[Mailbag] Raymond Chen, Pinkberry, Massimo Vignelli, Frank Gehry, etc. May 10
4 comments Latest by Adam James
Do nothing fast
From: Des Traynor
Thought you might like this quote from one of Microsofts very talented programmers, Raymond Chen...Speaking during Q & A at the PDC developers conference recently…
One of the questions I always get asked is, “My app is soo slow to startup! What are the super secret evil tricks you guys at Microsoft are using to get your apps to startup faster?” And the answer is … the super evil trick … is to do less stuff. Because the stuff you don’t do doesn’t slow anything down…It turns out I can do nothing really really fast!
Pinkberry yogurt = “frozen heroin juice”
From: Scott Heiferman
The taste that launched 1,000 parking tickets [“This is a story about yogurt, but it is also about entrepreneurship, financial and cultural expectations, beating the heat, beating the caloric system and parking.”]
Hwang and Lee agreed that the store should be streamlined, so there are only two flavors of yogurt—plain and green tea. You cannot buy anything else. Not even water. There is little waste and the staff can be trained in a few hours (it’s not hard to yank down on the handle of a soft-serve yogurt machine).
Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map
From: Tyler Rooney
Massimo Vignelli explains his 1972 NYC Subway Map (Quicktime, 4 minutes).
I thought you guys might appreciate this. It’s outtake footage from the documentary ‘Helvetica’. Vignelli even mentions what he did wrong with his iconic subway map.
MTV’s The Real World
From: Eric Prugh
In what is potentially the last season of The Real World on MTV (Season 20), they have created a social networking type site to let the public vote on the finalists for the show. From what I can tell it seems to be in Rails and includes all the Ajaxy goodness and slick interface that Web 2.0 demands. The interface might leave something to be desired, but it’s cool to see how TV is jumping on the bandwagon of interactive web content and driving people to their websites.
Coincidentally, I came across the site because I am a finalist. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an RoR programmer on the show? I thought so.
Frank Gehry on models
From: Nate Rosenberg
Thought you’d appreciate this: In the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, the architect explains that he creates multiple scales of a model to remember that the model is not the project. He explains that its often too easy to become infatuated with the model itself instead of remembering it is a representation of a building. Kinda like software teams working on the specs instead of the software.
Kiwi laundry products
From: Harry Llewelyn
Great advertising for laundry detergent!
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4 comments so far
mike 10 May 07
I don’t know about Mr. Vignelli’s idea that the NYC subway map should have less information than even the short-of-information one he devised. The current map, while decidedly non-minimalist, has a lot of information, most of it rather easy to extract. When traveling to unfamiliar destinations, I often find this “unneeded” information quite valuable.
Frédérick 10 May 07
I’m not sure all Microsoft programmers have this in mind most of the time, but I definitely agree with Mr. Chen’s quote.
Now, the only thing left is to apply it, eh!
Erik Mallinson 11 May 07
Geesh! Pinkberry went from a small start-up to a lying 18 location store in 1 day! ... for me at least, who went from not knowing about it seeing it in the news twice.
Follow the link and find there’s more choices too. They should have read Getting Real.
Adam James 12 May 07
Speaking of MTV has anyone seen their main site lately? It’s so normal and relatively well designed (Considering it’s MTV ) it’s scary. Like someone there finally gets it. A website should be usable. Imagine Amazon.com designed completely in a Flash interface, that’s the old MTV felt like.
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