In November, I quit my job at LANDesk to begin working full-time on Readeo, a website that let’s families who live in different states (or anywhere, really) build and keep their relationships with children strong by reading together. Tonight I thought I’d share a few of the thoughts behind the product as well as some of the designs that got us to where we are now.

Similar to Coby’s (our CEO) experience above, my brother and sister-in-law lived in Columbus for several years which meant we didn’t really get to see their boys grow up during that period. We saw them on the holidays every year and spent a good chunk of that time just getting re-acquainted.

By the end of the visit, we had great relationships with the boys and we were all sad to be leaving. But when the next visit came (a year or so later), the introduction phase of the relationship was back and they were calling me “Justin,” and I think I remember Whittney being called “Grandma” a time or two : )

The idea behind Readeo is to create a shared interaction that allows friends and family to spend quality time with their [grand]children, and really establish relationships through that interaction, even when they’re physically far apart.

On Readeo, that main interaction takes place within what we call a BookChat. Below is an early sketch of the BookChat screen where families read together with integrated video and digital children’s books (yes, I know my plane looks like it’s crashing…):

In addition to the BookChat portion of the site, we created Readeo with a narrow social networking component. Really, you’re only connecting to your closest family and friends—but with those people, we offer the ability to share or recommend favorite books, create book shelves, upload profile pictures, etc.

Below is an early but still pretty accurate comp of the various dialogue boxes that allow people on the site to add friends, recommend books, send BookChat invitations, etc.

When you’re logged in to the site, the Profile becomes your homepage—from there you can access all of the other features on the site: Browse the Library, Create a bookshelf, Read a book, BookChat, and more. This is one of the few pages on the site that ended up passing straight through to the final product without many changes.

I’m really happy with where we are right now. We have a ways to go in refining and bringing additional features, and adding books and publishers, but we’ve had great feedback, some good press and some of the best publishers in the business.

If you want to learn more, visit www.readeo.com and try it out for yourself. There’s a free 14 day trial, and for a free one-month subscription just use the code “readeolaunch” when you sign up.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or questions—and thanks for indulging me!

Here’s my obligatory iPad post. I’m not defending or bashing the iPad here—just revealing the real reason behind it’s being…which might also explain the lukewarm reception it’s received.

1. It doesn’t cure cancer. Or male pattern baldness. Or whatever else people had in their heads it would do. Just because Steve Jobs says it’s the most important thing he’s done in his career, doesn’t mean it’s going to be a miracle. We’re talking about consumer electronics here. They’re great, but people were treating yesterday like they were expecting the Second Coming. Again: con-sumer elec-tronics.
2. The name. Yeah. Oh well. But look at it this way: people are talking about it and it’s easy to remember. I would have preferred iTab. But did you see Twitter yesterday? A lot of people who never would have heard of the iTab were asking what an “iPad” (or any other variation people have come up with) was and why all the buzz. In the end, I doubt the name will keep many people from buying the thing, but I’m sure the PR got stretched further than it otherwise would have. And you know what they say about PR…
3. The bookshelf design looks like it was copied from Delicious Library. Or Classics, or Shelfari, etc, etc. Seriously, do people care? They think Apple ripped off these other designers? Tell me- how many ways are there to represent a bookshelf? Basically two. Either you represent it realistically (like they and everyone else did), or you represent it a little more abstractly (like we’re doing on Readeo).
4. It’s missing core features. Flash, multitasking, camera, etc. Are you surprised though? Look at the effort Apple goes to to maintain control over the iPhone, etc. This ensures they have room for product revision and continued sales/upgrades down the road when they do add the webcam, the camera, multitasking, etc. (almost seems like they do this to spite early adopters)
5. Finally, and mainly: You thought they were going to release a revolutionary new product but what Apple really released was a business model. The whole iPad is built around the idea of the apps that will be built and sold for it. That’s it’s real reason for being. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing- it will be the apps that extend the thing’s usefulness. But at the same time, there’s something less magical about a product when you know that it’s main purpose is to extract bills from your wallet in exchange for things you think you need.

This probably works in other browsers, but i haven’t tried—so first make sure you’re using Firefox. If you’re not, ask yourself if you should really be using the Internet at all. Or go here.

