments
    • Smooth pagination
    • Web crawler pagination
    • Dynamic content loading
    • Keyboard shortcuts
    • Redesign request bar, support for notes, field, etc
  • TryPolyphasic
    • Sleep Track Generator
    • iPhone App
    • Flash sounds for alarm
    • Naplog Graphs
    • Design front page
    • User profile
    • User status check-ins
  • Anne BobroffHajal.Com
    • Blog homepage
    • Article page
    • Polish gallery
Posted in TWiTD | No Comments »

This Week in Tumble Design – February 7th, 2010

February 8th, 2010
by Nicky Hajal

This week started off pretty calm and productive and got crazy pretty quickly.

TryPolyphasic

I wasn’t expecting to spend that much time on TryPolyphasic this week. Out of no where, though, the site was down. For some reason, the entire site directory was moved into /var/lock. When I tried to move the site back to /var/www, the directories moved but the files disappeared!

To make things worse, the backup system provided by our hosting company had been down without notifying us. Luckily we had a locally saved copy and I still had the most recently files I’d worked on open.

Unfortunately, we lost the custom WordPress Plugins I’d developed for our WP-Mu installation and all the forum customizations I made.

I was expecting getting back to 100% to take at least a week. Somehow, though, I rebuilt everything in just over 24 hours.

I also setup our own backups using rdiff so we have all of our servers backed up daily on all of our other servers. Phew.

Transissimo

Here’s what got done on Transissimo

  • Username validation
  • Can only translate languages you know
  • Requests order by ‘needyness’
  • Built a class to interface with Mad Mimi to programatically send emails through their system
  • Display existing translations while translating
  • Notification of new requests (almost done)

The most difficult thing has been the last one. It is comprised of many components, presents the most technical challenges (to do a good job of it) and even brings forth some important issues about how to responsibly email our users. I really like what I have so far on all fronts and it should be completed this week.

I have also been spending time considering different options for handling gender in translations. This will be a focus for the coming week.

YCombinator

Lots of editing! Good stuff. Our goal is to have our application submitted by Thursday.

Anne Bobroff-Hajal.Com

Been building a JavaScript gallery for annebobroffhajal.com – it’s now functional and just needs a bit of polishing.

~

This Week

  • Transissimo
    • Notification of new translations
    • Gender support
    • Language profiles, interface to collect data
    • Fix failed login notification
    • Better pagination: smooth page loading, better back button support, fallback for non-js/web crawlers
    • Support for translator comments
    • Dynamic content loading
    • Keyboard shortcuts
    • Better request design
    • Note, field support
    • Bot protection
  • TryPolyphasic
    • Sleep Track Generator
    • Flash sounds for alarm
    • Naplog Graphs
    • Design front page
    • Rating system for blog articles
    • User profiles
    • User status check-ins
  • YCombinator
    • Finish edits
    • Record video
    • Submit by Thursday
  • AnneBobroffHajal.Com
    • Blog homepage
    • Article page
    • Polish gallery
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

This Week in Tumble Design – January 31st, 2010

January 31st, 2010
by Nicky Hajal

I learned last week that it’s important to keep a list of exactly what I get done as I go if I want to have an accurate list here.

So, let’s get into it:

YCombinator

I have looked into YCombinator before but never thought it would be something for Mike and I here at Tumble. I was watching Airbnb on Mixergy when I decided to check YC out one more time (Airbnb is a startup that came out of YCombinator). For some reason, it clicked with me this time.

Mike and I will be ready to move on from Troy soon. We have a few great projects mostly complete and a major one just getting going. We want to explore new places and lifestyles. We have a ton of people to meet and a lot to learn from them.

From this angle, YCombinator becomes pretty attractive.

So, a major part of this week was putting together our application which is now mostly done and just being pared down and improved.

Transissimo

We’ve really expanded the private beta to the point where we now have over 1500 translations. This has been extremely exciting to see! Actually, I’ve spent a fairly decent amount of time just putting together phrase lists for our translators to get at.

