Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

I have been party to so many discussion about the pains of supporting IE6 that last year I wrote a detailed blog post about the subject, "So Why Shouldn’t I Support IE6?"

In that post, I made the case that supporting IE6 creates a very real, one time ROI by unlocking your website for 15% of the market.  On the downside, the return on that investment is declining over time, as IE6 bleeds market share, month after month.  To make matters worse, for a startup, there is an opportunity cost for that work.  Your resources would be better served to be refining your existing product to achieve better long term growth.

Clearly, as both a web developer and a businessman, I am not an IE6 fan.

So I was tickled to open up my inbox earlier this week and find this delightful letter from Google Apps:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Good riddance, IE6!

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I made the big switch to OSX about a year ago, and for the most part have never looked back.  Apple makes damn fine hardware, the best desktop operating system known to man, and the lack of a need for antivirus software means everyday tasks (especially IO bound tasks) can be much, much faster.

But there have been a couple of apps that were sorely missed.  Most notably Google Chrome (previously noted here), Visual Studio, and Windows Live Writer.

Now, thanks to the magic of VMWare Fusion’s Unity feature, I have these running in OSX.

Why do I love Windows Live Writer so much?  Clearly it’s not for the closed source software model, or the virtualization performance hit. 

Nay, I’m in it for those scrumptious HotKeys.

As a developer, I take my craft seriously.  I hate touching the mouse.  I type faster than I can think (yes, that gets me in to trouble sometimes).  And hands, once trained in the art of a few simple key combinations, are hundreds of times faster than reaching over to wriggle that clicky laser mouse.

Windows Live Writer has keyboard shortcuts for everything that you need as a blogger:

• Ctrl-K creates a link
• Ctrl-L inserts a picture
• Crtl-B for bold, Crtl-U for underline, and other familiar formatting combinations
• Ctrl-Shift-C to categorize your post
• and Ctrl-Shift-P to publish when you are done

When I jumped to the Mac platform I did a  lot of research and decided to spend $30 on MarsEdit, which is IMO the best blogging software available for the Mac.  Big mistake.  Inserting images in MarsEdit is an extremely painful experience.  You basically have to do any image manipulation outside the app.

Live Writer on the other hand, includes killer features like pixel perfect resizing, crop, and rotate.

And best of all, it’s FREE (well, free if you don’t count the $80 paid for VMWare Fusion or the XP license, but those are not single use tools).

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A little surprise love from Google Maps arrived in the Downtempo HQ mailbox the other day. Like your favorite pizza joint and nightlife hotspots, our office has been flagged as a Google Maps “favorite place”: “between July 1 and September 30, Google users found your Downtempo LLC business 14 times, and requested driving directions or other information about your busines 1110 times.”

(As awesome as we are, we haven’t had 1,110 visitors in the past 3 months, so I can only assume that this is due to our name being a popular search term.) Anyways, for our clients and collaborators, our barcode is now posted in the office, so feel free to bookmark us with your cameraphone the next time you drop on by.

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Something that we believe passionately about at Downtempo is having a great product experience from beginning-to-end. In the quest for great code, sometimes product design and interaction can fall by the wayside, and things like identity design are sometimes dismissed as mere window dressing. We couldn’t disagree more — while code is the foundation of software products, it’s the holistic product  experience that has to engage the user on all levels, and identity designs from great design shops (such as our friends and collaborators at cinstudio) are a key part of setting the tone of that experience.

When I was reading over the blog Own Your Mind today, I stumbled across a blog post describing the lockpick business cards that a few different hackers had designed for them, which spawned a rich discussion on Flickr. (The original design for the cards were done by Jenni Mattson in an identity design project for Melvin. Definitely check out her other identity design projects on her site.)

The business cards speak for themselves — clean design, utilitarian, and they actually do break apart into a set of fully functional lockpicks. Great work, Jenni.

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I was checking out Andrew & Dunham’s Damn Fine Tea site after seeing their advertising on Daring Fireball (I love John Gruber’s RSS feed revival of old-time-radio-style product endorsement advertising), and was impressed by their mini e-commerce site.

In particular, I felt like their individual product page does a great job of getting me to want to put the tea in my cart because it has:

1.) clear messaging, price, purchase action/button (all in 1 line!)
2.) the product looks cool and somehow worth $22 (even though i’m a coffee drinker… go figure.)
3.) delightful prose gives a strong pitch, and the limited edition numbers encourage a fast purchase decision.

