I have a problem. I have too much stuff going on in my life that it is getting difficult to manage it all. So I figure that all of you professionals out there who have their lives in order (anyone?) could help me out some.
I own 3 desktop computers, 1 laptop, a Sidekick, a Blackberry and many other gadgets. How can I better manage my life? The technology is there, but the common sense seems to be missing or something.
Keith’s To-Done has been helping me out some, but I am looking for more and in the process of looking I am missing out on getting work done. My biggest problem is email. It was discussed in the comments of freelancing traits how important it is to respond to emails. I am horrible at this. I receive anywhere from 150-300 non-spam emails a day. Obviously I can’t respond to all of them and still get all my work done and maintain some type of social life.
So how do you manage it all?
Tumblr is no longer just the home of reblogged pictures, quotes, music, videos, and journal entries of friends you follow; it’s also gaining favor with the more discerning content creators in the design and technology circles, turning it into a truly professional publishing platform. This phenomenon is thanks to its relatively easy customization while keeping its interface decidedly simple.
My question is, if Tumblr’s audience is becoming more mature, should it shift from its dead-simple appeal and grow up too? David Yeiser prefers its current approach:
What’s neat about Tumblr is it’s not only a great publishing platform but a great tool for content consumption. [...] as self-publishing has changed to shorter forms and varied media the traditional feed reader has become obsolete. I shouldn’t have to click a title of a post to read a quote. [...] I think the way Tumblr aggregates and displays blog posts is the future of feed readers. Though I’m not aware of any standalone readers that take this approach.
Personally, I disagree. I follow a lot of people (and non-people) on Tumblr, producing remarkably varied content genres (e.g. XKCD Explained, 53 Weeks of UX, Sweet Home Style) with no way of filtering which ones I’d like to view at a time. Infinite scrolling in the dashboard can only take you so far in browsing ease.
Unwieldy content consumption is a familiar problem experienced on Twitter and Facebook, and by people who want more options, more control. Except there are now methods of dealing them on those sites. It’s even a big business for third party companies. On Tumblr, that remains to be seen.
Dashboard filtering options would be a welcome addition to the site. The reason is that “following” is a one-size-fits-all option when the truth is we need many.
And there lies the rub with a hosted platform, as well as platform that caters to simplicity first and foremost. Notice that as the concept of feed reading, trackbacking, and commenting are abstracted, if not replaced with Tumblr’s own conventions of dashboard reading, reblogging, liking, answering, one is forced to adhere to a closed set of standards inside its community. For a community that’s got such a wealth of content, consuming and sharing and communicating through that content but with limiting, non-standard methods is a turn off. If I link to a Tumblr post from a non-Tumblr site, will the owner of that tumblelog even know that I did?
Again, all of this wouldn’t be so bad if there were more options available, even as premium features. Right now, there aren’t.
What should Tumblr do? Should it go the WordPress.org and Identi.ca route and provide an open, self-hosted platform? Should it take some notes from the old-but-still-strong LiveJournal? (In some ways their user bases are the same.) Should it push its API more aggressively? Should we just wait and see what they’re up to, or accept that it’s really just a different culture from what we’re accustomed to?
As someone who’s enjoyed a lot of great content on Tumblr and is tempted to migrate her personal blog over there, there are a glaring number of things holding me back.
Blame it on the need to express oneself in as many avenues possible, or the tendency for this community to navel-gaze out of narcissism or frustration, but you can’t deny how comic strips are a brilliant outlet for these designers. Each carries a different subject, sense of humor, and illustration style that you’ll want to subscribe to all of them.
Brad Colbow: The Brads
Brad’s also been tapped to create more informative strips such as Learning About Contrast in Design and Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5.
Kyle Weems: CSS Squirrel
I’ve mentioned CSS Squirrel when he announced his branching out to podcasting, but poking fun at the latest industry developments and insider info is where he shines.
N.C. Winters: Freelance Freedom
NC goes through the ups and downs of freelancing at Freelance Switch’s Freelance Freedom.
Business Guys on Business Trips
BGOBT tells the most awful office tales in detailed narrations but minimal line art.
Matthew Inman: The Oatmeal
The man behind Mingle2 and SEOmoz, Matthew has gone on to create humorous quizzes and infographic-style comics at the very viral The Oatmeal.
Phil Thompson: The FrontEnders
Phil does a front-end spin on the British soap The Eastenders.
Ricardo Gimenes: Behind the Websites
Ricardo creates a fleet of colorful characters to represent different websites, and now makes strips for Smashing Magazine’s The Smashing Cartoons.
This week, the Museum of Modern Art added the @ symbol to its permanent collection in the Department of Architecture and Design. Although it stands out because it’s intangible it carries just as much history and impact. For starters, did you know that @ has been around since the 6th or 7th century to denote a unit of measure? It’s been used for commerce since, made its way into the typewriter in 1885, then in 1971, Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first email system, giving it new purpose in the age of computing.
The story of the @ sign and its entry into the MoMA is also a fascinating lesson on what design can do:
The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol.
The article continues on its value as a different kind of design piece: “It does not declare itself a work of design, but rather reveals its design power through use.” Around the world, different countries have composed different mythologies for it, and its uses are still expanding both socially and technologically.
This is probably the greatest kind of design—the @ symbol is both ancient and modern, local and universal, practical and beautiful, by continuously evolving in its meaning.
The Apple iPad has polarized the tech industry in the past week. I’m amused by this development, not in the context of product innovation or what it could mean for web design and development, but for the culture of tech opinions.
There’s the half that believes the iPad is not the revolutionary new step in computing people having been waiting for, and then there’s the other half that thinks those critics are not the iPad’s target market. Considering how Steve Jobs began with his keynote about the iPhone is now dominating the mobile phone industry over veterans Nokia and Samsung, it certainly takes a lot to accept that the iPad might not enjoy the same fate. This short and sweet (which is rare) post by Jeff Lamarche puts things in perspective:
I’m sure somebody has told you all this before, but let me point it out again: it’s not always about you. Products can be successful even if they aren’t right for you.
[...] I’m a techie, but I don’t need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don’t hate my dishwasher because I can’t get to the command line. I don’t hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system. Sheesh.
But my beef with this is: hardly ever does that argument surface when not so popular, not so geek-worthy products surface. From what I’ve seen in tech culture, it’s so much easier to reject, even hate a product than even entertain the notion that it could succeed. In general, in a certain demographic, in a certain geographic region.
At times the word easier gets replaced by cooler. It’s cooler to hate stuff; that’s what techies are supposed do.
See how all the Apple or tech pundits are squeezing out the possibilities where the iPad could work wonders. Will it kill e-book readers? Will it revitalize the newspaper industry? Will it shake up processes in education, art, medicine, and business? Which function was it born to do?—as though it hasn’t been discovered only because Steve Jobs didn’t whisper the answer in their ears.
Is it because of passion for the brand? I would think other products may not deserve the same passion, but they do deserve a fair chance. Don’t hate a product just because it isn’t right for you.
Perhaps now there’s half of a crowd deciding people shouldn’t be so quick to judge, the tradition could change. Or it could not, because Apple is the exception to the rule.
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