Seconded. This book has made me rethink all of my behaviors and professional practices – from the gym, to food, drinking, and my UX design recommendations and reasoning. It provides a framework for how we make decisions, a truly phenomenal and amazing accomplishment, when you consider it.
Dropbox's GUI does need some work for presentation, which is why me and a friend built an app on top of Dropbox precisely for that: views.fm Actually just released a new slideshow feature to present photos!
For designers: good for practice, bad for business
For businesses: good for unimportant stuff that needs a bit of design, bad for serious stuff
As a designer/business owner, I'm past the point of using this service and since my product is UX/design focused, I wouldn't dream of outsourcing design work in this way.
Oddly enough, the more I read the more I become convinced that this may actually not be the case. Technology and our ability to effectively process information is growing at an exponential rate – of course, so is the amount of information.
But logically, there will be a point in the future where the output of humanity in an hour will be greater than the sum total of all human knowledge prior to 2012. Some fans of the Mayan calendar say this date is December 21st, 2012. Kurzweil says more like 2045. Really hard to say, IMO. But still, if we have the power to create that kind of information then we'll have to be able to take in a lot more, so I'm not too worried about missing everything. I'm just concerned about the information pertinent to my health, career, and loved ones, which is quite readily available thanks to sites like this.
Fuck startup events (and startup "incubators" for that matter.) Everybody wants to 'play startup' these days.
Valuable non-programming skills include, in order of immediate product utility: user experience design, visual design, customer support, business development, marketing. And, more importantly, and much rarer, the ability to find all those people that fit with the team and to create a working environment of mutual respect.
I dunno, I'm 26 and equally baffled by every new mobile/social fad. I think technology and late stage capitalism does something strange to culture, leaving a void where religion, music, or some sort of dialog traditionally exist, so young people are following the logic of consumerism, going to whatever gives instant gratification and a semblance of meaning.
That's the best explanation I can come up with the success of things like foursquare, instagram, etc. and the rise of online gaming.
There were probably assholes like us saying the same shit back in the 50s though - why do these people stay inside and watch TV when they could see ART at the Cinema!?
Color is the foursquare of photo apps. Which is to say: novel, silly, and, ultimately rather useless.
For group photo sharing, which I think is an awesome idea, there's an app/site in private beta called Chute (getchute.com) which does the same thing with less emphasis on users nearby.
Six months ago I started a weekend project with a buddy to build a pretty visual layer on top of Dropbox.
Lots of coffee, long nights and weekends later, and it's a full-fledged file sharing application.
I'm using it to send design mockups and assets to clients. My buddy is stoked on streaming his music library from any computer. Would and how would you use it?
I think you meant to write: "the future is freemium." This article doesn't mention micropayments.
I'll be damned if those aren't some good ideas regarding accessibility though. I don't know if the marginal value with those kind of features is worth it, but it sure seems like a better alternative than fruity redesigns like the new Gawker shit.