1. Open up your Google Calendar
2. Select the month you want to start from
3. Click the Print icon near the top right of your calendar
4. Choose “Save As” (this will create a PDF)
5. Open your Firefox Download Manager (Control or Command + J is the keyboard shortcut)
6. Right-click on the file in your list of downloads
7. Choose “Copy Download Link”
8. Paste that link into your Address Bar
9. Find the dates (I’ve highlighted them in red) within the string (for example “http://google.com/calendar/printable[...]letter&dates=20100131%F20100307&ctz=America…”)
10. Replace those dates with the date range you want to print
11. Hit “Enter” on your keyboard

Bam! You can now download a PDF with separate pages for each month for whatever date range you want. Hopefully Google will update the calendar so that you can do it all a lot easier, but for now, this lets you print a yearly view of your Google Calendar without too much trouble.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

The other day, my buddy Nichole sent me a great quote by Jeffrey Zeldman that’s right on the money:

“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

This idea has been bubbling up for a while—probably since I started working for a decent-sized company with a lot of sales, field, and channel marketing people who are each working furiously on their own projects to create leads that convert to sales.

“Hey- can you make this pretty for me?” I hear that question almost every day. While I’m flattered that people think I can make something look good, there’s a bigger issue.

Designers (at least the ones I know) aren’t trained in “decoration.” We’re trained in making things work—weeding out the unnecessary, the confusing, and the vague. We specialize in creating the elements that tie communication together to make a compelling finished product.

But to be effective, this process requires involvement of the designer from the beginning. When a project is started by simply identifying a problem and then running headlong into the “obvious” solution, it rarely becomes more than a one-off piece with a short life and small impact.

Quality requires asking the right questions, playing devil’s advocate, and candidly exploring the problem with a full range of possible solutions. I’ll be first to admit designers don’t know everything—but they generally do have good questions to ask and good ideas about forming solutions that will connect with the customer.

If you’ve already come to your conclusion and just want it to “look pretty,” any employee with Adobe Creative Suite might be able to give you what you want. But be aware that you’re probably not giving your project a fair shake, and you’re not being as effective as you could be if instead you would involve your designer(s) from the start.

Designers don’t decorate—they make things work.

Mere decoration has no real power to improve sales or build a brand. Solid design strategy does. But if it starts at the last 10%, it’s not strategy—it’s an afterthought.

If you’re like me, you find it pretty unbelievable that people will cast a vote for someone or something without knowing who or what they are. The fact is, though, that it happens all the time. In elementary and middle-through high school elections, in college, and continuing on to local and national politics.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the same thing goes on in Congress nearly every day on incredibly important issues. After all—to these people, voting is just business as usual. Pick a “side and glide,” I call it. Sure it’s lazy, but at least it looks like things are getting done.

But here’s the difference: we elect and pay (and give incredible health care benefits) our representatives with the expectation that they will take the necessary steps to become informed on:

1. The issues
2. The sentiment of the people they represent in relation to those issues
3. The laws and guiding principles of the country that should influence those issues

Why do we pay people to do this? Because although it’s imperative that the process take place, we just don’t have the time to do it ourselves.

As a remedy for our lack of time and expertise, we as citizens, delegate our voting authority to elected officials so that the necessary time and attention will be given to important matters that may affect our lives for years to come.

So when I hear that sides are being taken and votes being cast on issues and bills that haven’t even been read, as a citizen, I feel ripped off. Worse, I feel defrauded by the very people trusted to handle the job.

Would you invest your money with some dude who doesn’t watch the markets, who decides (based on nothing more than the name of the stock or bond) that he’ll just throw your money at this one or that one and hope for the best?

Would you send your children to a doctor who doesn’t bother to read patient histories, who doesn’t examine the symptoms, and who doesn’t even ask the simple yet vital questions like “where does it hurt?”

This shortcutting—voting without first understanding the issue you’re voting on—isn’t just lazy and irresponsible, it erodes freedoms by transferring power out of the hands of the people and into the hands of politicians who, without proper oversight, create or tear down laws that will inevitably affect the populous. So if politicians aren’t looking out for the best interest of their constituents, who will? Who can?

The Solution
It’s pretty simple:

My Congressional Deadbeat Remedy Act would require congresspeople to have read any piece of legislation in full before casting a vote. Although reporting would be based on the honor system (despite my suspicion that DC is void of any actual honor these says), each would be required to verbally confirm whether or not they read the legislation before casting any vote.

Instead of a simple “Yea” or “Nay,” a vote would be cast like this:

“I, Rupert Rawlings, have read this bill and cast my vote against.”

or

“I, Nancy Pansy, have not read this bill yet enthusiastically, and with great emotion, cast my vote for.”

Here’s the kicker: If a representative doesn’t read the bill, he can still vote. That vote, however, will be counted at 50%.