The supporting pages on the site, while fairly minimal, are clean and clear. The result? A complete, targeted e-commerce offering for their product, complete with an option to order the related art print for an extra 5 bucks. (and dive into the A&D blog to see the other promotional strategies they’ve employed to raise awareness of their tea)

Not bad for what is sounds like pretty good tea (according to the Tea Pages review — i’m not a serious tea drinker, so I wouldn’t know great tea if you put it in front of me) in a fancy tin. Of  course, they’re also selling style and dreams and vibe, it just happens to come in tea leaf form.

A great example of small-batch web product marketing delivered.

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I recently made the trek down from Downtempo’s San Francisco office to  Palo Alto and attend Tobias Mayer’s “CSM Day 3″ workshop. An extension of Tobias’ WelfareCSM classes, where he provides low-cost training for people wishing to be Certified ScrumMasters, I was curious about what Tobias was up to.

Tobias has a fascinating take on Scrum — he feels that it can “offer a creative leap for people in any industry – or people in no industry at all: loners, thinkers, inventors, street corner philosophers, maybe you.” This is a change from the idea I sometimes hear that Scrum and Agile are Yet Another Software Development Process, and instead is in line with the more disruptive principles of Scrum.

Here was the introduction that Tobias sent out describing the class:

“If you are coming to the CSM Day 3 session please show up … between 8.30 and 8.45.  Lunch will be brown bag with a view to sharing.  There is a fridge and microwave and coffee-making facilities on the  premises. Lunch will be around 12.30-1.30 and the day will end at 5pm.

The vision:
A 5-6′ span hanging mobile on the theme of tropical rain forests.

We will build this from various raw craft materials, no pre-built pieces.  You will have to coordinate the architecture and the individual features of the mobile between the 3-5 Scrum teams we’ll have.  I am the customer, and each team will have a PO to represent me.

That’s all for now.  Bring any materials you feel might be suitable
for this project.  I’ll supply most of what you’ll need.”

How could I resist?

Besides the fun of building the (decidedly unique) deliverable, the ideas of using emergent behavior to solve the architectural challenges, having multiple Scrum teams integrating with a “Scrum of Scrums”, and experiment with Scrum in a fairly consequence-free environment.

The class itself was a great mix of both technology and non-technology folks, and I always enjoy a chance to see and participate in group dynamics at work. (If you haven’t read a good book on group dynamics and facilitation, I highly recommend picking one up from Amazon and having a read. My class on Group Decision Making in undergrad was one of the non-tech courses that has continued to be useful even years later.)

One of my favorite parts about working with Tobias is seeing how he embraces change, rather than fighting it. It’s all too easy for us to deny people the chance to contribute, or to not adapt their own suggestions into the process. My own modest contribution was asking Tobias if there was a better way to model the Scrum process than having him play the roles of both Customer and Product Owner, and after some questions to the group at large to explore the idea, he promptly recruited a volunteer from our group to act as the Product Owner for our session.

As for the teams themselves, the group broke down into parallel Scrum teams to write up the initial user stories, and then for the initial sprint, the teams took on different subsets of stories required for the final mobile (having the Product Owner decide whether or not to accept a giant tissue-paper bird won points for my favorite surreal moment).  My own Scrum team, Constructive Chaos, took our own set of stories, and soon I was collaborating with my teammates on creating hanging ferns and leafy vines to satisfy some vegetation-related stories. (Luckily my teammates were better at craftiness than I was!)

I ended up leaving early for a personal commitment, but I really enjoyed the chance to have fun and play with Scrum. It’s all too easy to not take enough (or any!) time to reflect on our own development process, and I found this to be a fun use of a day, and a great chance to look at the many forms that Scrum could take. While I may not be using the Scrum process to generate the world’s next piece of fine art (although of course, our mobile totally rocked), I felt my own practice of Scrum benefited from the chance to try out Scrum with new people and a novel goal.

If you’d like to see more photos of that day, you can see my photos on Flickr and Tobias’ photos on Photobucket. And if you’re thinking about checking out one of Tobias’ WelfareCSM classes, I highly recommend checking the WelfareCSM workshop calendar and seeing when the next one is in your area.

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Evidently some poor soul in Intuit’s marketing department is still living in 1998, and decided to spend a chunk of their marketing budget actually sending unsolicited “upgrade” CD-ROMs in postal mail to every Quicken customer.

There are a several ironic moments here (for example, since I bought Quicken online years ago, so wouldn’t it make more sense to send me an e-mail to pitch an upgrade?), but the most tragic one is the statement on the back cover:

“As part of Intuit’s commitment to environmentally friendly practices, this is printed on paper from responsibly managed forests and verified recyclable sources.”

