I strongly recommend GoodNotes for this use case. They do a better job than paper at all the "think" tasks like lassoing objects, handwriting in a zoom window, highlighting, etc.
To be clear, nobody tracks time, even for projects that are managed. The coordination I mentioned is about ensuring the right people are available to work together on the right things at the scale of days and weeks, not individual hours. Most of the hard work is making decisions about what to call 'done' versus where to keep iterating, and managing that over time so everyone experiences steady progress.
The app is the best experience. If you don't have the app or it's not supported on your platform, then you have the regular mobile web views to fall back on.
People in the tech world easily assume that upgrade = better. But that is only true if you feel underserved by the existing software you are running. Many customers out there in other fields don't have that feeling of being perpetually underserved that is common in places like Hacker News.
Native views and web views are good at different things.
Native is good for high fidelity interaction, animations, responding to gestures. However the native APIs are bad for designing "documents" -- that is, layouts where elements flow within a container and push each other around. That means that things that are extremely easy on the web can be painstaking in native UI without much upside.
Web views have limited interactivity, but they have other advantages:
* Faster iterations. You don't need to push a build when a webview changes.
* Document-style layout, as mentioned above.
* Higher density. We found it easier to show more information on the screen with HTML/CSS than the native controls. Looking at other apps out there makes me think it's an attribute of the medium, not just us.
* No need to sync data or duplicate logic. Sending HTML down the pipe is simple.
Finally yes, we get the multi-platform advantages because the web views are also served to people who hit the regular mobile web version of the app without any wrapper.
I'm on a project where we're taking the hybrid approach and I can second all the points Ryan has made here. We are launching our app soon on iOS and Android so we're getting the full benefit of cross-platform compatibility. We've run into literally zero cross-platform browser issues during the process, too. Hybrid is definitely the way to go if your app is text heavy like Basecamp and our app.
I don't claim that addressing anxiety is the only reason to say "Signup in 30 seconds." However, data about what converts better isn't a reason. Conversion data gives you correlations, not reasons for the correlations. I prefer to work from a theory of causality when I'm deciding what to put on the page.
That's an entirely valid point and for the most part, I agree. Where we seem to differ is where we feel the balance exists between correlation and causation. I feel the former still gives very strong contextual direction, and this shouldn't be ignored, especially when the proposed solution is the 'and then what' flow.
I'd actually love to see some studies of how that works in practice, especially given that screen real estate is so valuable around the signup call-to-action. You may be on to something!
Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot.
Argument #2: You probably need something like ten kilobytes of information to make a reasonable decision about which presidential candidate to vote for. This is way less than the amount of information that news-oriented people spend their time and attention to absorb on a single day.
(If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year.)
"If you want to overkill, on November 1st you could read the election issue of The Economist cover to cover, whatever political posts are on the front page of HN, and the Wikipedia pages for the major issues. Then sit and think carefully for an hour. This would take about five hours, and I’ll bet $1 you’d vote for the same candidate you would have if you’d read five hours of political news per day for the last year."
I think I'm going to use this method - it's an interesting exercise, and it's a great excuse to get people to stop talking to me about bread-and-circuses politics (e.g. what's discussed in this blog post: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000436.html ).
"Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-explicitly-political work that contributes to justice, peace and prosperity. A small career choice can do a lot more than the most forceful checkmark on a ballot."
This is an uplifting and encouraging message - and a far better argument in favor of anarchism than torching a Starbucks. Thank you.
>Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone.
One could make a good argument that this kind of faulty thinking is the reason third party candidates can never get any footing, and also the reason that we get such downright evil people elected.
Your vote is not "foregone" unless you choose not to vote. Period.
I think it’s not a problem in the utility equation for an individual voter, it’s a problem in the system. By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.
Empirically, a good showing for a third-party candidate has no significant effect on the political discourse, and your individual share of giving that candidate a strong showing is negligible.
Voting in the US is badly broken. I strongly favor equal representation, a multiparty system, and other reforms. Part of getting to them is admitting things like my vote, for one, being foregone.
By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant.
