The Brooks Review

Month: January 2011

  • Past Blast: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

    [This is part of Shawn Blanc’s blast from the past idea where you link to an old post that is still great.]

    This is my last past blast for the day and it is one of the best articles I have ever read.

    Gay Talese:

    When his voice is on, as it was tonight, Sinatra is in ecstasy, the room becomes electric, there is an excitement that spreads through the orchestra and is felt in the control booth where a dozen men, Sinatra’s friends, wave at him from behind the glass.

    It is an article about how to be cool, how to have respect and so much more.

  • Past Blast: Writing Sensible Email Messages

    [This is part of Shawn Blanc’s blast from the past idea where you link to an old post that is still great.]

    Merlin Mann giving you advice to interleave your email replies back in 2005, actually this entire post has nothing but excellent email tips. Merlin:

    Make it easy to quote – Power email users will quote and respond to specific sections or sentences of your message. You can facilitate this by keeping your paragraphs short, making them easy to slice and dice.

  • Automatic Email Message Filing in Mail.app

    Since posting about interleaved email replies, I have gotten a good amount of emails from people asking if I could share some more email tips and tricks to help them out. So why not throw a few more out there for people. Today’s tip is about two Mail.app plugins that I leverage from Indev Software called MailTags and Mail Act-On.

    I can’t remember when I started using these plugins, but it had to be sometime in 2007-ish. I believe that I found them from the once epic Hawk Wings blog. ((It is still a great site, but rarely updated.))

    MailTags plays a very small role in this tip, but it is an important one. This tip is all about eliminating the mouse and I bet more than a few of you will like this. I currently have six active email accounts in Mail and each account is IMAP and shares a similar folder hierarchy. Each account has at least two folders in it: Archive and Follow-Up.

    I practice inbox zero so once I read an email I want it to go to one of these two folders 99% of the time. For a while now I was just using Mail Act-On keyboard shortcuts to file a message away — then I realized there was a better way.

    Mail now files my emails for me once I respond to them and can put them in either folder depending on where they should be.

    This is actually not complicated to set up, it is only a bit tedious if you use a ton of email accounts and a filing system with more than one folder, like mine.

    Here’s how it works:

    1. You need to install Mail Act-on at the very least, but for folder sorting you need MailTags as well.
    2. Once those plugins are installed you need to configure the ‘Keywords’ section of MailTags (done in the preferences). This is where you want to add any keywords to use so that your rules can file the email in the appropriate place. For my setup I only added one keyword: @Followup which I will use to designate an email going into a Follow-Up folder. Screen shot 2011-01-20 at 9.13.51 AM.png
    3. Now flip over to the ‘Rules’ pane and click on the Act-On Rules tab. This is where you need to set up the move rule properties. Basically you need to create a new rule that applies to every message and moves the message to whichever mailbox you want it to go in. So for sake of example I want every message that this rule is applied to, moved into the Archive folder. Don’t worry about setting an Act-On Key and be sure to give this a descriptive name if you are going to set up more than one account. Now you need to set up a rule for each mailbox you want to move emails to, all set up just like this. In my case that means 12 rules in total.Screen shot 2011-01-20 at 9.14.34 AM.png
    4. Now we get to the good bit, switch over the to ‘Outbox Rules’ tab and click ‘Add Rule’. We are going to make our first rule for filing here. You are going to want to make sure that the rule is set to ‘all’ for which conditions need to be met. This forces Mail to make sure all, not just one, of the conditions are met. Then you set the first rule to a ‘From’ ‘Contains’ ‘your email address’ — note that it needn’t be your full email address if you want to catch both me.com and mac.com emails in one swoop just use the stuff before the @ symbol (unless you use the same bit for all your email accounts). The second condition should be set to: ‘Has No MailTags’. This rule is my archive conditions rule. Now set the action to: ‘Apply Act-On Rule’ ‘Name of your archive rule’ ‘Prior Messages’. That is it, but it is very important that you apply this to ‘prior messages’ and not the default ‘current messages’. If your email has any MailTags applied nothing will happen.Screen shot 2011-01-20 at 9.16.27 AM.png
    5. Repeat this step for all your other email accounts that you want auto archiving on.
    6. To make an email move to a particular folder based on your MailTags don’t set the ‘Has No MailTags’ condition and instead set it to: ‘MailTags Keyword’ ‘Contains’ ‘name of your keyword’. Then just select the folder you want those emails moved to just like above.Screen shot 2011-01-20 at 9.16.35 AM.png

