A smart idea sounds great when it’s in your head. Even before it’s made, we can imagine how great it will be–there would be no iPod, no PC, and no Super Mario Bros. without imagination.

But just because you can already see the finished idea, don’t think that the steps in between “smart idea” and “transformed future” are insignificant. They eat most smart ideas before they hatch.

The next time you hear that someone “stole” someone else’s idea, look at the in between first, and ask: how much of that–the business strategy, the way the product was built–was really stolen?

Blatant theft? Or recognizing a smart idea?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://microsoftgadgets.com/

Three Four companies, one idea.

Here is a timeline of the gory details:

• 1984 - The original Macintosh, featuring widget-like desk accessories, is released. [0] [1]
• 1998 - Arlo Rose comes up with concept for Konfabulator, after looking at a skinnable MP3 player, according to his account.
• 2001 - Microsoft releases a paper on UI design that discusses “Peripheral Awareness of Important Information–” a foundation for later “widget” development. [2]
• February 10, 2003 – With the help of Perry Clarke, Arlo releases the first version of Konfabulator.
• November 8, 2004 – Konfabulator releases its widgets for Windows.
• April 29, 2005 – Apple releases Mac OS X 10.4, which features Dashboard, a widget hosting system. [3] [4] [5]
• July 25, 2005 – Yahoo buys Konfabulator. [6]
• Also 2005 - Microsoft Gadgets is announced and unveiled in Vista.

Does it really matter if Yahoo stole the idea from Apple, or MS stole from Arlo Rose?

Not really. I’m sure that most of the people involved in each of these projects would have been able to come up with widgets on their own; MS, Yahoo, and planet Earth are all full of innovative and capable engineers *(and I would hate to see a patent war kill widgets).

What really matters, though, is this; how much have they learned from the past? Yes, that’s right; perhaps all these gadgetmakers should be looking at their competition.

Assertion 1: Making a good product is not the result of creating something new; most often it is the result of doing something well.

The widget is a relatively simple idea. Instead of having to visit a webpage every time you want to check the weather, why not have a widget that’s always there? Less distracting and yet always available. This would save space on the screen and yet keep little bits of useful information always accessible.

A bright idea doesn’t make a product though. Once you have the inspiration, it’s still nothing more than a paper tiger. Anyone can come up with bright ideas.

As one good example of an innovative idea that flopped, look at PDAs before Palm. People developed the technology and lots of people were thinking about handheld computers, but it was only when a team took the ideas and made them simple that the technology took off. [7] [8: How can a gorilla learn to fly?]

Fig 1. Put too much in a palm device, and you make a mistake made by many before you.

Think back to Edison–1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Bright ideas are incredibly cheap to produce, but taking them and putting together an actual market is hard work and hard thinking. That’s where the $ is.

Assertion 2: Simply copying an idea == copying all the mistakes of that idea.

Up unto the Palm, every pocket mobile device tried to be too ambitious. Newton, anyone?

If that doesn’t sound familiar, let’s try a more well recognized example:

There were plenty of products before the iPod. The Rio shipped three years earlier. [9] In both cases, the difference was that the new product was far simpler than its predecessors and its competition.

If you copy a product that hasn’t succeeded before, you will run into the same problems that others had before. Not just making it simpler. There are business problems, design problems, and engineering problems.

Assertion 3: Making a successful market isn’t about having the best engineering.

The original idea for a mouse driven interface wasn’t created at Apple or at Microsoft. As computer history buffs will tell you, the original Graphical User Interface (or at least, the mouse part of it) was created at the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center [10] Nevertheless, nowadays, we don’t buy our operating systems from the company with the most innovative engineering.

Then, the Mac came along, and made a new idea into a great product. The original Mac was an exciting, innovative device, and you could buy it in a store. It took 6 years for Microsoft to come up with a product approaching it. [11]

So why are we using Windows now?

Look at assertion 3 again.

Making a successful market isn’t about having the best engineering.

Windows took a no longer new idea, modeled it after a great product, and turned that into a profitable business.

—————————-

It’s not romantic to build a distribution network that will warehouse your new toy so it doesn’t sell out right after it hits stores in downtown Manhattan. It’s not romantic to make your product compatible with version 1 of a huge corporate customer’s obsolete operating system. It’s not romantic to figure out how your brand new shiny social network that is, by the way, sooo much better than that other social network that everyone still uses for some reason, will get customers.

But you still have to do it.

Remember that before laying the egg.

This seems to be the default plan in big companies. They do it because it decreases the standard deviation of the outcome. Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software, and it’s hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

…The other problem with startups is that there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that’s interesting to write. Programming languages are interesting to write, and Microsoft’s first product was one, in fact, but no one will pay for programming languages now. If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.

All makers face this problem. Prices are determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers. Acting in off-Broadway plays doesn’t pay as well as wearing a gorilla suit in someone’s booth at a trade show. Writing novels doesn’t pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. And hacking programming languages doesn’t pay as well as figuring out how to connect some company’s legacy database to their web server.

Here’s a fun game. If you were only allowed to have 10 books to keep and read (libraries are allowed so we can allow textbooks and pass school, etc.), which ones would you keep? I think this might be one.