This is only true in the context of a single election. Over multiple election cycles, small movements in voting patterns can announce the start of a trend. Saying your vote doesn't count is an abdication of responsibility - 'somebody ought to do something about it, but 'they' would never allow it, hurf durf.'
As I said, empirically, those announcements are not important. Look at Perot, Nader, Paul – those votes might have been half an epsilon further from wasted than a vote for Obama or McCain, but they were still vastly less effective than any of a dozen other political actions using equal time and effort. And your importance to any trend is inversely proportional to its importance.
As prodigal_erik points out in a sibling comment, this is a systemic problem with our electoral system. It has nothing to do with hurf durf.
Seriously, saying the median American’s vote doesn’t count is a statistically founded observation, not an ethical action. In terms of ethical actions, I’m advocating for the opposite of laziness-posing-as-cynicism. I want a kind of intellectual vigor about politics where we care enough to spend our resources where they’ll do the most good. We should care about school boards and our own jobs, not the essentially symbolic presidential vote.
Voting is like buying a spatula with a pink handle. Refusing to work with a company that donates to an irresponsible county commissioner is like convincing a bright student to work in cancer research. It’s way less cool and way more important.
The best way out of this is the (virtual) abolition of the Electoral College or the adoption of true electoral reform. These are more realistic goals than they might seem.
In our winner-take-all system, the natural constituency for a third party would have to be willing to withdraw their support from the less unfavorable major party candidates, and give elections over to the other side's nutjobs. That's a very high cost just to communicate a trend to politicians, which could have been done by straw poll without the resulting damage to civil rights, the economy, church-centric values, or whatever you're most concerned about. The cure for tactical voting is some other polling system like IRV or approval, where I don't lose all possible effect on outcome just because my favorite doesn't win.
It's only badly broken because voters don't participate in the process. The US political system only works when you have an engaged, educated citizenry actively shaping government. Cynicism about one's vote being foregone is one thing that leads to a broken system.
This article has relevance to this problem as well. The vast majority of people won't realize that news is just noise, noise meant to misdirect voters. If you really want to know about the candidates, you can look up their record and do some research. Unfortunately, this isn't taught in civics classes, and most voters are content with what their favorite news channel tells them about how good one candidate is and how evil another candidate is. Then they regurgitate the same talking points with their friends and neighbors and reinforce the media message, entrenching an opinion in non-swing states. The system will work if people would be more willing to participate and educate themselves, like Roshan decided he would do.
Saying it’s bad to think your vote is foregone is different from saying it’s wrong.
And I’m not sure it is bad. It’s the truth, and it’s best to trust people with that. Knowing that my vote is effectively uncounted makes me more, not less, politically effective.
> If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?
This reminds me of a recent Daily Show segment that showed how Time magazine offers different cover stories for their international and their US issues on the same date. One example was the Arab Spring (international) and something on "doing chores" for us here in the US.
Yeah, and puppies. Sometimes when I take a glance at American news it looks like there'd be a conspiracy going on not to expose citizens to any issue possibly widening their field of view on world affairs. It's pathetic.
Sure you can! Like everything else, you have to pick your sources. I go with NYT and the IHT for "American" sources, and the BBC and Al Jaz, and then occassionally the local newspapers if I'm bored. NYT is quite decent, IMO, although obviously far from perfect.
If you watch AJ/BBC you've probably spotted what my comment was up to. If not, just compare it to their respective US alternatives and you get it. I sometimes click on to mainstream US news just to check what's the POV on foreign affairs and I always feel like there's an echo chamber with a very thick wall (not to mention the quality of journalism), and it's not only the one with F and X in their name. It's a pity though, and what makes me more annoyed is that popular news channels in my country also went that direction.
Oh please. Politicians change their positions so much once they are elected that you can't judge what they will do on foreign policy or any other matter.
You scale it by identifying which scopes of work are dependent on others and which scopes are independent. Any independent scopes can be designed, developed, and reviewed by small teams working at pace together, parallel to other teams. They key is how you break the work down into scopes, and how you see their interdependencies at a given moment and over time.
http://www.goodnotesapp.com (I'm not the maker, just a really big fan)