The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Email Mistakes That Irritate Smart People

    There are a lot of ways to send an email, and given that it is a tool that many of us spend a large chunk of our day using, I thought I would share some of the annoying things I come across when reading email.

    1. Reply All

    This is one of those buttons that we like to hit so that everyone is kept in the ‘loop’, but the problem is not everyone needs to be kept in the loop — nor do they want to be. It is fine to hit reply all, but be sure to edit the list of people that you are replying to, keeping only those needed in the conversation in the email chain. If you are even in doubt about when to use reply all, don’t use it. Better to forward an email to someone later then to waste 50 people’s time reading email that they don’t care about.

    2. The “I CC’d You” Emails

    Let me tell you about the CC field, it is used to keep people in the loop that need to be kept in the loop. What it is not for is to be used as a way to show me that you are doing your job, or to ask me to do something. When I get an email that I have been CC’d in and somewhere in that message there is a task you want me to do — 90% of the time I miss that task. The reason is simple: I don’t read emails I am only CC’d in past the subject line. If you want me to respond or act on an email you send me, make sure I am in the ‘TO’ field.

    3. Look at a JPG of My Company Logo

    It is really awesome that you figured out how to embed your company logo in your email signature, but I know who you are and what your company logo looks like. I still hate it. Don’t waste bandwidth sending me email attachments of your logo. Further, it really screws me over when I go to look for emails that you sent me a file in as every email you send me has a damned attachment. Don’t even get me started about downloading that crap over AT&T’s sucktastic data service when I read your emails on my iPhone.

    4. Yes I Have Your Contact Info, Thanks

    Raise your hand if you just have one email signature that you use on all your emails — now drop your hand really fast on your head. We all have those fancy email signatures that include our contact info and maybe even a vCard ((insert OOooos and Ahhhhs here)), they definitely say our name and title. These are great for people who don’t know you, but when you are corresponding with other people in your office and regular contacts – your first name will suffice.

    Think of it like a phone call: if it is someone, who when you call, you need to introduce your full name and company to then use the big fancy email signature. However, if just saying your first name on that same call will do the trick, use that same etiquette for email. I have my email set to default to the signature: “`-Ben`”. If I need the other longer signature I can switch to it, otherwise the short and sweet one works best.

    5. Stop With the Cryptic Subject

    Think of your subject line like a title of a book — would you buy a book called “RE: Report”. Nope. We need to tell people what the email is about in the subject line, so that they know if they need to open it now or not. For instance instead of saying “Report” as your subject how about put the actual subject in – “Please Review My TPS Report” – oh snap now I know whether to read that now or later. ((probably later))

    6. Sending Large Files

    Most people I suspect never look at the file size that they are sending to people, they just know that if it bounces back they can’t send it as is. I would ask that if your email is over 3mb please send me a file link so that I can download it faster. There are a ton of services out there that do this, many that are so fast and easy you will be amazed. Sending and downloading large files over email is not what the protocols were designed for, and they are agonizingly slow – help yourself out and use a service like Droplr.

    7. Capitalization

    If you send me an email in all caps I will assume you are yelling at me and take my damn sweet time responding. Likewise if you send me an email in all lowercase I will assume that you couldn’t care less about the email you sent — resulting in me taking my damn sweet time responding. Typos and grammar problems abound, but we all know how to properly capitalize an email, so don’t be lazy.

    8. Keep It Short

    It is really great that you like details, but I don’t have time for them. Tell me what I need to know and what you need from me. Don’t waste my time asking about the weather or how business is going. Being concise in emails can often lead to people thinking that you don’t have the time for them – I am not talking about one line email responses (ala Steve Jobs), just say what you need to say in a clear and concise manner. This helps people better understand you and makes you look smart.

    9. Legal Notices and Printing Notices

    Drop the legal notice, it is just dumb amd makes you look paranoid. Drop the “be kind to the environment and don’t print this email” notices because it is just rude. You wouldn’t walk up to someone at Kinkos and ask them if they are sure they need those copies. If I need to print the email I will, otherwise assume it is filed away on my computer never to be revisited.