I also refined the top translator list so it displayed more users and sorted them more fairly – an average of their total points and number of translations. So, if you’ve rated 100 translations and earned 100 points, but not translated a single phrase you dont rank above someone that has less points but has actually been translating.

I really want to be designing based on user behavior and feedback now that we have some users. So, I setup a forum at forums.transissimo.com. There was some added complexity there only because I didn’t want to have existing users resign up for the forums and I wanted a single login from transissimo. Since the transissimo auth system is custom, I had to put together a custom bridge to SMF.

For awhile, links to users profile were : transissimo.com/user/central/profile/user/username. This week I put together a router so that transissimo.com/username takes you to a users profile. I still need to put together a validator for usernames that are banned because we’ll be using them ourselves in URLs.

Something that I’ve known we’ll need for awhile is detailed profiles of languages we have on transissimo. Is it read right to left? What genders does it use? Are the characters roman? If not is there a romanization? And so on. I began the infrastructure for this and now have it such that input boxes correctly render for Right to Left languages like Arabic.

We need a system to notify users how many translations are available for them since their last login. I am still figuring out the logistics of contacting them most efficiently but I completed the first step which is tracking online status of users.

TryPolyphasic

The blog community on TryPolyphasic has been doing great but it’s been frustrating that the blogs feel so separate from the site and each other. I put together a WordPress Plugin (we’re using WP-Mu) that places a common TryPolyphasic bar on the top of every blog. It includes a drop down menu to get back to the sites main pages and buttons to navigate through blogs.

The bar also gave us the ability to track whether a users has read an article and whether there are new comments since they last read it. In general, the idea is to take a long stream of blog content and make it very approachable.

Transissimo ToDo

in order of importance/relevance, italics are what I want to do this week

  • Notification of new translations
  • Validate banned usernames
  • Language profiles, interface to collect data
  • Display other translations from a request (while translating)
  • Better ordering of translations (most needy first)
  • Translation only available for languages you know
  • Design interface to support gendered translations
  • Better pagination: smooth page loading, better back button support, fallback for non-js/web crawlers
  • Support for translator comment
  • Dynamic, animated content loading
  • Keyboard shortcuts for navigating translations
  • Better request bar dropdown design
  • Note, field support for requests
  • Protect from rating bots

TryPolyphasic ToDo

in order of importance/relevance, italics are what I want to do this week

  • Naplog Graphs
  • Flash sounds for alarm
  • Rating for blog articles
  • User profiles
  • User status check-ins
  • Update wp-mu

YCombinator ToDo

in order of importance/relevance, italics are what I want to do this week

  • Recruit some editors
  • Put together a video
  • Submit application!
Posted in TWiTD | 1 Comment »

This Week in Tumble Design – January 17th, 2010

January 18th, 2010
by Nicky Hajal

This past year, I learned how useful it can be to consistently review progress and refresh goals. For over 100 days, I tracked my productivity daily and planned what I wanted to do the next. It totally revamped the way I worked. I stopped my reviews suddenly, hardly noticing; I realized I had internalized a lot of what I’d learned in the process. I decided to reduce my reviews to just weekly.

And now,  I want to begin posting them here. I’m not exactly sure yet how I will make them useful for others and what purpose they will serve out in public, but I have a feeling that they will grow into their role over time if I can be consistent with it.

~

This week I went back and forth between working on transissimo and TryPolyphasic. Both are really fun projects to work on.

Transissimo

The first major thing that got done on transissimo was a pagination system for loading ‘issi’ content (requests, translations, etc). I ended up refactoring a lot of the code I had previously to make the methods that get and insert content more generic/reusable. This sets things up quite nicely for dynamically loading new content in the future.

The next major project was improving the Dropdown Controls which I had serious issues with as far as user experience. Here’s the old and new dropdowns.

Old vs. New Dropdowns on transissimo

Old vs. New Dropdowns on transissimo

I also spent a fairly significant amount of time planning out a more effective but slightly more complex Game Dynamics System as well as an editor for translating longer texts. It is tough to know precisely the sequence that it will make sense to implement these different future components. But, I appreciate having some time to think about it now that much of the coding for the first phase of transissimo is done.

