I am extremely proud of my team. 

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If you are familiar with Django you are familiar with a nice set of template tags called "humanize". In essence it turns data such as "13 April 2012" into "2 days ago" or "1000000000" into "1.0 billion".

JS Humanizer is a jQuery counterpart to the Django humanize template tags we wrote for TitanFile and thought that others might find it useful too:

https://github.com/milanvrekic/JS-humanize

JS Humanizer supports:

intcomma (4500000 = 4,500,000)

intword (1000000 = 1.0 million)

naturalDay (15 April 2012 16:25:30 = Today)

ordinal (3 = 3rd)

filesizeformat (1234567890 = 1.15 Gb)

linebreaks (Play\ning with blank lines = <p>Play<br />ing with blank lines</p>)

linebreaksbr (Play\ning with blank lines = Play<br />ing with blank lines)

pluralize (1, "y", "ies" = y)

truncatechars ("hello world", 10 = "hello w...")

truncatewords ("Playing with truncate words", 3 = Playing with truncate ...)

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Fitt's law is one of the most (if not the most) important rule of UI interaction.

Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 )

Fitts' law has been shown to apply under a variety of conditions, with many different limbs (hands, feet, head-mounted sights, eye gaze), manipulanda (input devices), physical environments (including underwater!), and user populations (young, old, mentally retarded, and drugged participants). Note that the constants a and b have different values under each of these conditions.

Chronicle Herald iPad app does not follow this law very well:

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Fast food restauraunts serve one purpose - get in, eat quckly, get out.  Minimal table service, limited menu, cooked bulk. More customers you serve and faster you do it - the better.

Every time I grab a slice of pizza from Ontario chain PizzaPizza they shove it in the oven for few minutes and continue serving other customers. Now the following happens:

1.) Pizza slice gets too hot to eat. This in turn causes bad experience since I cannot finish my meal and carry on with my business. I have to wait for the slice to slowly cool down, in a fast food place.

2.) While I am waiting for my Pizza slice to "drop in temperature", I am taking up table space from other customers. 

3.) Operating massive heating oven durring work hours must add up to quite a bill over a year. Decreasing the temperature of the oven would save me from too freakin' hot to eat slice , save money for the company and get me out of the place faster, so other people can use the tables, while increasing my overall experience. 

No brainer one would think.

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Entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada is expanding rapidly. Halifax and Saint John give some are great examples. Birthplace of Canadian confederation and for a long time main port of entry into North America, Maritimes never lacked incentive and new ideas. Everyone knows that Bank of Nova Scotia started in – Nova Scotia but not many people know that Royal Bank of Canada hails from these regions too. So can we then explain that only 7 per cent of small businesses in Canada are located in the Maritimes? What are the reasons? What are the problems? And more importantly – what are the solutions?

Full blog post on Startup Canada web site

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EDIT: Munitio has since corrected this usability fault.

Munitio is very mindful when it comes to manufacturing and designing their (great sounding) earbuds but I just came across something very mindless.

Does anyone ever go to a store to order zero items? By the virtue of previous cognition and conditioning I expect to see “add to cart” and be able to do just that - add an item to a cart.

However, that is not what happens at the Munitio store, no sir! It actually sends a request to the server, and while I am expecting to see payment information page I see my page refreshed with an error message, that order quanity must be greater than zero.. duh! 

Or take the example bellow. Does anyone, ever, ship anything to Antartica? And if the form is in English is it safe to assume that country of the person who is signing up is not Afganistan?

When it comes to meaninfgul defaults in web forms, based on your goals, you can select one of the two approaches:

- Show representative value that serve as just in time instructions that will help users understand how to complete the field (ie. by providing an example phone number, properly formated, in the phone number field).

- Show frequent value that will help user understand the comonly expected response. One example would be changing the value of of zero in the Munitio store "add to cart" button to 1 or a nearest average of what most people bought (but I doubt people buy more than 1 pair of expensive earbuds at the time).

Meaningful default values is one of those little details that matter. Good design is about details coming together to create something greater than the sum. Now, the difference between a good design and a great one is in all those details: the spelling of a word, the spacing between items, the colors used. Attention to details is what separates good designs from great ones.

Attention to details shows respect towards the client and speaks volumes about ethos of the company.

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Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design? As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)

Good design:

• Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

• Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

• Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

• Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

• Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

• Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

• Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

• Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

• Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollutionthroughout the lifecycle of the product.

• Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

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`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 

`I don't much care where--' said Alice. 

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. 

`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation. 

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'"

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On November 2nd in Ottawa, the Embassy of the United States will be presenting a conference on innovation and entrepreneurship, entitled The Canada-U.S. Partnership: Enhancing the Innovation Ecosystem. To mark the event, the Embassy partnered with Canadian policy think-tank Canada 2020 to hold a contest for youth and potential entrepreneurs.