    10. Addressing People

    You don’t need to address me in the beginning of the email (e.g. ‘`Ben,`’ ) I know you are sending it to me because I received it – just get on with the email. The only exception to this is when you are sending it to multiple people in the “To:” field and you want to call certain peoples attention to different areas of the email (e.g. Ben: Can you please take care of the TPS report cover sheet issue. Janet: Please take a shower before coming to work.).

    11. The ‘Thanks’ Emails

    If I send you some information that you requested, there is no need to respond to me by saying just ‘Thanks’ it clutters up my inbox and is useless. I assume that, unless you keep asking me for information, you received it when I sent you, any problems and you will contact me. I sometimes write “no response necessary” at the bottom of my emails, but that just confuses most people. Just stop with unneeded emails and we will be good.

    12. Telling Me Versus Asking Me

    Unless you are my boss then you need to ask me for things, telling me to do something will get you no where. Don’t send me an email saying “I need you to get me this information ASAP” – ask me to get you that information and let me know if there is a time constraint. In doing this you will find people are far more helpful – even if you are their boss.

    13. The Follow-Up Call

    This is not strictly and email irritation, but I hate it when people call me to discuss an email chain, or in lieu of responding via email. If I sent you an email I did so for good reason – please respond in the format that I initiated the communication.

    14. Sent from my…

    Guess what no one cares where you sent your email from, and what device you are using. No one. It was cool for the first few weeks of iPhones, then Blackberry users started adding it and it naturally became lame. (( BlackBerry had this first but it said something like: “Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless” before the iPhone.)) Further I don’t get the thought process in having such a line attached to begin with – should I thank you for responding while you are not at the office? I am confused.

  • US newspaper to charge website commenters

    Roy Greenslade:

    From tomorrow, the Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address.

    And the name on the credit card will be the name that will appear on comments. So it’s goodbye to anonymity.

    Seems like a great way to get relevant thoughtful comments. Should be great.

  • Design Director of NYTimes.com Leaves

    Khoi Vinh:

    After a lot of internal debate, I came to the conclusion that the time is right for me to make a change in my job. So about two and a half weeks ago, I formally resigned my position as design director of NYTimes.com. My last day will be this coming Friday, 16 July.

    This is a massive talent loss for the New York Times.

  • Remember When We Were All Supposed To Quit Facebook?

    MG Siegler:

    My point isn’t to downplay the privacy problems Facebook had a couple months ago. Many of them were very real, just as the iPhone 4 issue is. But shouldn’t all those who were acting holier-than-thou at the time have an obligation to stick to their guns? When they go quiet so quickly, it just makes them look like fear-mongers and gives Facebook even more power. And that’s exactly why it’s hard to take any of these problems seriously.

    I followed through, did you?

  • Should Apple hide the Consumer Report…Report?

    Eliot Van Buskirk:

    A TUAW reader first pointed out that a number of threads mentioning the search term “consumer reports” had disappeared from discussions.apple.com, replaced by a note asking the user to log in to the site, after which the relevant discussions still are not viewable. However, Microsoft’s Bing search engine cached those pages before Apple removed them, so they’re still visible for the curious.

    The big issue here is not that Apple is covering up the fact that there is a problem with the antenna, rather that they are hiding the fact that Consumer Reports will not recommend the phone. Who cares? Consumer Reports is irrelevant to any good testing and has not been a stalwart recommendation service for anyone under 40 for the past decade.

    Why then is Apple removing posts citing Consumer Reports? Simple they don’t want bad press on their website just as your company would not allow bad press on its website. The issue isn’t the antenna, the issue is marketing. Apple will let you complain all day about any problem you want, just don’t link to articles talking crap about their products.

    Apple is in the majority in this thinking, and they are maintaining their private forum. If you want to bitch and link to Consumer Reports go get a GeoCities ((remember those)) page – just don’t do it in Apple’s playground is all that Apple is trying to say.