TryPolyphasic
I spent the most time this week working on an alarm for polyphasic sleepers at http://trypolyphasic.com/alarm. I have been using it the past few days and improving it as I go. I am really enjoying how simple it is to use. It can also send text alerts via SMS.

I spent some time working on some other housekeeping issues for TryPolyphasic, cleaning out spammers, etc.

3 Goals for this coming week

  1. 10 people translating on transissimo
  2. Stream line the video tutorial process so I can whip them out quickly with each site-change
  3. Nap-logging and graphing for TryPolyphasic
Posted in TWiTD | No Comments »

Is My Generation Ruining it for Content Producers?

November 22nd, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

I recently came across these comments from two different content producers:

“Basically, kids believe that everything should be available on the web, open source, and therefore copyright and the idea of writers being paid for their work is becoming antiquated.”

“Now it is the hardware that is valuable (eg. Kindle) and content is worthless.”

The thing is, I get them. There’s certainly some truth there and with all the talk about piracy on the Web, it’s probably hard for those already invested in book publishers or record labels to like my generation very much.

But, to suggest that my GenYers are chiefly responsible for the direction of media is giving us a lot of credit we don’t fully deserve. To write off what’s happening as merely youthful, misplaced values makes it easy to miss the scale at which these changes are happening and the effects they will have on the future.

My generation was placed into a content-sharing system, created largely by the generation before ours, that is unlike any other in history (the Internet was designed to share content between the Military, afterall). And then we were told to behave within an outdated set of rules.

~

So, yes:

We do believe that everything should be available on the Web. Everything that is video or audio should be transcribed to text and everything that is text should be searchable, translated into common languages and audible; it is unfathomable both how empowering that will be and how possible it is today. Accessible information and ideas is the Web.

We do believe in open-source software, but not because it is a fad. Rather, because it is the most tried and true software available. The majority of web services today are powered by open-source projects like Linux, Apache (web server software) and mySQL (database software). Google will be releasing an operating system in 2010; the open source code is available now.

We do believe that copyright is antiquated, but that isn’t our fault (or copyright’s fault)! Copyright was designed for a system of scarcity, where copies themselves have value because they are a limited commodity. This just isn’t the case anymore. Digital copies can be distributed by individuals to millions at near negligible costs.

But:

This does not mean that we believe writers should no longer be paid for their work, nor that Kindles are worth more than the content in them. It means that Kindles are still scarce commodities while digital media is not. This is not the fault of the consumer but of the economic system that can’t support the digital exchanges that happen between people (in other words, a system based on supply and demand doesn’t function well when supply is near infinite).

~

If the worry for the future is that this “devaluing“ of content will result in less content, no fear. There is more content than ever and much of it is produced and distributed by individuals. Just take a peak at NaNoWriMo.

If the worry is that this content is at a reduced quality, no fear.  Incredible content is everywhere! A few examples:

Writing: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store by Robin Sloan
Music: Ronald Jenkees’ Stay Crunchy and a Jenkees cover by Alicsibu on Guitar
 Video: Venice’s People by Philip Bloom or BLU’s MUTO for animation

And if the worry is whether or not content producers can make money on the web, no fear. These guys and gals are doing it:

So far, this usually includes all or some of the following: free content, premium content (ebooks, downloadable courses, etc), advertising, speaking, consulting and coaching.

So, yeah, content producers will be very different in 10 years than they were 10 years ago, but there will be content producers and they will be producing high-quality content and they will be getting paid.

~

Like the printing press, digital media unlocks a new level of content distribution that is orders of magnitudes greater than it’s predecessor. We are a social species that communicates and shares by nature, so these changes have enormous consequences. Mostly good ones if you choose to look at them that way. I’m really excited for what’s to come.

Posted in Featured, Web | 1 Comment »

Pleasing Everybody is Different than Caring About Everybody

November 20th, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

Gary V. says that “you can’t please everybody“ is much too common a phrase these days.