Liu’s Reviews

Hackers and Painters (4/5): Keep in mind that most of the book is free.

Futurama (3/5): Our scientists are close to perfecting a formula that will allow you to generate a hit cartoon show on demand. Included free are: obnoxious side character, episode on the influence of television, musical episode.

In-N-Out Burger (5/5) 

The Mission:

Possibly going to review for use:

• http://plone.org
• http://www.xaraya.com
• http://drupal.org

Random links:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/

http://autoreview.belproject.com/item/19

http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/06/01/tesla_motors_new_electric_sportscar_company_raises_40m_from_google_guys_others.html

Reviews

Sanitarium (4/5)
Google Earth (4/5): Good at what it does, needs to do more
Drama in the Ph.D. (4/5)
Blue Like Jazz (4.5/5)
Lord of the Rings (3.5/5)
Life of Pi (I forget, it was good)

Reviews of stuff
Superman Returns (3.5/5): Not bad, good, or memorable
Click (3/5): Story unoriginal
Code Monkey (5/5)
Picasa (with Web Albums) (3.5/5)
Mr. Bucket (5/5)
Draw a Pig! (4.5/5)
Opera (3.5/5)
Housing Maps (4/5)
Prey (demo) (3.5/5): This sums it up quite nicely
Windows Live Messenger (3/5):
It might be better, but I didn’t get to talk to too many people. Plus the interface is difficult to decipher.

In our last article, we reviewed AIM. Today we will be covering Trillian Basic, the free version of Trillian.

Basics

There’s not too much to talk about with the fundamentals. Trillian does everything the same way a program like AIM does, but with a little more visual flair. There are no ads to get in the way, no unnecessary buttons. It’s almost too simple – where do you go to set an away message?

The options window, however, is quite graceful compared to its counterparts. You can actually open it and have a non-horrible chance of finding what you’re looking for.

Little Things

There are a number of little details that Trillian just gets right. Compulsive away message checkers, for example, have always been able to look at away messages just by putting their mouse over a user name:

The history logging is also quite useful. If you ever have an important conversation that you’ve forgotten, you can look up what you said just by pressing a button. (On the flip side, Trillian isn’t careful to keep these logs secure.)

Other little features that are sorely missed in other AIM clients include the automatic lookup of words in wikipedia, being able to copy text by highlighting it, and being able to click on an aim window and start typing. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to talk to someone in AIM, clicked on a window, and started typing, only to find out i had clicked in the wrong part and nothing showed up. These incredibly subtle things might seem stupid, but together they add up to a very well-designed program.

But this part doesn’t work with AIM!

While Trillian may get a lot of things right, there a lot of annoying nags that come up while using it. For example, if you add a contact on Trillian, it’s hit or miss whether it’s been saved anywhere else. While this starts out simple, if you use more than one screen name, or you use instant messenging in more than one place, it can become quite difficult to manage, and you may lose all your contacts if you go somewhere else.

Chat rooms also tend to be more trouble to start than they should be, and direct connections can sometimes be hard to establish.

Overall:

In general, Trillian does a good job of defining what a good instant messenging program should do. Its interface may be too abstract for some, but once you get used to it, it never gets in the way.

Score:
Features: 3/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Visuals: 4/5
Overall: 4/5

This concludes Liu’s Reviews of AIM clients for now. While I obviously still have to get to GAIM, the other major Windows client, I don’t really feel like dealing with it yet.

In our last article, we reviewed Miranda. Today we will be covering AIM–the basic, original, pre-Triton version.

AIM

Getting AIM

While the old AIM is not available on AIM’s regular site in the U.S., interestingly enough, AIM 5.5 is still the default version in Canada and the UK. Maybe Canadians like a cleaner AIM. Anyways, you can get it from here in the states, through these sites, or through OldVersion.com. For this review, we used AIM 5.5.3599.

The ads!!!!

Before going on, we should mention the biggest major disadvantage AIM has over most of its competitors; the advertising. Not only does the actual window prominently feature annoying (and sometimes talking) advertisements, even this version of AIM installs unrequested crap onto your computer.
For this version, I removed the extra stuff automatically. You may do the same by following these instructions:

1. Run
   “C:\Program Files\AOD\AolAod.exe” -uninstall
   in Start Menu->Run. This will remove the “Free AOL” links on your desktop, start menu, and favorites, all at once.
2. Run
   “C:\Program Files\Viewpoint\Viewpoint Media Player\mtsAxInstaller.exe” /u
   This will remove the Viewpoint Media Player.

These are the two main things that will haunt you on an AIM install. Now that we’re done with that, let’s look at the actual program.

The basics:

The basic AIM works relatively well. Anyone with half a brain can sign in and use it to send messages to people. Setting away messages and changing your profile is easy too.
The most difficult part of AIM is dealing with all the extras that you don’t actually want to see. Do you want the stock ticker or the AIM Today window? Do you want the computer to go ding-dong every time you send a message? If you don’t, you’re gonna have to remove it yourself. If you want the taskbar button to go away when you close the buddy list, you’re gonna have to do that yourself too. The annoying popups in the bottom of the screen are also absolutely obnoxious if you get too many of them. (Plus I think they can pop up during some games).

