Archive for March, 2008
9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design
PSDTuts has a very good article on 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design. It’s a good read for all designers, and all people interested in design. I especially liked the example sites in the article!
I strongly recommend reading the article but in summary, the principles are:
- Precedence (Guiding the Eye)
- Spacing
- Navigation
- Design to Build
- Typography
- Usability
- Alignment
- Clarity (Sharpness)
- Consistency
Thanks to Jimish for the link!
India: Cash Rich, Product Poor
Sramana Mitra wrote on Forbes that India has a lot of venture money now, but no tech products. She goes to explain that:
India’s meteoric rise in the tech world has been driven by providing back-office services. That work puts a premium on skills such as engineering management and coding. Someone else–somewhere else–writes the specifications for the projects. Again, someone else, somewhere else does the market studies analyzing the potential of a new product.
Indian managers have had scarce opportunities to learn the nuances of how global technology markets work. That means that local entrepreneurs can try to position products, but they do so without detailed and disciplined marketing knowhow.
Being in the Indian IT industry, I agree with her that Indian entrepreneurs have the tendency to start service companies because they are low capital, low risk. The cash flow cycles are faster and only technical and execution skills are required.
If I talk about myself and Magnet, over the last decade, we have come up with many product ideas, even developed at least a dozen products. But have not had a rocking success in marketing a single product. That not only because we lack the marketing skills, but also because we don’t have the persistence it takes to launch a product. Over and over again, we put our products out and went onto services because service business was there, generating monthly cash flows for us! And monthly cash flows have been important at all stages for the company!
Sramana highlights the grave side of this! “VCs typically do not like this business model. There are (very) few barriers to slow down competitors keen to enter the market.”.
And that’s happened all around. In the last decade the competition has gone through the roof. As things start getting difficult offering just services, many Indian IT companies have started looking at products and product + service offerings. There are only a few who have succeeded so far, but there are many that are trying.
But I think it requires different skills and tactics to ace the product market! And Indian IT companies and developers need to unlearn a lot and then learn some to succeed. More on that some other time!
But what do you think? Where is this going?
What’s the best way to manage birthdates and anniversaries?
I am someone who forgets birthdays and anniversaries. I’ve been able to manage with apologies so far. And I’ve been thinking of having an application to track important recurring dates for a very long time. Till date, I have not acted on this.
What is the best system to manage birth dates / anniversaries / other important recurring dates?
Is it recurring events in iCal (I am on a Mac), or one of these various sites (e.g. BirthdayAlarm), or Plaxo (I really like the way it reminds for birthdays, but not everyone on my list will be online!). Is it some desktop software? Or is it some home grown system? (We have a birthday bot in Magnet, checks for upcoming employee birthdays everyday and notifies people!)
What works best for you?
5 Good, Usable RIAs in Flex and Silverlight
drawLogic has a roundup of 5 Good, Usable rich internet applications done in Flex and Silverlight. A good summary of some really well built apps! If you are interested in RIA’s, you should check them out!
And if you can’t wait to go try them out, here are the 4 I like:
The topic of Ryan Christensen’s blog entry essentially is usability in RIAs. He says you can use any technology, but what really matters is the usability of the application! Valid point Ryan!
Optimizing Flex Applications
Was looking around ways to optimize Flex Applications, and found David Coletta’s slides. David is founder of Buzzword – the kickass online word processor built in Flex, and shares some great tips. Here are the slides.