    Some Notes

    You will want to play with this and test it a bit. Please don’t think you need to set the MailTag keyword to the email you want moved, you set that on the email that you are sending and the action happens on the email you are responding to.

    The rules go in order from top to bottom. That means put the most used email accounts towards the top of the list to speed everything up. Which means that, yes, this slows down the sending process a bit as your computer must run all these rules.

    If you only use one email account, then you need not worry about the ‘From’ condition and just apply this to every email message instead.

    Also: these rules only work when done in Mail.app, so your iPhone and iPad won’t be auto-filing just yet.

    You can do a lot more with these Outbox rules and I will be talking a bit more about that soon. If you are still a bit confused about this, the developer has a great video tutorial on his site which can be found here.

    Why

    It doesn’t take long to file away emails with Mail Act-On keyboard triggers, or even using just your mouse. So the question is: why should you set this up? The answer is two fold:

    1. It is faster to have this auto file for you, helping to speed up the reply process when you get a lot of email.
    2. Knowing once I send a reply I won’t see the email again (hopefully) means that I take my time to make sure that I complete all actions for that email in that moment. Meaning instead of sending a frivolous email that states: let me look into that. I instead just find the information I need before I even reply.

    You never know unless you try and both of these plugins have a generous 30 day trial period so there really is no harm in giving this a go. Good luck!

    [This part of an ongoing series on dealing with email, to see more posts look here.]

  • Past Blast: “Be a Better Designer”

    [This is part of Shawn Blanc’s blast from the past idea where you link to an old post that is still great.]

    This post from Shawn is about more than just being a better designer. Shawn Blanc:

    That was the first and last time I ever acted like a high-and-mighty graphic designer who treats his clients as if they were perpetually inconveniencing him.

    You can take the words ‘graphic designer’ and input just about any other profession.

  • Past Blast: iPhony

    [This is part of Shawn Blanc’s blast from the past idea where you link to an old post that is still great.]

    John Gruber on iPhone rumors…in 2002:

    Other than Jobs himself, who confirms nothing about an Apple iPhone, Mr. Markoff’s only sources are “industry analysts”. Industry analysts know nothing about Apple, and given their record in the tech industry in the last few years, it’s a wonder anyone quotes them at all. Even the Daring Fireball could have offered better insight than these bozos.

    True and still does offer better insight than those industry “bozos”. That’s not the reason I’m posting this though — this was the point when I realized that I should stop reading analysts and established ‘journalists’ and turn to my peers for their ideas and reviews.

  • Frank Chimero on Excess

    Frank Chimero, in what must be the best thing I have read in 2011:

    This is what we want from everything we let into our lives: a good fit, so we can achieve full mastery of our tools, so we can milk all the potential out of everything that we have. If we can do that, we can truly appreciate our things.

    I have a button down shirt from my wedding. It was custom made just for me with 15 dimensions taken, including the pitch of my shoulders. It is best shirt I have ever owned. I had the opportunity to wear it again at my sister in-laws wedding and was reminded just how damned good I feel when I wear that shirt. I wish I could have all my clothes custom made — truth be told it is cheaper than you think.

    I feel the exact same way about my iPhone. I messed about with the arrangement of icons until it was perfect for me. My wife hates it when she borrows my phone because the phone app isn’t in the dock: Twitter, OmniFocus, Mail, and Camera are.

    Same goes with my Mac, iPad, OmniFocus and so much more. Customization to make things fit you and how you work is the ultimate goal.

