I Love It

I love it because it revolutionizes scrolling. Seriously. Gone are the days of scrolling 3 or 5 lines at a time. The mouse reacts perfectly to the speed of your finger, dynamically setting the speed using “scrolling with momentum.”

Move your finger slowly to smoothly glide a webpage or document up and down. Flick your finger to throw a web page up and down. It feels very much like scrolling on an iPhone. And two dimensional scrolling really streamlines your workflow in design apps like Photoshop.

I Hate It

But it seems like Apple focused so much on creating a multi-touch mouse that they sacrificed some things. First, the mouse doesn’t feel right to me. It’s simply too flat to lie naturally in your hand. I like the curved feeling of my Razer Orochi.

Second, the forward/back swiping is difficult to use. You have to hold the mouse close to perfectly still and get just the right swiping motion with two fingers to get it to work. In my first day I would say I got this right less than 50% of the time. Maybe I will get better the more I use the mouse, but I would almost rather have two buttons on the side for forward/back.

Third, I really miss the scroll wheel click. Why? Because when I browse news sites I like to click the scroll wheel to open links in new tabs — it allows me to open all the pages I want to look at while staying on the main page with all the links. It really speeds up my browsing.

Lastly, like the touch pad on Macbooks, you can’t customize what each multi-touch does or add new multi-touches. I would, for example, like to use two-finger swipe up/down to switch tabs in Firefox. Or add three finger swipe up/down to switch apps. I find the current multi-touches insufficient for my needs.

So, What Will I Do?

I’m only one day in, but I can already tell that, despite some of my frustrations, the power of touch scrolling is so awesome that I’ll ignore the mouse’s drawbacks. Scrolling webpages and Photoshop documents is such a pleasure.

Yet, the ability to customize multi-touches is the one thing holding this mouse back from being truly magic. I guess I’ll have to hope Apple updates the multi-touches or someone creates a Multiclutch for the Magic Mouse.

During school, I struggled with what to do, what company to work for, what industry to be in.  I felt pressured and pushed in different directions.  I looked at a lot of interesting options.  Got six figure offers from big name companies.  But I never felt pulled towards something.

I needed that pull.  And then one day I realized I was in the rare position of being able to do something I love.

A quick background.  I grew up building stuff.   It started with electronic bulletin boards and became web sites. Started a web dev shop after college.  Coded and did management work at big sites like CNN.com and SI.com.  Got big corporate experience.

Then, I got an MBA.  While in school, I worked at a startup accelerator and at a venture capital firm.  I learned a ton and basically got a boot camp education on starting a technology business.

As graduation neared, I realized all my past experiences were taking me down an entrepreneurial path.  I just needed to follow it.  But doing so isn’t easy when you’re an MBA student watching your classmates take high-paying, cushy jobs (or so they thought). But the pull was too great.

It started casually enough.  In early March, David Sung and I cornered Lance one day in his office to talk ideas.  Lance sees a lot of startups and has a lot of ideas.  We suggested he start pursuing his ideas, planting seeds and seeing which ones grow.

One of those seeds was what we called Socialytics, a social media analytics application.  In April I did a bunch of market research.  Research said there was opportunity.  And so in May we decided to build a prototype.  I excitedly went into coding mode and had a working prototype built by the end of June.  It solved our original problem and showed the potential of what could come next.

In early July we demoed it to a few alpha users.  They gave us some positive feedback and direction.  We decided on a plan to move the project forward.  Development, market research and alpha testing continues.  It has great potential to turn into something big, but like all good opportunities, it is accompanied by a great deal of risk.

But the pull doesn’t care about risk.  It cares about passion.  The passion of building something new.  The passion of attacking a market opportunity.  The passion of challenging yourself to beat the odds and do something great.

Instead of those 3 steps, I just type “m <movie name>” into my browser adress bar and hit enter and it takes me right to the search results on IMDB. Similarly, I type “a <product name>” to get results on Amazon. The trick is to create a bookmark that passes the “<movie name>” or “<product name>” text to the site you’re searching on.

To do this, visit your favorite site and search for something. For example, I searched for Donnie Darko on IMDB, which sent me to this URL:

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Donnie%20Darko

Next, bookmark this page in your browser and then edit the bookmark properties. Change the keyword to the letter you want to use to search. I use “m” for IMDB and “a” for Amazon. Change the search terms (“Donnie%20Darko”) to “%s” like below.

Save the changes and you’re done. Now you can search using your bookmark. I can’t remember where I first learned this trick, but it has quickly become one of my favorites.

