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Flamingo: the IM client your Mac always craved for

November 1st, 2013

I’ve always preferred native clients for web services. Be it calendar (iCal), email (Sparrow), Twitter (Tweetbot) or, in this case, Google Talk. For years I was using Adium, a great open source OS X client supporting all sorts of protocols. Simple, minimal, efficient. Adium, though, never seemed like a truly native OS X app.

Moreover Google never launched a native client for Hangouts (née Talk) on OS X. That was always a problem for me since Talk was my IM of preference. I never did a lot of chatting on Skype except with a few very close friends and iMessages is still quite broken (sorry, Apple—that’s the truth.) Although iMessages has been improved a lot since, say, a year ago I think it still isn’t in a place that’s suitable as a regular day to day IM platform. It’s ideal for texting, just not IM yet.

Hopefully Flamingo solved the IM conundrum on OS X for good. With a fully native OS X approach Christian Dalonzo and Indragie Karunaratne (the guys behind it) re-imagined the UI and UX with great attention to detail and produced a beautiful product. Flamingo stands amidst the IM clients maelstrom as the only solution a true Mac user would love to use day in day out.

Flamingo
Flamingo’s chat UI

In spite of its first version and limited (but extremely well-thought) feature list, Flamingo shows amazing potential. Its all-in-one design sporting buddies, conversations, and messages, all in a single unified window is fantastic. On top of that, Flamingo supports a unified contact management system with seamless transitions between accounts in the same window. There’s also automatic inline-media support from services like CloudApp, Droplr, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and your favorite GIFs. Just paste a supported URL and it’s instantly transformed. Other features include direct file transfer—or via CloudApp and Droplr, blazing fast search and also support for Facebook and XMPP accounts.

At $9.99 it might seem really expensive and unnecessary for many—considering it’s an IM client—but personally I think it’s a very decent price for the software quality one gets. It totally transforms your OS X IM experience (we all know how horrible Google Hangouts Chrome extension is.) Flamingo is available on the Mac App Store.

Eric Schmidt in Athens

October 11th, 2013

It’s rare to see a 58-year-old speaking with the kind of hubristic, starry-eyed optimism and hope only possible in the liberal and global world of technology, embracing radical change and progress.

Eric Schmidt isn’t your typical 58-year-old though. The Executive Chairman of Google visited Athens yesterday and gave a talk1 about how technology along with business can be used as economic stimuli in order to generate growth and prosperity. I was glad to hear him saying big business and governments do not create new jobs. Amen to that. It’s the small, new business that create jobs. Statism, a big public sector, not embracing private enterprise and globalization cannot act as stimuli for growth and will only keep an economy, and by extent a nation, constrained within the boundaries of its own, far away isolated from the rest of world. In the meantime, the rest of the world advances with an accelerating rate whether it tries to tackle small problems or daft moonshots — as technology, global growth, and trade do as well.

One’s competing with the world now. There’s no ‘keeping up with Joneses anymore.’ Location is uninteresting and moreover not important. It’s keeping up with everybody — from Jakarta to Quebec. Thus, removing roadblocks and regulations that make starting up a company harder than it should be in the first place which also protect certain industries would be deemed as necessary and wise. Whatever bureaucratic relics of the past that make it hard to start a business have to be eliminated.

Our goal should be to create infrastructure and legal frameworks that make it easy for people to start something up, fail, repeat. For example, there are certain cases in Germany that make it illegal for a company to fail and if it does, the owner is prosecuted and faces jail-time. By all accounts that’s absurd in 2013. Failure should not be punished. Instead it should be used as a pool of valuable knowledge for the next time one will try. Best practices, do’s and don’ts. Along with frameworks for starting up, it’s also important to create and establish frameworks that make it easy for people to move around the world and create. The more you regulate a system the harder it will be for it to operate optimally. Now, scale it up to global-level data: 7.13 billion people. Also don’t forget to plan for the future: 1.14% YoY population growth.

With Google Glass not even launched yet the amount of luddite debate about how technology dehumanizes us will grow by a factor of 3 soon.2 There’s always this generation gap and the experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the present have been lost. In Schmidt’s youth, as he said, it was rock and roll that was rendered as such. Nowadays in lieu of rock and roll it’s the Internet and almost everything digital. But contemporary research shows that, in fact, communication between us is growing a lot more thanks to the Internet. And for kids that growing up now (and I think that’s true also for kids that were born in the ’90s — especially for kids born in the early ’90s like me3 who are the first digital natives) it feels natural, more suitable, appropriate and valuable. Even the telephone was rendered as a human-communication killer only to prove the opposite.

Greece, though, has unfortunately a remarkable skill of sometimes ignoring that we’re actually living 2013, humans have walked on the moon, computers instead of paper files could be used in its IRS, smartphones can browse the Internet and that email actually works. All the aforementioned things still sound borderline bonkers and preposterous for many people — from education unions, parents who want their kids to be directly appointed in a random, dull job the public sector, politicians and party leaders across the political spectrum, and generally each one who hasn’t understood what living in 2013 means.

They will not listen to Schmidt’s talk and ideas but real doers have.