    Frank is right on another point:

    Optimize for steadfastness, embrace the ephemeral quality of hot-swappable items when it makes sense, and think about how it all connects.

    Minimalism is one thing, “appropriatism” is another.

    If you read nothing else this week, make it this.

  • Ten Billion Apps Yet?

    Simple website that tells you how long before the ten billionth app with be downloaded.

  • Starbucks Starts Accepting Mobile Payments Nationwide

    Jennifer Van Grove:

    Starbucks Card Mobile [iTunes link] lets users add their Starbucks Cards, track rewards and reload cards as needed via PayPal or credit card. To pay with their phone, app users simply select “touch to pay” and hold up the barcode on their mobile device screen to the 2-D scanner at the register.

    That’s pretty cool, I’ll have to see how it works on Friday.

  • NYT: iPhone 5 Will Be ‘Completely Redesigned’

    This whole report sounds like rubbish to me. Sarah Perez:

    To start, the iPhone 5’s internals will be different – the device will run on a new, combined CDMA/GSM/UTMS chipset from Qualcomm, which will support both AT&T and Verizon here in the U.S., as well as other carriers worldwide – perhaps even an expanded lineup, as would now be possible.

    I highly doubt this will happen this go around — I am guessing that this is another year or so off.

    iPhone 5 Expected to Support NFC

    I doubt this as well — again this is further off than this June. They just hired Benjamin Vigier in 2010, Apple doesn’t rush things like that. Expect this next year at the earliest.

    Can Apple Execs Deliver Jobs’ Vision for iPhone 5?

    This is an idiotic statement. Plain and simple, the iPhone 5 has been executed by Jobs already. Do people really think that the iPhone 5 isn’t close to being production ready right now. If that is what you think, then it won’t be coming out this summer.

  • Quote of the Day: Tim Cook

    “We are all very happy with product pipeline and the team here has an unparalleled breadth and depth that Steve has driven in the company, and excellence has become a habit.”
    — Tim Cook, COO of Apple, Inc.

  • Work E-Mail Not Protected by Attorney-Client Privilege, Court Says

    Interesting decision: work emails are for work and if you are communicating with your attorney you don’t get privilege there — meaning your work can use those emails against you in court even though you were communicating with your attorney.

  • Why I Need To Quit Facebook

    So. True. (At least it was true when I was still on Facebook, maybe it has changed but I sincerely doubt that.)

  • “Worth”

    I get so very tired of analysts, pundits and bloggers assigning an arbitrary dollar value to Facebook and other privately held companies and declaring that amount is what the company is “worth”. I have no problems with valuation, but I do have a problem with equating a perceived valuation as the market value of a company — more often referred to by the arbitrary and irrelevant term: worth.

    Facebook is worth $50 bazillion.
    Groupon is worth $15 billion.

    These two companies and every other company in the world is only worth one amount: what a buyer is willing to pay for it. We know how much publicly traded companies are ‘worth’ because they are traded on an open market, a market where buyers and sellers determine how much the company truly is worth in 15 minute delayed intervals. ((At least according to the Stocks app on my iPhone. How they trade 15 minutes in the past is beyond me.))

    When a company such as Facebook is assign a dollar value, it is done so by a group of private investors giving it that value based on some confidential data they are shown by the company. There is a lot of implied value and value wrapped up in the fact that the company is not publicly traded. ((The I got there first mentality.)) These values are never market value because: a) the open market is not able to determine what that price is; b) the company being valued is not subject to the same reporting standards as a public traded company is (thanks SEC). ((You can’t accurately assign value to something when you have no idea if the numbers being reported are accurate.))

    Let’s look at valuation in terms of homes because you can easily see the difference.

    If you bought a house in 2006 for $1 million dollars, is it worth $1 million today?

    Most likely not, we are in a terrible recession and in fact you can’t base current value off of past sales. When you get a real estate license one of the first lessons you are taught is that you need to compare homes sold within the last 6 months — markets fluctuate too much otherwise.

