David Rinnan on posterous

Thoughts, views and comments on the online world, marketing & business. Sometimes in my native language Swedish.

This is a "notification" - about why web traffic move to devices

I think one of the main reasons for a huge increase in web traffic happening on mobile devices is due to the superior notification system provided -- which in turn is due to the fact that many "websites" run as apps on the smartphones, rather than in a web browser. (I know some hate to hear this, but we all know it is true) 

Most people are getting active in social networks and as we get better at using smartphones we simply switch over to notifications on our mobile phones rather than receiving emails all the times. Since;
1. We get better control over smartphone notifications than email (they way we want to be notified in detail) 
2. We keep clutter out of our inboxes and use email for communication purposes 

The way notifications work on a mobile device in an app is one of the major reasons why our desktop operating systems will work more like iOS (and the well known copies not mentioned here) in the future. 

Anyways.. back to the topic. So, we rely on the smartphone or iPad (tablet as it is also popularly called by some) for our notifications and we click the links. We glance and comment and for deeper stuff we forward to mail or instapaper or the likes. 

This one of the reasons I like apps, compared to smartphone websites (even though the latter has its strengths too). It is because my apps, which are mainly web-driven (and as such could just as well be a phone-webb) get to be so nicely-tightly integrated into the operating system of the device. 

and as this revolution unfolds -- our email will get back to what it once was! :D

show your Library folder on OS X Lion

Previous versions of OS X did not hide your Library folder. Lion does.This causes a problem for instance when you want to copy keychains between your old and new mac, to name one example.
Launch terminal and write:
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
You will now see your Library folder when checking your user home folder.
nohidden will unhide and if you just replace nohidden with hidden the folder will be invisible again

Update to my contexts in Omnifocus

I have used omnifocus for a pretty long time now (1.5 years or so) and when I recently carried out a review of how my system was setup I noticed that even though I tagged everything with contexts, I rarely used these.
I decided to change my contexts so that they better reflected what I actually, rather than, @computer, @home, etc.
So this is my updated list and after a week of use I must say I like it better.
I am thinking of finding a better way of managing develop, maintenance, fix & tinker. Common for these three is that I actively carry something out with some sort of endresult which is not paperwork, for example.
Maybe something like DO -> develop, maintenance, fix & tinker would be a working setup.

Due_phone

@email @phone @errands @fix & tinker @clean @research & review @relax@management with subcategories @staff @strategy @planning@paperwork with subcategories @online @invoice @print @letters @pay @bookkeeping@develop with subcategory maintenance
my @waiting category has many subcategories has got subcategories for each person I often wait for, but I will keep these a secret :)I can however tell that one of the subcategories is called @apple :)

David Rinnan
http://www.google.com/profiles/david.rinnan

If your home button fails on iphone

A broken home button on the iphone makes the phone unusable since you cannot get back to the home screen from a launched app.
The solution is however rather simple.
-hold the powerbutton and slide to shut down the phone.-Turn it back on with the powerbutton-Once in, go to settings, general and turn on passcode, enter a code you remember well-click the power button once to close and once again to open
-your screen will look different since you have to enter the passcode-rather than entering the code first click emergency call and once there press the back button on the screen
-enter the passcode and you will then get to the home screen
Basically with pass code turned on you will be able to get back to the home screen by making a quick visit to the emergency call screen before entering the passcode.
As far as I know there is no way to quick jump between open apps which requires double click on the home button :/
For me this means that I can survive until I find a good deal on a new phone or even wait until september when the new iphone expects to be released.

Being free makes you happy?

Or at least that is what we think...

Have you ever noticed how something that should make you happy sometime doesn't. Maybe you didn't sleep well or was not in the right mood. It is pretty easy, based on that understanding, to see how happiness is something that is different for everyone and something that we ourselves in a large part is responsible for - more as a psychological effect in our brain than something real and measurable to the outside world.

This is why having a choice might make you less happy. 

