Linked List: March 20, 2009

Friday, 20 March 2009

Regarding Marissa Mayer’s Personnel Decisions 

From Laura M. Holson’s NYT profile of Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience (this is the source Douglas Bowman pointed to regarding the story that Google solved a design dispute by user-testing 41 different shades of blue):

At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet as part of a program to foster in-house talent. In essence, math is used to solve a human problem: How do you predict whether an employee has the potential for success?

A scrum of executives sit around a table, laptops in front of them, as they sort through résumés, college transcripts and quarterly reviews. The conversation is unemotional, at times a little brutal. One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

I realize how hard it is to find good employees, and how hard it is to evaluate prospective employees from their résumés — that snap judgments from limited information must be made. But this makes it sound like Mayer still uses SAT scores and college grade-point averages to judge current Google employees being considered for promotion.

As for holding one bad grade — or even entire bad subject areas — against someone, I’m more suspicious of people who did get good grades in every subject. In my experience they tend to be rule-crazy conformists, obsessed with their grades rather than with particular subjects.

Design Is How It Works 

Worth a re-link, in context of the aforelinked items regarding the role of design at Google, is this quote from Steve Jobs in 2003:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Apple Is a Design Company With Engineers; Google Is an Engineering Company With Designers 

Buzz Andersen, regarding Douglas Bowman’s description of the role of design at Google:

But I think a useful way to think about the difference between the two companies is: how likely is an individual contributor from each category to be present in a meeting with the CEO? Based on my experience at Apple, I’d say the answer is: pretty unlikely for an engineer, far more likely for a designer. I don’t have any direct experience with Google, but I suspect just the opposite would be true there.

The two companies clearly have fundamentally different approaches to deciding how their products work.

Douglas Bowman Leaves Google 

Refreshingly honest look at Google’s engineering-dominated culture, from their first lead visual designer:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.

‘Old Growth Media and the Future of News’ 

Steven Berlin Johnson on the future of news publishing:

The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state. What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.

In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest.

He starts the piece by recalling just how hard it was to come by Mac and Apple-related news when he was in college in 1987 — you were pretty much stuck waiting for two-month-old news from Macworld once a month. Imagine not hearing any real details about this past week’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement until, say, the third week of May.

Johnson’s piece pairs well with the aforelinked piece from Clay Shirky.

‘Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable’ 

This essay by Clay Shirky is, simply, one of the smartest things I’ve ever read:

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

And:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

The whole piece is a must-read.

OmniGraffle 

My thanks to the Omni Group for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote OmniGraffle, their excellent Mac OS X graphics editor.

I’ll just come right out and say that OmniGraffle is my favorite app from Omni — I use it to create graphics for Daring Fireball such as the table in my Safari 4 review comparing tab colors. It is a very good tool for a startlingly wide range of tasks. It can be used to create both flowchart diagrams (backed by an outline) and layer-based graphic design layouts. It can be used by non-artists to create high-quality graphics (thanks to its built-in and third-party stencils), and by artists to create original design work with precise control over layout and typography. It’s also a great tool for user interface and web page design mockups.

Order OmniGraffle at the Omni Group’s store through 23 March 2009 and save 15 percent using the coupon code “GRAFFLE_FIREBALL”.

Most-Secure Browser: Chrome 

Ryan Paul:

Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer were all exploited during the Pwn2Own competition that took place at [CanSecWest]. Google’s Chrome browser, however, was the only one left standing — a victory that security researchers attribute to its innovative sandbox feature.

Tethering on iPhone OS 3.0 over AT&T 

Joachim Bean:

Hello everyone, I just found a way to enable tethering on iPhone OS 3.0 over AT&T.

SpiralFrog Shuts Down 

Greg Sandoval, reporting for CNet:

SpiralFrog, the pioneering ad-supported music service, quietly closed down on Thursday. SpiralFrog’s site went dark at about 4 p.m. PDT.

Let’s recall what was said about SpiralFrog back in 2006. Paul Thurrott:

In a slap at market leader Apple, songs downloaded from SpiralFrog won’t work with iTunes or the iPod. The songs will, however, work just fine in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (WMP) and any Microsoft-compatible PlaysForSure device, including Media Center PCs and Windows Mobile-powered Portable Media Centers.

That was quite a hurtful slap. On the other side, yours truly:

I smell yet another dud.

PDF Browser Plugin 2.3 

SchubertIt’s PDF Browser Plugin 2.3 uses Mac OS X’s built-in PDF renderer, but offers a slew of features not offered by Safari’s built-in PDF viewer — and it works in Firefox, too. Free for personal use, $69 for commercial use. See Dan Frakes’s review in Macworld for more information.

The Hit List’s Natural Language UI for Creating Repeating Tasks 

Andy Kim on the design process he went through for the UI to create repeating tasks in his upcoming task management app The Hit List. What he wound up with is a simple single-line text field into which you just type how often you want the task to repeat.