Wait, this is the company that was savvy enough to acquire Mint.com before Mint eclipsed Quicken? This doesn’t seem to add up. CD-ROMs were easily recyclable (it requires hauling to a specialty computer/electronics recycling center), so evidently there’s a real cultural disconnect between their M&A

The most annoying thing about getting a CD-ROM in the mail is that it’s one more piece of junk sitting and waiting to be recycled without ever being used (and I’m sure for most consumers, this will end up in their trash cans, and then off to the landfill). At least we can easily recycle the envelope, I suppose.

And for the marketing departments considering still sending out CD-ROMs in the mail in 2009, here’s a handy cartoon poster from the EPA of The Life Cycle of a CD or DVD (complete with word scramble) that illustrates the pretty large waste of effort that goes into getting that piece of plastic into your mailboxes.

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Tobias Mayer, whom I received my CSM training from, is doing an optional extra day of training tomorrow in a “scrum of scrums” environment, for those of us who were in the initial session of his novel (and successful!) WelfareCSM Scrum training project.

One of the things that I love about Tobias’ method of traning is that he strongly advocates for Scrum as a system for achieving results in many areas of life, and not just in software development.

For example, here is what we’ll be doing in tomorrow’s Scrum additional training session.

“If you are coming to the CSM Day 3 session please show up … between 8.30 and 8.45.  Lunch will be brown bag with a view to sharing.  There is a fridge and microwave and coffee-making facilities on the  premises. Lunch will be around 12.30-1.30 and the day will end at 5pm.

The vision:
A 5-6′ span hanging mobile on the theme of tropical rain forests.

We will build this from various raw craft materials, no pre-built pieces.  You will have to coordinate the architecture and the individual features of the mobile between the 3-5 Scrum teams we’ll have.  I am the customer, and each team will have a PO to represent me.

That’s all for now.  Bring any materials you feel might be suitable
for this project.  I’ll supply most of what you’ll need.

See you tomorrow.”

So tomorrow I’ll be getting up at 7am and driving down to a Palto Alto church (Tobias is a fan of using community spaces for Agile training) to spend my day in a multiple-scrum environment building a large rainforest-themed mobile with one of the best Scrum trainers that I’ve worked with.

Couldn’t ask for a more intriguing Friday!

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I was glancing at my inbox a few minutes ago, and I saw a subject line that *looked* like spam:

“Apply for revenue sharing for your video the zorb rolls down a hill”

But surprisingly enough, it appears to be the real deal, based on a video shot of me a few years ago riding the Zorb down a hillside in New Zealand (it’s great fun, trust me!).

I’ll try it out and see if I earn more than 30 cents off the revenue share, and keep our readers posted. For the rest of our Internet brethren, I thought you’d find it interesting that YouTube is conitnuing to expand their revenue sharing program, even to videos like mine with a mere 32,745 views.

The payment program itself looks pretty straightforward — they’ve tied the payments into AdSense, and there’s a brief tutorial of rules (with a fair number of DO NOT items called out in bold, red text) about what’s allowable. The impression I gathered is that YouTube is extremely sensitive to monetizing any copyrighted content, even mashups or any slightly derivative works of copyrighted content.

It looks like this is part of a recent move by YouTube to expand their revenue sharing program for specific videos, I’ve noticed posts from HyveUp and other blogs also receiving these invitations for relatively medium-to-low traffic individual videos.

Now if only Flickr would launch their *own* revenue sharing program, instead of making me pay them for the privilege of hosting!

Here’s the text of the email I received:

Dear downtempo,

Your video the zorb rolls down a hill has become popular on YouTube, and you’re eligible to apply for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.

Once you’re approved, making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, complete the steps outlined here: [URL DELETED]. Once you’re finished, we’ll start placing ads next to your video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program. Thanks and good luck!

The YouTube Team

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Join your friends at Downtempo for another Hacker Breakfast at Cohabitat, the location of our Dallas office, and also Dallas’ most delicious co-working space. We’ll be there dishing out our favorite breakfast tacos and geektalk this coming Thursday, November 5th, from 8am-10am. Come on by and join us!

Downtempo’s Dallas office is located at:

Cohabitat
2517 Thomas Ave
Dallas TX, 75248
(the door sticks, so don’t be afraid to push)

Breakfast Tacos will be served from 8am-10am, while we rock our fine Downtempo beats.

CONNECT with new people and find out about what they are up to!

PARTICIPATE in riveting discussions about technology, startups, and obscure epicurean delights!

ENJOY the spicy delights of the Downtempo Hot Sauce Bar!

And for those of you who would be so kind to register beforehand (someone has to figure out how many supplies to get!), we’ve setup a Facebook event to collect RSVPs.

See you at breakfast!

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