A person in jail or someone who lost all his/her money can be as happy as you. We might look at that person and think he/she is crazy - while in reality the person can very well be much happier than we are. 

You choose a new job to get a better paycheck to be able to support the family with a bigger house. You might not get happier even after getting the bigger house and the higher paycheck. It is apparently very difficult for us to value the effects of different things. We are often wrong when evaluating one new car against another one, for example. 

How much better will your life be driving in the twice as expensive car? 

If you won the lottery and I lost all my money at about the same time. Chances are our perceived happiness one year later will be on the same level. 

The mechanisms for happiness are very interesting and something that we are able to effect if we understand it. Or effect others in their purchasing decisions.  

It might not be the latest news but I often find myself browsing TED talks and during my last session I discovered Dan Gilbert, a very talented talker and his research on happiness and simulated happiness. Check it out! 

LogMeIn Remote Control of PC and MAC

There are a number of great solutions to remote control your computers. Things tend to get more complicated when you want to remote control your Mac or PC from outside of your network since the computers are behind NAT firewalls and have temporary IP addresses.
Trying to remote control someone else computer is more or less impossible..
One potential solution to the problem is LogMeIn.

Logmein_logo

LogMeIn has a number of different subscriptions plan and one of them is free! You create an account, install the software on your machine and you are ready to go!

Once the application is installed you can choose to provide others with access to your machine by emailing them code. The type of access and how long it will last is all up to you. When someone uses the link you have created you will still have to confirm the access via popup dialogues on your machine. This results in a very secure solution.
The communication between the computers is relayed on a central LogMeIn server and this is why you don't have to struggle with firewall settings and port forwarding. It works great even if it is not as quick and smooth as a dedicated peer to peer remote solution.

The main reason for using LogMeIn (for me) is to be able to help friends, colleagues and clients who are struggling with something on their machine. Rather than trying to guide them via phone I ask them to install logmein (which takes 2 minutes) and provide me with access to their desktop. Saves a lot of time and frustration. For access between my own machines on my own network I use other solutions.

Logmein

Customer Support Failures e.g. www.fc-moto.de

Failure in customer support and customer communication can quickly
make a business go bust.

You stumble upon such companies all the time. And as in this case they
have, back in time, managed to get a market position that leads to
people having to do business with them for lack of any alternatives.
Fc-moto.de is one such example. It is a company where most people I
know seem to be reluctant to buy anything from them but still do.
Luckily the e-commerce web has now grown enough to offer alternative
web shops within the motorbike area such as http://www.motoin.de/ even
though their customer support seem to suck as well...

What did they do this time...
On the 20th of April 2010 I ordered a pair of enduro boots and a
helmet. Nothing fancy but still approximately 1000 euros worth of
goods. At no time during the purchasing process was I offered
information on whether the items were in stock or how long it would
take to get the units. There were no choices made available to the
customer to decide if the order could be split if only parts of the
order were on stock.

After 10 days the boots shipped and the order was automatically split
without any question to me, even though it meant higher transport
costs.

(One should have in mind that not knowing when things ship can be a
problem since the money wont be withdrawn until the items ship.)

Towards the end of May the helmet had still not shipped and there were
no information from fc-moto.de. I sent an email asking for the time it
would ship and also indicated that I had been waiting for one and a
half month. After a week of no reply I cancelled my order via email,
the only method available. Today, the day after having cancelled the
order, I received a reply on the first email, sent over a week ago,
stating that they would look into my order status ASAP. 6 hours later
still no reply and they have not yet managed to get deep enough in
their email log to notice that I have cancelled the order altogether.

I have as of now still not received the ASAP reply I was promised and
I have yet to receive a confirmation of my order cancellation.


Trying to manually manage all processes related to an e-commerce
business is not going to work. Make available automatic measures and
other useful features such as;
-order cancellation
-order status updates and ETA on the customers web account
-customer can define if the order can be split or not
-ticket based support function
-make the inventory information availability available on the website
-clear information, easy navigation and direct communication is often
more valuable than a huge amount of items, unless you actually have
them on stock.