What tricks and hacks do you use to speed up your searches?

If you don’t know, meta tags are undisplayed lines of code in a web page that hold data like generator, description, and keywords. Here’s the meta tags for my blog.

I’ve added a “designer” tag, which tells you who designed it and how to find them. I plan to use this tag on all the sites I build going forward.

If everyone used this tag, figuring out who built a site would be as simple as viewing the site’s source code. Unfortunately, this tag is not yet widely used and until it is, I will still have to guess and do detective work to figure out who designed that site.

Do you ever wish you knew who designed a site?

SQLEditor makes it easy to design a database. You can quickly create tables, add fields, edit field attributes and determine relationships between tables. SQLEditor’s visual display helps you understand the relationships between your data.

For example, I’m building a simple, web-based task management app that makes it easy to manage to-do lists (more on this later). Here’s what the database design looks like.

As you can see, I have three tables (users, lists and todo) with various data fields and 1-to-many relations between users and lists, and lists and todo. That is, one user can have many lists and each list can have many to-dos on it.

After visually creating the database, SQLEditor can then export directly to a database or it can export SQL commands to a file. Here’s the SQL commands needed to create my database.

These commands could be written by hand, especially for simple databases like the one I’m using in this example. However, for large, complex databases, database design tools like SQLEditor are indespensable. They remove alot of the work in building databases for web apps.

What do you use to build your databases?

Convoluted Pages

My main problem with the Zappos.com site is the clutter. Take a look at the homepage, it has way too much going on: there are two search bars, a bunch of promos and ads, a sitemap-like list of links, a long list of product reviews, and a footer that is bigger than many homepages. The result? You get a site that is 4,371 pixels tall that is hard for the user to navigate. For the average user (1024×728 resolution), that’s at least 6 full screens of stuff on the Zappos.com homepage.

Seriously, how many users scroll down past 1,000, much less 2,000 or 3,000 pixels? Zappos should take a look at one of Google’s many sites to get an idea of how to build a clean, simple page that clearly indicates what action the user should take.

The Zappos interior pages aren’t any better. The Zappos site is only 740 pixels wide, but they decided to cram three rails in, leaving little room for product photos and details.

Zeta Version

The zeta version has significantly reduced the clutter, both on the homepage and interior pages. The result is a clean, simple site that makes it easy for people to find shoes.

There’s still room for improvement, though. For example, the footer is still way too big and the sidebar is filled with corporate info and links that aren’t relevant.

Right now, the old Zappos site often redirects you to the new zeta site (when searching for example), so I wonder why they don’t completely replace the old site. Regardless, the zeta version is a big improvement and should help boost traffic and sales.

What are your thoughts on their new site?

For example, I searched for “iphone apps” on Google, and StubleUpon immediately drew my attention to what turned out to be two of the better links on the page, appleiphoneapps.com and Lifehacker’s 20 Best iPhone apps post.

What would really be nice, once StumbleUpon has enough data, is for them to build their own search engine and integrate it into their browser plugin. Despite many saying search innovation is dead, it can still be challenging to find what I want on Google.

Yes, Google’s algorithm is amazing, but there’s a human element that search is lacking. Despite progress in AI, people can still determine what’s relevant or not better than computers. StumbleUpon, with its growing wealth of data on what people like on the web, is well-positioned to enhance search with a touch of human input.

I tested out KeePassX on my Mac to see if it would give me a more secure way to store my passwords. KeePass uses AES or Twofish encryption to secure a master database of all your passwords. You have one password you need to remember to open the database and access all your passwords. Keypass generates very secure passwords (HjVgF4P3si0et6KnDLxZrxu5n) of various lengths with or without special characters for you to use on websites.

What I like: KeePass eliminates two vulnerabilities: KeePass’ generated passwords make it virtually impossible for people to guess your password and it securely encrypts your passwords should someone ever gain access to your computer.

What I don’t like: Unlike the Windows version, KeePassX doesn’t have an auto-fill hotkey. That means every time you want to log into a site, you have to have KeePass open, switch to KeePass, copy the password, switch back to your browser, and paste the password. This is way too much work.

Due to this lacking feature, I won’t be using KeePass for my regular passwords. However, for certain passwords like my bank account I would consider using KeePass. The down side is that I have to have KeePass to retrieve my password. If I’m on another computer, I won’t be able to login.

Bottom line is I’m still looking for a strong password protection tool. What do you use to secure your passwords?