He thinks that even just the effort to connect with the displeased on their blogs or on twitter is worthwhile. I could not agree more.

Except that pleasing everybody is different than caring about everybody.

~

As a designer, I can hardly even please all of myself, let alone everybody else. ”You can’t please everybody“ is a useful phrase to me.  It reminds me to side-step perceived perfection and just do the best that I can (and improve iteratively).  At a time when ideas, content and products are moving faster than ever, this becomes increasingly important to keep in mind.

The fact that you can’t please everybody does not mean you can’t care about everybody, which I think is what Gary V. is really getting at. This is so important.

When I am designing something, I know that the buck ultimately stops at me. But, another major component to my work is taking in as many ideas, thoughts, images and experiences as possible so that I have a deep well to work with.

Feedback from users, people, provide this design-fuel in so many different forms. And communicating with them provides it in much greater magnitude.

Nice Translator has given us a good deal of experience in dealing with users. I’ve met some awesome people around the World and a lot of them started the conversation with negative feedback. Despite slightly rude comments at times, they are real people simply seeking human interaction in a digital world.

~

Here’s an example (trimmed for the sake of brevity)

Frank

… NiceTranslator is not very useful to me if it can’t be relied upon for a simple translation such as this. Comments, please?

Frank D

Nicky

Hi Frank,

Thanks for your feedback! It’s true, Nice Translator is, at the end of the day, a machine translator and has its shortcomings. NT is great at capturing the general idea behind most sentences but there’s no way to guarantee it will be fully correct. Since we are using the Google Translation API, there isn’t much we can do to improve the quality of the translations, but Google is continually improving on the service so expect it to get better over time.

In the meantime, use NT for non-mission-critical translations! Enjoy :)

-Nicky

Frank

….

I get the feeling that you are a REAL LIVE PERSON and you really DO care about what your end-users think. So, thanks again for your reply, and I hope that maybe you can get someone at Google (if there really are anything other than bots there) to consider my input above.

Best of luck in your enterprise!

Frank

~

We’ve received comments that were much more abrasive than Frank’s, but always do our best to respond with care. At worst, they just never get back to us. At best, we gain some friends to visit if we’re ever in Denmark or Greece.

As designers (whether designing a website, a business or a menu) it’s important to consider that even if We Can’t Please Everybody, it still helps to care about everybody.

Posted in Design, Users | 3 Comments »

How to Stop Wishing You Read More Books and Read More Books

November 18th, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

My dad is a warm-hearted Lebanese man with the calm temperament you’d expect from someone raised along the Mediterranean Sea. Compared to most other parents he was pretty lax, rarely pestering me as I grew up.

Which is why what he did harp on stood out. Etched into my brain is him saying, “Nicky, you don’t read enough!”, usually as he rustled my hair. It didn’t make sense to me, though.

“Why would I want to read?”

~

What none of us realized at the time was that I was reading. Where my dad grew up exploring history books, I spent my time scouring the Internet for articles and blogs on web development. Books were what I had to do for school. I would rarely think to open one up for fun and if I did it seemed too daunting to actually do.

As I grew older, the idea of certain books began to intrigue me. Recently during an interview on Mixergy.com, host Andrew Warner mentioned that walking into a library makes him feel like he has a world of super powers at his fingertips. This is how I felt – but I just didn’t have the experience to get me from wanting to read to having read. It seemed so damn hard.

Fast-forward a few years later. I’ve left college a year early and feel committed to educating myself on subjects that matter to me. Slowly, I’ve been able to incorporate reading books into my daily life.

These days I read around 50 pages a day, casually. It’s relaxing and empowering.

Best of all, I think I can help someone get from where I was to where I am.

~

You don’t have to read. I know, it’s hard to believe after all those years of reading assignments, but what you do with your time is actually totally up to you, reading included.

See that huge stack of books on your shelf? The ones you’ve really been meaning to get to. You don’t have to read them.

