Thanks, Steve.

October 6, 2011 #

Sadly, Steve Jobs passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 56.

He will be remem­bered for many things, among them his unique per­spec­tives and con­tri­bu­tions on the way we use tech­nol­ogy in our lives.

From a com­ment on Red­dit:

If you use a mouse… thank Steve.
If you pub­lish a blog, or videos on Youtube… thank Steve.
If you wept dur­ing the end­ing of Toy Story 3… thank Steve.
If you carry around a tiny lit­tle dig­i­tal music player… thank Steve.
If your phone lets you play games or music, read the news or books… thank Steve.

I’m not say­ing he invented any of these things. But he fig­ured out how to do them right, do them well, bring them to the level that every­one could eas­ily use and enjoy them. He dis­tilled con­cepts down to their core, then wrapped them in a sim­ply, ele­gant inter­face. He believed that peo­ple with vision could change every­thing… and then he proved it time and again.
Love Apple or hate them, there’s no deny­ing that this man and the com­pany he helped found have pro­foundly changed the way we inter­act with technology.

Qwikster

September 19, 2011 #

This is a fun­da­men­tal change in the prod­uct, and Hast­ings just dis­misses the con­cern with a wave of his hand. Not only that, but this is a brand­ing issue as well. When you switch sites you’re going from Net­flix, a brand peo­ple know and love, to Qwik­ster, which sounds like the lat­est get rich quick startup with­out a real busi­ness plan. —from Net­flix in Dan­ger of Ruin­ing their User Expe­ri­ence by Josh Porter

It’s also just a con­fus­ing change for your user base and one that will splin­ter the two busi­nesses, but as Porter explains this could be on purpose:

Let’s assume for a moment that Net­flix is know­ingly try­ing to kill off its DVD rental ser­vice. This is the way to do it…separate it out com­pletely, give it a ridicu­lous name, and keep your brand equity with the newer stream­ing service.

Until the next thing

September 19, 2011 #

Every time I cre­ate some­thing there’s a sense of accom­plish­ment with the assur­ance that what­ever I just made is the new best thing I’ve done, up until that point.

I’m imme­di­ately proud of the end result and even prouder of the jour­ney and then I’m left won­der­ing what the “next best thing” will be, some­thing that will chal­lenge every­thing I’ve learned as an artist and yet again there’s that creep­ing fear that I won’t be able to con­jure up the cre­ative energy that got me there in the first place.

That’s when I hit a wall and look over that tiny cliff I’m cling­ing to and remind myself that I’m not alone in think­ing this.

We are not mir­a­cle mak­ers nor can we rub that prover­bial genie lap and wish for the genius to emerge. It’s all part of a larger process to reach some sort of goal (launch­ing a prod­uct, fin­ish­ing a paint­ing, wash­ing the dishes) and know­ing the only way to get there is to take it one step at a time.

This seems obvi­ous and even more so com­mon sense but why is that every time we are faced with what is per­ceived as a daunt­ing task we dread tak­ing that first step? Yes, we’re apt to have small fail­ures along the way but I believe it has more to do with shed­ding the warped per­cep­tions of our­selves. That’s the first step in a cleans­ing process that places us back at square one; the blank slate.

It’s at this moment I come to the real­iza­tion that we are unhinged from the obsta­cles that we allow to pile them­selves up in our path and this is where we take our first steps (through the eager­ness to learn and adapt) towards the goal that will make us feel like we’ve accom­plished some­thing amaz­ing and become proud of our work.

That is, until the next thing…

Welcome to Planet Earth

August 22, 2011 #

A short film by Mike Liv­ingston.