The contest asked for written or video descriptions of product or idea that are not only socially or commercially viable and innovative, but that also enhance or is enhanced by the close Canada–U.S. relationship.

After carefully reviewing the submissions, two winners have been picked:

• TitanFile.com, a new process for sending and receiving confidential documents. The service allows users to transfer and store files over a secure connection, notifying users when their files have been accessed and ensuring that all recipients are verified before they gain access.
• FloorNav3D, an interactive 3D program that allows visitors to "virtually visit" a location or property from their web browsers. The program is scalable, and can be used for anything from product demonstrations, to interactive showrooms, to blue prints and floor plans, to larger projects like golf courses and amusement parks.

Full text: http://canada.usembassy.gov/news-events/2011-news-and-events/october-2011/24-october-2011-innovation-competition-winners-announced.html

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The Workers

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers

as they spake unto their Group Head saying:

"It's a crock of shit and it stinketh."

The Group Heads

And the Group Heads went unto their Section Heads and sayeth:
"It's a pail of dung and none may abide by the odor thereof."

The Section Heads 

And the Section Heads went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them:

"It is a container of excrement. And it is very strong. Such that none may abide by it."

The Managers

And the Managers  went unto their Director and sayeth unto him:

"It is a vessel of fertilizer. None may abide it's strenght."

The Director

And the Director went unto Vice President and sayeth unto him:

"It promoteth growth and is very powerful."

The Vice President

And the Vice President went unto the President and sayeth unto him:

"This powerful new Plan will actively promote the growth and effciency of the company."

The Policy

"And the president looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good, and the Plan became Policy."

(From "Repositioning") 

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TitanFile had some good coverage in this Weekends Financial Post 

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I just received an email message from paypal, subject was "Milan Vrekic, visit PayPal's new Merchant Learning Centre today"

This is a great example of an excellent, actionable message subject so let's look at it:

"Milan Vrekic, visit PayPal's new Merchant Learning Centre today"

It starts with personalization, they get my attention by putting my name first "Milan Vrekic". It is then followed by a call to action "Visit paypal's new merchant learning centre" and finally a time constraint is applied to the end of the subject line "Today!" (might have as well be "now!" or "right away!").

This is a great trick to apply to activation emails. Think "John Doe, activate your accoung and start using AWESOMESERVICE today!"

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eMail I received from Dal this morning:

"Your Job Posting ID # 19175 has expired. 

If you have selected to receive your applications through myCareer, login to your account to:

view applicants
repost your job
select interview candidate(s)
request an interview date
Thank you for recruiting at Dalhousie."

Telling me that my "Job posting 19175" has expired tells me nothing. Especially if I have several postings listed.

Acceptable and much more friendly version would be:

"Your Job Posting ID # 19175 (Senior Python Developer Wanted) has expired, with the posting ID linked.

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To get the web site up quickly: PHP
To program in expressive and powerful language: Python
To hang around programmers who call themselves rockstars: Ruby
To really learn to program: C
To reach nirvana: Scala
To get depressed: SQL
To devolve: Visual Basic
To get a guaranteed, well-paying job in a cubicle with your own stapler: Java
To do the same thing with acronyms and certifications after your name: C#
To achieve magical sense of childlike wonder that you have hard time differentiating from Megalomania: Objecive C

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Milan Vrekic, Mojo Labs Co. & TitanFile Inc., @truejebus, Halifax, NS, CYBF Mentor

Six out of 10 businesses with drastically change their direction in the first year of existence.

Unfortunately, business plans can take a take a long time to write and are seldom updated as often as they should be. When we start writing our business plans we do not have all the right answers. We make assumptions about financial performance, market conditions, etc. Often, by the time we finish writing a business plan, the business has already changed and parts of the plan need to be updated.

Despite these shortcomings, forsaking business plans to rely only on intuition is not good either. You need to be able to document your assumptions and guiding hypothesis in order to effectively explain your business to an outsider.

To ensure your business plan is adaptable, it is critical for you to pinpoint the areas with the most risk and uncertainty because these are the areas that are most likely to change in your plan over time. Remember that which areas are considered most risky depends on your industry. In the technology industry for example, people often focus on product development when they should be paying closer attention to market forces.

No one wants to spend six months building something that will not be useful. To keep your business plan working for you, be sure update it regularly as your market and your company change and address risk and uncertainty with confidence.

Original article here: http://cybf.ca/socialmedia/?p=2235

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From the Wind in the Willows; said by the Water Rat:

"....there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing-----about in boats--or WITH boats,'.......'In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TitanFile

4MP9CZQ2X8U4

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