  1. In a bona fide California Ideology fashion — a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley which combined elements of radical individualism, libertarianism, and liberal economics mixed based on their shared interest in anti-statism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and techno-utopianism. You can watch the talk here. (Thanks @AnnaMagni for the link.) ↩
  2. Be prepared; I warned you. ↩
  3. 1993 represent. ↩

iOS 7 intricacies

September 22nd, 2013

iOS 7 is not perfect. iOS 7 is excellent — bar none other mobile operating system. This new design approach will evolve and improve over time, just like the original iOS did. iOS 7 is a new aesthetic and functional foundation which serves as a basis to right all the wrongs of the original iOS experience. Apple went thermonuclear1 and cannibalized (once again) its own products.

It’s the first true product of the post-Jobs Apple era. More subtle, refined. Jony Ive doesn’t share Jobs’ software design taste in excessive visual guidance for the user thus creating an artificial environment resembling real-world artifacts. Let’s face it: the early days of smart smartphones are over. People now are able to distinguish between apps, actions, design elements. They — and, consecutively, we — don’t need a Rolodex-alike icon to tell us this is the Contacts app2.

Apple sends a clear message to all pundits who render Cupertino as unable to innovate. I still stand by what I wrote in June:

Apple made it clear that it’s the only dominant player when it comes to amazing hardware and software. “Can’t innovate any more, my ass.”

Not only dominant but also the only skilled enough when it comes to design, aesthetics, details, performance and meaning. If you read between the lines Apple doesn’t try after all to compete with Google. It’s clear, now, that Cupertino is by far better on everything (sans the web infrastructure—we’re getting there) compared to Mountain View. Still a trailblazer.

Apple is different.

iOS 7 is the face of Apple to the majority of the world and there’s an (ongoing) perception that Apple is not going to survive as a going concern.

At this point of time, as at all other points of time in the past, no activity by Apple has been seen as sufficient for its survival. Apple has always been priced as a company that is in a perpetual state of free-fall. It’s a consequence of being dependent on breakthrough products for its survival. No matter how many breakthroughs it makes, the assumption is (and has always been) that there will never be another. When Apple was the Apple II company, its end was imminent because the Apple II had an easily foreseen demise. When Apple was a Mac company its end was imminent because the Mac was predictably going to decline. Repeat for iPod, iPad and now, iPhone.

But it’s key to understand what innovation means.

John Gruber nails it:

Refinement, in the eyes of these naysayers, does not count as innovation. Only revolution counts. But the iPhone needs no revolution. […] Every step of the way between 2007 and that lone original iPhone — running an OS with no third-party apps, no multitasking, not even copy-and-paste — and today’s world, where Apple is on the cusp of selling its 700 millionth iOS device and the lineup ranges from the iPod Touch to the iPhones to two sizes of iPad, has been about just that: refinement.

Innovation is missed by most people because it is so often incremental.

Aside innovation, Federighi, senior VP of Software Engineering, says iOS 7’s new look is inextricably linked with technological advances:

“This is the first post-Retina UI, with amazing graphics processing thanks to tremendous GPU power growth, so we had a different set of tools to bring to bear on the problem as compared to seven years ago [when the iPhone first launched],” he says. “Before, the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display. But with a display that’s this precise, there’s nowhere to hide. So we wanted a clear typography.3”

Hardware and software are one now. A cohesive, powerful, beautiful unified whole. There’s not ‘hardware’ design and ‘software’ design — it’s just design. Jony Ive leads this effort perfectly.

Regarding the thought-process behind designing iOS 7: it’s a very sophisticated one. Abstract, rational, cognitive. It takes only a couple of days to completely immerse in the logic behind this massive overhaul—which is a massive cognitive task in itself—performed in a very little time. The exceptional mental task your brain does after you complete the iOS 7 immersion is your iOS 6 perception: you will be amazed how dated iOS 6 feels and looks like.

Although there is much to say about the iOS 7 minutiae I will not bother you. I’ve been using it since Beta 1 in June and despite its rough edges, iOS 7 sent a message: Cupertino never lost its cool, its taste, and its craftsmanship. Never will. Of course, there are still some design bugs and things that need more refinement and work. But they will get fixed — as always.

“We’re engineers and artists. Craftsmen and inventors. We sign our work. You may rarely look at it. But you’ll aways feel it. This is our signature. And it means everything. Designed by Apple in California.”

iOS 7 is Apple’s signature. A damn good one.

  1. As Steve Jobs would go against Android.↩
  2. Although some text-based navigation elements in iOS 7 still feel alien. I can’t understand this design decision — it’s not bad — it’s just different. Maybe it’ll take us some more time to adapt to it. ↩
  3. That’s the reason behind dropping the shadows, Thodoris. ↩

4sqwifi now available in Android

August 24th, 2013

It’s been a great day today. After a period of two months of on and off development 4sqwifi is finally available in the Google Play store. Grab it while it’s hot and do tell your friends.

4sqwifi in Android 4sqwifi in Android

This new version is almost completely built from the scratch up — we didn’t just copy iOS. We use a new and better algorithm to find relevant venues, new server-side scripts that make the experience much smoother, and a few UI tweaks that brand the app uniquely. Basically what all this means is: faster, better 4sqwifi. I think you’ll like it.

4sqwifi in Android wouldn’t be possible without the help of the great and talented Áron Pável, whom I met through the amazing (and recommended) NYCEDC program last May. Thanks, Áron.