    Most home owners will tell you that there is a difference between: market value, assessed value and appraised value. I won’t go into each calculation, but suffice to say:

    • Market Value is the price an open market is willing to pay for the house. In other words it is the price that you can sell the house for now, at this moment. This is the “true” value of the home and the one that you can rarely predict. This is what people usually are referring to when they ask what something is “worth”.
    • Assessed value is what your local governing body assigns to your property for purposes of taxing the crap out of you.
    • Appraised value is the value assigned to your home from an independent 3rd party that looks at the physical conditions of the home and the location it is in to for determining a value. This is also the value that your mortgage can and will often be based on.

    So what happens if market value is less than appraised value — well this is when you go “under water” on your home. Essentially you owe more money on your loan for the house, then you could get if you were to sell the home right now.

    Back to Facebook

    All privately held companies can only be given appraised values and not given market values, unless they are made publicly available for sale. This is a bit trickier with businesses because they are (ideally) profit earning entities — better to compare them to commercial real estate, but that is a topic for another time. ((Perhaps when you can’t sleep.)) What I am trying to say is that private investors do their best job to assign an appraised value to companies so that they know if they are getting a good deal on their investment. What these investors cannot, and will not, do is predict market value. They internally estimate what they think fair market value is, but that is as close as they get.

    They lose out if they give out their market value estimations. If Facebook knows that private venture firms believe their market value to be X, then they know exactly how much investors are willing to invest and at what return.

    In other words if you want to buy Steve’s computer from him and you know that he thinks it is worth $500, but is asking $1000 for it — well you have the upper hand in the negotiation because you know what the minimum he is willing to take for the computer. The opposite is true as well, if Steve knows you have $1200 to spend on a computer, then he knows he what you can afford to pay and will adjust his price based on that information. These same principles apply to the valuation of companies for private investing.

    Bottom line: these numbers purporting that Facebook is worth $50 billion is a total load of crap. They perhaps are appraised at that value by one set of investors, but they are hardly worth that much at market value. ((They may even be worth more, who knows.))

    The better question, or perhaps the bigger question with Facebook is: why the hell do they need all this money?

    The only possible reason I can think of: they aren’t making money.

    A company that isn’t making money and only taking on debt is worth only one thing to me: $0.

    I am not one of those venture capital naysayers — there are plenty of great reasons to seek venture capital so that you can get your company going. What I am against is pretending that popularity and profit are equals.

    I have no way of knowing if Facebook is profitable — my guess is that it is at the very least a break-even business right now — what concerns me is what they need the cash for. Are they trying to buy talent? What are they building that they need that much money?

    Doesn’t matter anyways, this was just my long winded way of telling you that “worth” and “valuation” are two entirely different terms — ones that cannot and should not be used interchangeably.

  • TBR RSS Feeds

    A few people over the past couple of weeks wanted to know if there is anyway to get an RSS feed that contains only the Articles and not the linked list items. Indeed there is and has always been a way, but I kept it secret for an unknown reason.

    Hit this link to see the two feed URLs. Thanks!

  • I Smell a Winner

    Before I announce the winner I wanted to thank everyone who entered the contest. Your feedback is invaluable and very much appreciated. I will be writing a post later this week (hopefully) talking a bit about the feedback I received, but until then let’s get to the goods.

    The winner of the OmniFocus giveaway is:

    Duncan Cooper

    Duncan you will be getting an email shortly with the code for your free copy of OmniFocus. Thanks to everyone who entered!

  • Cold Water on the iPad 2 Retina Display Hype

    John Gruber on the iPad 2 retina display rumors:

    Rumors are rampant that the upcoming iPad 2 will feature a higher-resolution retina display. Long story short: No, it won’t.

    I was about 670 words into a post that comes to this same conclusion, only I don’t have any sources like Gruber. As much as I want the retina display iPad I just don’t see how it is cost effective and possible given the power needed to drive it.