That realization alone made me much more willing to actually open up a book. Allow yourself to read, don’t force yourself to read.

Pick a super power. It’s too easy to get caught up in the books everyone says I should be reading. The Classics. I’m sure there’s some merit to them, but I have my own interests and I bet you do too.

Figure out what you really want to know more about or learn how to do. Find the best book you can on it and remind yourself that it’s in there.

Divide and Conquer. Even today, when I get a new book and flip through the pages, I start feeling pretty intimidated by all those words. How long it could possibly take to go through all of them seems so uncertain.

What I’ve learned is to take a deep breath and think things through.

Go grab one of those books from your shelf and divide it into 50 page chunks. You’ll probably notice there are less of them than you’d expect. At about one chunk per day I get through most books in a week.

Realizing a book wasn’t an open-ended commitment and instead a quantifiable amount of paced reading totally changed the game for me.

Keep your friends close and your books closer. With so much entertainment just a click away, it’s hard to remember to take some time out with a book. For me, solving this problem meant having a small cubby on my desk just for the one or two books I’m currently reading.

If I’m stuck on a design problem, taking a break to read 15 pages is always within an arms reach.

Start more than you finish. Books really can be great as my dad made them out to be – but not all of them are.

Opening a book is not signing a contract. If you stop feeling it midway through, don’t worry about putting it back on the shelf. It will always be waiting for you if you want it again.

There are too many great books to spend time reading ones you aren’t totally in love with.

~

If you’re coming from the same place I was, a mountain of mental baggage is keeping you from tapping the incredible ideas and infinite knowledge stashed away in books.  The strategies above are about gradually reducing that mountain to an anthill. They’re about reprogramming what reading means to you.

Relax, trust your abilities and enjoy your new super powers.

Posted in Featured, Learning | 8 Comments »

The Little Known Benefit to Learning a New Keyboard Layout

November 9th, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

If you’re the average person, you probably haven’t thought a whole lot about the keyboard you type on. But, those out there who have a little nerd in them may already know that the standard, Qwerty keyboard layout was designed in the 1870s for the typewriter.

Typewriters frequently jammed with alphabetically-laid keys. The solution, by printer Christopher Stoles, was a keyboard layout that kept the machine’s typebars further apart for letters frequently typed together. Even though the direct purpose wasn’t to slow down typing, speed certainly was not a priority.

Since then, several keyboard layouts have been designed with efficiency and ergonomics in mind: the Dvorak Layout, by August Dvorak and more recently Colemak, by Shai Coleman are two examples. The common benefits to picking up one of these layouts are slightly faster typing speeds and less fatigue in your fingers and wrists.

But when I started using Colemak this past June, I discovered something much more profound.

I discovered how my brain learns.

~

There are a lot of phrases that all boil down to, “If you just keep trying, you’ll succeed eventually.” But, it’s not always easy to come up with examples of this or recognize it when it’s happening. Learning a new keyboard is an amazing opportunity to blatantly see this phenomenon in action.

~

When you first start out, you simply cannot type functionally. The first few days, your shear commitment will keep you pluggin’ along, but by day four your fingers won’t even be able to type in Qwerty anymore.

This is a blessing in disguise. You’ll realize the only option to get back to using your computer is unabated persistence in learning the new layout. You’ll spend hours on KeyBr or KeyHero, practicing your typing and watching your speed increase.

Sometimes it will suck. Around day 7, you’ll feel as if you haven’t improved at all – your numbers are down from the day before. You’ll go to sleep a bit dejected but wake up to find, out of nowhere, a huge increase in your speed. In fact, you can pretty comfortably type entire paragraphs now!

Gradual progress over the next several days will be punctuated by another sharp increase in skill overnight. The cycle continues until, a month in, you’re typing as well as you did on Qwerty which you’d been using for at least 10 years.

In an incredibly short amount of time you’ve witnessed the fundamental learning processes of your brain – no, you’ve experienced them. Ultimately, it was commitment to practice, patience and your brain’s natural learning response that were the critical components to success.