Think about how this approach would incentivise representatives to provide time for, and to actually read the bills that they seem so passionate about.

If you care about the issue, you’ll do your homework and come prepared to cast an intelligent vote. If you don’t, take the 50% and rely on your colleagues to do their jobs for you.

It’s not a perfect solution. I doubt anything can really cure the human condition of laziness and blind dis/obedience—especially in politics. But it’s clear that we would all benefit from representatives who, instead of cutting the corners, read the bills and ask the questions including “where does it hurt?”

So- only two complaints:

1. “Leopard” is an incredibly difficult word to spell
2. Selected windows in Exposé now have a blue glow that melted one of my retinas

What you probably didn’t know is that John Harmon*, a designer who was laid off at Microsoft in Q4 of 2008 was hired by Apple to their OSX design team in May of 2009. His first assignment was on Snow Leopard, and tasked with creating a way for Exposé to more easily indicate which window was about to be selected. And the Blue Glow of Death was born.

Seriously, I’m surprised Apple gave the go-ahead on the glow. It’s not that big a deal, but it doesn’t match anything else in the OS and just feels strange. And since I couldn’t really stand it, I bet it makes you squirm a little bit, too.

So here’s all you need to do to fix it. You can design your own “glow,” or just download and use mine. They’re just two really simple PNG files. I didn’t get too creative because I just wanted something simple and background-ish, but you could probably come up with some pretty cool effects by experimenting. I created two sets. They’re very similar, but you might be able to tell a difference if you click to enlarge:

Thin Bright:

This theme makes the window highlight just one size.
Download Thin Bright

and Hefty:

This theme has both a large and small window highlight size.
Download Hefty

To swap these for your Blue Eye-Burning Glow, just go like this:

1. Click on Macintosh HD
2. Click on System
3. Click on Library
4. Click on CoreServices
5. Right Click on Dock
6. Select “Show Package Contents”
7. Click on Resources
8. Find and delete “expose-window-selection-big.png” and “expose-window-selection-small.png”
   - you will need to authenticate (using your log on password)
9. Drag your new images (Thin-Bright, Hefty, or your own) in to replace
   - again, you’ll probably need to authenticate
10. Log out (or restart if you want) and then log back in to activate your new eye-pleasing Exposé selection windows

That’s all there is to it. Hope you found it helpful. If you mess around and decide to create your own, feel free to post ‘em here, I’d love to take a look.

*Technically, I made that Microsoft John Harmon story up, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.

They do a great job of incremental change and keeping brands related yet distinct. The packaging evolution of Adobe Creative Suite and Photoshop:

Notice the change in point-of-view between CS and Ps (you can see it better if you click to enlarge). The Photoshop packaging comp is viewed from just a little bit lower than the Creative Suite packaging. Seems kinda weird…but since it’s consistent across versions, I wonder if there’s any reasoning behind it?

“The cab driver in Halifax is telling me how he had a hip & a shoulder replaced & open heart surgery. Guess how much that all cost him.. $0!”

That’s great…but who paid for it? Did Canada invent some sort of magic machine where nothing costs anything?

The reality is that he did pay for it. And so did everyone else in his country. Now, if someone asked me “Well hey—wouldn’t you help someone like that by chipping in a few dollars? Or are you just a cold, heartless jerk?” I’d say “Sure, I’d be more than happy to donate a few dollars to help out someone like that.”

I bet most of us would respond the same way. Especially if we knew the person. So why not nationalize health care then?

It’s the being forced to help out ALL the people like that that rubs me the wrong way. It kinda adds up, you know? And when someone is suddenly entitled to your service (or your pocketbook), doesn’t that take a big chunk of the joy out of service? Can compulsory service actually be called service anymore?

I got back from a trip to Europe last week traveling on trains, staying in hostels and at friend’s houses. Most of them liked to talk a little politics, and they were surprisingly on the same page in their opinions. Almost all said they like President Obama. But universally, they said they would rather have America’s health care system than their own.

So who would you trust? Someone who’s lived with nationalized health care and it’s consequences (and wishes they didn’t), or someone who wants national health care because the idea of free health care for everyone sounds like an awesome idea?

Yes—we need health care reform. But before you go holding up Canada or the UK or France or any other country with government-run health care as some banner of an ideal health care system, consider the big picture.

I realize I’m simplifying a bit. But what would be great would be to take a deep breath (+ enough time to look at a variety of options and their intended and unintended consequences) and form a solution that actually moves our health care system forward.

Because I’d rather not be covered than be covered in crap.