    Don’t bank on it this go around, but the iPad 2 should still be great.

  • Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme

    Joseph Perla on why Facebook is a ponzi scheme:

    Eventually, though, and this might take a long time, but it is finite, everyone will have tried Facebook ads and know that they are useless. Eventually, after 10 million businesses have invested $1000 each, and Facebook has earned $10 billion in revenue in total, then they will have run out of new customers and their revenue will dry up. A useless product is never sustainable. I wish I could short Facebook.

    I wish I could short Facebook too. From people that I have talked to about Facebook ads the sentiment seems to be shared: they only work for very specific products and mostly they are not worth the money spent. FYI to everyone who is potentially going to advertise on Facebook: it’s not worth it unless you have a social game or busty girls in tight t-shirts.

    (On another note: you are clicking those beautiful Fusion ads up there right? There are some damned good services being advertised and it helps support this site. Thanks!)

  • “New Twitter Has Become Browser Poison”

    Mike Cane on Twitter.com:

    So, if you’ve been experiencing browser slowdowns, close that damn New Twitter tab and I bet everything will get better fast.

    Interesting, since I don’t use Twitter in the browser ever I haven’t seen this. Nor can I seem to reproduce it when I try, which leads me to wonder if Cane is having problems because of Windows and Twitter not liking each other.

  • Some Quick Interleaved Reply Tips for iOS and Mail.app Users

    Now that I have been using interleaved responses for a bit longer I thought I would share some general tips and tricks that I have learned to help speed along your replies.

    iOS

    • Don’t set an email signature. In fact go into your Settings.app in iOS and open up the signature for editing — hit that clear button and call it good. If you don’t do this you will always be deleting a top posted email signature (assuming you want to interleave or bottom post — which is why you are reading this to begin with right?)
    • Select the text that you want to quote before you hit reply. iOS will only quote the selection instead of the entire message. This is great for cutting out email signatures, you can break apart the message later. I mostly just use this to get rid of extra crap so that I don’t need to delete as much in the reply.
    • Doing things right takes time and in iOS’ case it takes a good bit of time. I was getting frustrated as I replied to 90% of your contest emails on my iPhone or iPad — but I took the time to get used to composing good reply emails. I encourage you to do the same, that whole “do unto others…” line comes to mind.

    Mail.app

    • I got a few emails about getting bottom-posting up and running in Mail.app and it is clear there is one thing hanging people up: signatures. In the signature preference pane uncheck the box that says ‘Place signature above quoted text’ — if you have the plugin installed this should solve most of your problems.
    • As with iOS highlight what you want to quote in your reply and that is the only bit that will be quoted. You really should make a habit out of doing this as it is a huge time saver.
    • Learn the keyboard shortcuts for making a section of text a quoted section (CMD+’ increases the quote level for instance). This will keep you from getting tripped up formatting.
    • If you want to mix and match top and bottom posting it may be best not to auto-insert your email signatures.

    One Last Reason to Interleave Replies

    I also find that when you reply to someone and add a new person in on the email — interleaved replies works magic with bringing them up to speed. Instead of forcing them to read all the irrelevant crap in the original email (the ‘hey how are you’ stuff) they just get the questions and answers that they need to see — all in a logical order.

    Lastly if you have made it this far heed the words of Jocelyn K. Glei, writing for The 99 Percent:

    If you don’t have anything substantive and/or actionable to say, don’t send the email. Refraining from sending the one-word “Thanks!” email is tough, because it can feel ungrateful. But at this juncture, we’re all probably more grateful for one less email.

    Be sure to check out that entire post for some more good tips.

    [This part of an ongoing series on dealing with email, to see more posts look here.]

  • Quote of the Day: Merlin Mann

    “In fact, it’d be great if we could each skip needing outside permission to be awesome by not waiting until the universe starts tapping its watch.”

    The one thing I have learned about life is that: all you get when you wait for permission is a whole lot of regret. I don’t know about you, but I am not cool with that.