  • Why USB Syncing Needs to End

    If I had to pick one thing to complain about on the iPad it would be the syncing mechanism. I rarely sync my iPad because I don’t have time to wait for it to finish – I need to use it, or I am at the office (my iTunes library stays on an external drive at home). The same goes for my iPhone – what a pain to take the time and sync it.

    It is not the actually syncing of content that takes the longest either, it is the ‘backing up iPad/iPhone’ part that is horrendously long. Let’s say I download a new album on my Mac and I want to sync that over to my iPad and iPhone – I have to plug them each in and wait for the back up and then the sync. If I download a song in the morning when I first wake up and try to sync this music to both my iPhone and iPad at the same time I will barely have enough time to pack up and leave. This is 2010 – we should not have to wait that long.

    • iPad Sync Time: ((This is a normal sync that I do about once a week. It includes a full backup, transferring of recently updated apps, putting on new photos and podcasts.)) 13:49 minutes for the total sync, of which 10:33 minutes was for just the backup.
    • iPhone 4: 5 minutes
    • iPod nano ((original)) : 46 seconds.

    At the very least Apple could allow us to disable the backing up portion of the sync, but they don’t. You can click the ‘x’ when you see the backup part start to skip it, but then errors pop-up and sometimes it will cancel the entire sync (annoying).

    Of course for my setup I only have to sync the media portions (photos, music, videos) as everything else is either wireless (contacts and calendars) or I download straight to the iPad/iPhone (apps and their updates). I can understand not wanting to allow Wi-Fi syncing of movies (given how large they are) but why can’t we wirelessly sync music and photos. Each file is small enough that if the sync was interrupted it could easily be resumed.

    Sure this may not speed up the syncing speed, but at least I could sit on my couch and use the iPad wirelessly – as it was intended. Even now I can’t use either device while syncing – which is just absurd. How can we not surf the web while data is being loaded onto the device – they are certainly powerful enough to do this.

    The Ideal

    Ideally we would be able to set our mobile devices to sync wirelessly with our computers / media servers while they are charging. In this scenario say I am going to sleep and I throw my iPad and iPhone on the charger – at this point the device would wait 30 minutes and then start syncing all data before finally performing a backup.

    Then in the morning if I wanted to load more songs the device would recognize that I have a current backup (made within the last 24 hours lets say) and would quickly sync all new media over Wi-Fi. Thus the syncing done while I am awake is only what I want to sync (setup in settings) and most all the other data is recent within the last 24 hours.

    I don’t want to be too demanding, but given that I labeled this portion of my rant ‘ideal’ it would only be natural for me to want Apple to implement a “Back to my Mac” feature that allowed syncing over the WAN (Wide Area Network).

    Where Is It?

    One company already has such awesome technology: Dropbox. Everything is in sync and I never notice it syncing. So the technology is out there and can move large chunks of data quickly – why the hell don’t we have it on mobile devices yet?

  • Why I Turned In My iPhone and Went Android

    Louis Gray:

    Second behind the word choice has to be “Momentum”. I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move.

    To me the above statement just seems silly, that is like saying that you are using Windows and not Mac OS because the customer base for Windows is bigger. That is never a good criteria to make a decision on unless you are the provider or are talking about social networking.

    I switched to Android because I am extending my move away from the desktop and more to the cloud. iTunes does not deserve to be the core of my device any more, as it is simply a utility to rent films and get new apps for the iPad.

    The above however is an sentiment that I completely agree with.

  • New iPhone 4 Ads

    They all focus on FaceTime and they are all pretty damn good. Though I must admit that I have only used FaceTime twice since getting the iPhone 4. I suspect that usage will rise as I know more and more people with FaceTime capable devices.

  • Out Of Nowhere, The iPad Has A Real Competitor – Kinda

    Don’t get to excited, it still involves modification to the device to get it running ‘full’ Android OS. That said it is cheap enough that I suspect it to be a cult underground classic much like the Nokia Tablets of 5 years ago were (n770 w00t).