~

With such a crystal clear experience of what it takes to learn a new skill, I’m approaching them differently these days. After a life-time of wanting to learn how to juggle, I can finally do so totally naturally. It feels incredible and I got there by now knowing that I would accomplish my goal if I just kept going and dropped the balls enough times.

It’s liberating to have that confidence going into something new – you put in the time, fail enough and you get there. It frees your mind to stop worrying and just have fun learning.

~

Nothing is more persuasive than an undeniable personal experience. Taking some time out to learn Dvorak or Colemak will, more than anything, give you a plain and simple control-case of what it takes to go from bewilderment to mastery.

Posted in Featured, Learning | 1 Comment »

What to Expect from the Tumble Blog

November 3rd, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

I love to write. Historically, though, I’ve been pretty bad at doing it consistently. It seems to be about once a year that I pick up a journal, note how strange it is that I haven’t written in so long and scribble in that I really want to commit to writing regularly. Instead, I get into a new project and thoughts of writing fade into the background.

I’m a big fan of persistence, though, so I’m going to use this blog as a place to make my most serious commitment yet to consistently expressing myself through the written word. I’m going to start by publishing at least one substantial article a week. I’m not going to be a stickler on what day I post or if it’s been exactly seven days – long-term, relative consistency is the goal.

A warning upfront: I do not promise anything close to laser-like focus in the topic of my posts. I spend most of my time each day designing slick projects for the Web, but my interests and thoughts are much more expansive. I want to include all that I can here.

I’ve been keeping a notebook of article ideas recently, here are a few topics already in the air: stress management, elements of good design, existential ponderings, useful php debugging tricks, lessons from traveling, open-mindedness, the difficulty of choosing what to eat, effective exercise, dropping out of school, dealing with unhappy users.

An eclectic list, indeed! If you can think of one subject area this falls into, let me know, but if you can’t, don’t worry about it; I’m certainly not going to. Instead, I’m going to focus on doing each article its own justice.

If you can tell right from the headline that a certain article just doesn’t interest you, I won’t mind at all if you decide to spend your time on something more productive. But, I think it’s a secret wish of mine that by writing about such a variety of things, I’ll help at least a few people discover a new love they never would have otherwise.

p.s.: Feel free to check-up on how I’m doing with my article for the week and keep me consistent! We’re @tumbledesign on twitter and you can send an email to nicky [at] tumbledesign.com anytime.

Posted in Featured | 1 Comment »

Bring Your Own Browser with Portable Firefox

June 28th, 2009
by Nicky Hajal

For those that spend time in an organization that requires the use of Internet Explorer, and especially IE6, using the Web’s latest webapps can be a challenge. Fortunately, it’s possible for many to bring their own browser with them, loaded onto a thumbdrive, and run a standards compliant, cutting-edge browser on just about any computer. In this article, we’ll be doing just that with a portable version of Firefox.

  1. If you don’t have a thumbdrive, you’ll need to start by getting one. Here’s the cheapest one on NewEgg.com. It’s much larger than you need, so you’ll have some extra space to store more than just Firefox (the browser only uses about 20 MB).

    My trusty spy pen-thumbdrive. It's only 128mb but still has plenty of room for Portable Firefox.

    My trusty spy pen-thumbdrive. It's only 128mb but still has plenty of room for Portable Firefox.

  2. Next, download a copy of Portable Firefox. While you’re there, you can check out some other portable apps.
  3. Once that’s downloaded, run the installer and have it install Portable Firefox on your thumbdrive.

    Be sure that you are installing Portable Firefox onto your thumbdrive

    Be sure that you are installing Portable Firefox onto your thumbdrive

  4. That’s it! Now you can put your thumb drive into just about any Windows computer and have your very own, fully-functioning Firefox Browser. (It’s worth noting, that installing extensions and themes is exactly the same as it is normally.)

For more advanced details (running flash, using an existing Firefox profile, etc.) check out the Portable Firefox Support Page.

Posted in Featured, Web | No Comments »