While AIM’s options are easier than Miranda’s, figuring them out takes some time. While I got so used to it that I never noticed, the menus are filled with ridiculous options. Exactly how many of these does the average person use on a regular basis?

Furthermore, there are some things you won’t be able to get rid of. Don’t want ads? You can get rid of them, but that requires even more trickery. Don’t want to upgrade? You’ll get plenty of nagging reminders with no real way to shut them off.

Extras:

Since AIM is built on AOL’s own network, naturally AOL’s program works perfectly with all the capabilities built into AIM. You can edit profiles and use fancy fonts without difficulty. AIM also includes special features that you may never use, including:

• Built in video
• Built in audio (I’ve actually used it before)
• Games that I played once or twice (I think they might’ve been sort of fun, but you have to let AOL install extra software)
• AIM “Expressions,” little themes you can add to make your windows have the same annoying postcard look for everyone who talks to you
• etc.

Some of the features are cool, but most of them aren’t that valuable on a regular basis. If you have multiple screen names, AIM can link them, which might be handy, and the new eye feature (which makes you invisible to others) is cool, if somewhat stalker-ish.

Overall

AIM is, for all its faults, a relatively good program at what it does. Unfortunately, its numerous doo-dads do more to annoy people than to make the program more useful.

Score:
Features: 2.5/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Visuals: 2.5/5
Overall: 3/5

Note:

You may wonder why I tested 5.5 and not 5.9. From my impression, 5.9 does not offer any new features of much merit, and a significant amount of spyware.

Miranda
Miranda is an extremely basic program, designed primarily for use with plugins. Plugins are little pieces of code that extend the program and add new functionality. As of today Miranda had 500 plugins, with more on the way. Many of these are extremely minor fixes, like keeping track of updates and toolbar buttons, which begs the question: Why weren’t the obvious features put into Miranda?

While there are plenty of valid answers to that question, the truth is that Miranda simply doesn’t have enough features, with plugins or without, to be that useful of an im program. The user interface is straightforward, but almost too obscure. The IM windows are so simplified as to be almost unusable; there’s not even an indication of who says what.

Even with all this simplicity, the user interface is still hard to use. The options panel, for instance, offers an absurd amount of customization–every single option for every single contact can be altered. This is nice, but it would be much more efficient and elegant to have the regular options obvious while hiding the complex options.

In addition, there are serious problems with the basics. It’s hard to add or adjust contacts, and out of the box the program has trouble signing in.

So, overall, Miranda has a long way to go. The program has a lot of potential, but it gets buried in confusing design. If the program could handle the basics, it would go far, but even with its spartan interface, something as simple as signing on and sending a message becomes horribly confusing.

Score:
Features: 2/5
Ease of use: 1.5/5
Visuals: 1.5/5
Overall: 1.5/5

Due to the blog outage from those a-holes at influxhost, I’m re-releasing this article in the unfinished form I found it on Gas’s backup.

Today Liu’s Reviews will be going into a three-part series review on cereal bars. I bought a whole bungalow of them at walmart over spring break, so I’d have something to eat for breakfast.

I’ll review them on taste, texture, presentation, nutrition, and overall breakfast bar experience.

Overall these Pop Tarts are pretty impressive. S’mores are a pretty difficult taste to capture in processed food, but Kellogg’s seems to have chosen not to try to imitate the entire experience of campfire made s’mores. Instead, they focused on making a good tasting Pop Tarts version.

The result is a nice, balanced texture of flavor, which can work both on its own and with milk. Naturally, the taste screams out “better if toasted!” but for the college student with an aversion to kitchens, Pop Tarts do a good job of tasting at least decent no matter what the situation.

The system requirements, though, are a bit high. I ate my Pop Tarts while using the following test specs:

• Intel 2.8 GHz Pentium IV processor
• 512 MB RAM
• ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 128 MB RAM

Naturally, I didn’t experience too many problems with it. However, on slower systems, people might experience hiccups or slowdowns.

Nutrition-wise, Pop Tarts are Pop Tarts; you get what you expect. That being said, they are pretty filling, and are fortified with some vitamins so you get some nutritional benefit from eating processed breakfast wafers.

Overall, Pop Tarts: S’mores are a good food for those who don’t need high quality but do want a minimum standard for taste and texture.

Pop Tarts: S’mores: 6.5/10

Due to an outpour of reviews, Cheng is reviewing his own logo. The logo has been reviewed by others, so Cheng thinks these reviews should be looked at also. What follows is a combo of review and remarks of what Cheng has done and what others have said that Cheng has done.


Point 1- This idea came about when Cheng thought about Canadia. What represents Canadia more than the people in? A word? I don’t think so, the name of the place is much less important than the people in Canadia. That is why the people take up most of the space. Should a person be hyphenated? No way Jose Renteria. A name can be hyphenated. Every person also has their “thing”. This includes things from Job and his car to LJ holding the group. If you want a detailed explanation, I can explain everything.