  • Man Claims 84% Ownership of Facebook

    Geoffrey A. Fowler:

    In his suit, Mr. Ceglia claims he signed a contract with Mr. Zuckerberg on April 28, 2003 to develop and design a website in exchange for a $1,000 fee and a 50% stake in the product. The contract stipulated that Mr. Ceglia would get an additional 1% interest in the business for every day after Jan. 1, 2004, until it was completed.

    My guess would be that if this had any legitimacy we would have heard about it long ago.

  • Secunia Report Lists Apple As #1 in Vulnerabilities

    I think the most telling part about security was omitted from this report: speed at which a vulnerability is patched. Ever OS and Software platform will have vulnerabilities – it is how fast you patch for users that really matters to me. However, sad to see Apple at #1.

  • Palm webOS Headed to HP Tablet, Printer

    Looks like HP may finally ‘get it’. ((HP wants to control all pieces of the mobile ecosystem, says McKinney. “If you look at success in the market, they are those companies who can control the end user experience and the entire experience stack,” he says.))

  • Judge OKs iPhone class action against Apple, AT&T, Marco Responds

    Marco Arment:

    The majority of cellular phones sold in the U.S. are carrier-locked. Furthermore, since the two biggest networks in the U.S. operate with different radio standards and cannot share devices, there’s almost zero demand for unlocked phones here.

    He does a great job of setting the record straight – I like Marco – have no clue how this made it to an actual case.

  • Backup Reminder – A look at my Backup system

    A couple of months ago I had a stark reminder of just how important backups are. I didn’t have my hard drive fail – though I thought it did – my Macbook Pro’s hard drive just wasn’t right. The system was running slow and the keyboard was unresponsive. I took the computer into the Apple Store where they did and archive and install for me that solved the problem. Up and until that point in time my backup strategy was as follows:

    • Backup internal hard drive with iBackup once a week.
    • Store many files in Dropbox.
    • Archive older documents and design files on iDisk.
    • Store Aperture libraries and Music on two separate hard drives.

    That was it, short sweet and simple. My rationale was that I didn’t need to worry about lost files from the current week as they are easily reproducible. However when all of this happened it meant I lost and entire day of work time and spent it at the Apple Store. Had I had a proper clone of my internal HD I would have been able to diagnose the issue as software related and restored myself later (spending the rest of work off of the cloned drive).

    Since that time I have drastically altered my backup strategy. Here is what it looks like now:

    • Backup internal hard drive with SuperDuper! every other day on two different drives.
    • Store all working files on Dropbox.
    • Archive older documents an design files on iDisk.
    • Store Aperture libraries on 3 different external hard drives.
    • Maintain one small ‘working’ Aperture library.
    • Keep iTunes music folder on external drive with a backup copy on another two drives.
    • Store one of the duplicate backup drives in fire safe.

    The main difference is that I have more redundancy, and cloned copies of my internal HD (both on a pocket sized external drive and larger more reliable drive) and that I am keeping a lot of data in Dropbox. I have yet to – and hope never to – run into a problem where I have to put my backup system into effect, however it offers quite a bit of comfort.

    My Wife on the other hand refuses to use some of these tools and instead I have her Macbook Pro backing up to an external HD wirelessly through Time Machine. It is better than nothing, but it is far from great.

    It is Monday – we all had a nice weekend (hopefully), give yourself the little extra piece of mind this week. Go buy an external HD (they are really cheap) and download a backup program that clones your HD (I recommend SuperDuper! for Mac users) and clone the drive while you sleep. Make it a habit and you will sleep better.

  • Microsoft is Hardcore about Making Win 7 Slates

    Steve Ballmer (via Todd Bishop on Twitter):

    We are hardcore about this.

    That’s all fine and dandy, but is he talking about the never successful (except in niche markets) Tablet PCs, or the newly found successful iPad style computer? There is a big difference.

  • How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters

    This is an older item, I just had time to watch it and it is a fantastic use of the newer PitchFX data for baseball. Really cool flash video.

  • It’s As If Apple Has Hired Don Draper

    MG Siegler:

    As we’re all well aware, video chat, even on phones, is nothing new. Sure, Apple has simplified it, but they’re not really showcasing that here. Instead they’re going right for the heart strings. They’re doing something rather incredible. They’re conveying how you’ll feel if you use the product, by making you feel alongside those in the commercial. They’re creating this sentimental bond.

    Spot on, it is an amazing commercial. This commercial is the reason parents and grandparents want every member of the family to have and iPhone 4.

  • SSD Performance in Macbook Pro (late 2008 Unibody)

    I ordered up an SSD drive for my Macbook Pro and just finished installing and testing its performance. It is mind blowingly fast – incredible.

    My Macbook Pro’s specs are as follows:

    • 2.8ghz Core 2 Duo
    • 6gb RAM
    • Late 2008 Model (expresscard model)
    • All test performed plugged in while using the faster graphics card
    • Hard Drive was a 300gb 7200rpm drive
    • SSD drive is a 240gb OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD

    Now for the results:

    Cold Start
    Hard Drive 1:47.9 mins
    SSD 59.4 secs
    Restart
    Hard Drive 1:44.7 mins
    SSD 1:10.6 mins
    Launch Photoshop CS5 Extended
    Hard Drive 16.2 seconds
    SSD 3 seconds
    Lauch InDesign / Photoshop / Illustrator (CS5 Same time)
    Hard Drive 1:54.4 mins
    SSD 10.3 seconds
    Load Dashboard & Widgets
    Hard Drive 16.9 seconds
    SSD 3.5 seconds

    As you can imagine I am quite happy with these results. (Please note that during each restart I had to enter my password, that takes me about 1.5 seconds on average.)

  • An interview with Michael Lopp from The Setup

    Loop:

    I’m a Mac OS X nerd and have been so for the past eight years. I’m a LaunchBar guy. Any time I have to touch the mouse, I feel inefficient.

    Amen to that.

  • Small Biz: 5 Quick Tips for Success

    Here are five quick small business tips that have helped me out over the past 5 years – let them soak in over the weekend and get going on them Monday.

    Pay yourself as little as you can get by on

    A lot of small business owners and freelancers pay themselves whatever is left in the account after all the bills are paid. I am here to tell you that this is a terrible idea. For the first year you need to be paying yourself the least amount of money that you can afford to live on. This comes in handy for those months that you have no work – as you can still pay yourself.

    After a year you should have a pretty good idea of what you make and can afford to pay yourself. Don’t bother projecting out the year ahead – base your salary off of last years revenue and stock pile a couple months worth of your salary in the business account. This has saved my ass time and time again.

    Indulge on things you use the most.

    I see small business owners make a ton of stupid purchases – a 60″ LCD for the lobby – and really skimp where it counts. If you use something for more than a few hours a day, take the time and money to buy the best thing you can. For instance you should start with your desk chair. A good office chair should cost you between $700 and $1500 and you should be happy to pay that. It will last years and benefit you for the rest of your life (your back will thank you when you hit 60).

    Lose the fear.

    Want to know how to fail fast? Be afraid to do anything, see how at works out for you. Self-employment is risky, but it is even riskier to wait until you have other peoples salaries that you need to pay. If there is a risk you are debating – now is always better than later.

    Be courteous always.

    Business is built on relationships, and ‘throwing your weight around’ only makes you look like a dick. Instead just smile and be nice, it goes a long way and you wick be surprised what great service and relationships you can forge out of it.

    Build up favors and don’t cash them in.

    One of my favorite things is when someone owes me something because I did something helpful for them. I have a ton of favors built up, and I try ti never cash them in. The result is that when I truly do need a favor there are a lot of people there ready and willing to help. If you always cash in every favor people will be far less inclined to really want to help you.