Today I want to talk a bit about audio books. Not sure what is the official name. aBooks? First of all – I love them! So now I have it out of my system lets get to facts. They safe your eyes and they save your time. They save your time massively. I can listen to a book which has couple of hundred pages in matter of few days without spending any productive time on it. What I mean is that I usually listen to audio books while I am on the public transport or during my evening running sessions. I usually listen to the book 3 times which allows me to get the data into the long-term memory instead of just the temporary one.

Are there any disadvantages

Yes they are. The books are still not cheap enough. They are far from expensive but lets be honest, it could be lot less then $20 for a book. The distribution channels and cost of production is far far less comparing it with the paper brother.

Another disadvantages comes in place where you actually need to or want to look at the screen/paper. Lets say when you are learning code or looking at some pretty pictures (design books) but for these cases we have eReaders and iPads right?

I know there will be people complaining that nothing can replace the smell of the book or the touch of the washout paper. I agree, these feelings can’t be replaced but if you are reading business book or looking at the latest book about design pasterns in Ruby you might not feel that you need the those extras as much. You would probably miss the traditional book when you are reading some Shakespeare’s book.

I have talked about the space saving before and here it comes again. Having books in digital form does not consume any space in your flat which I love a lot. I can only keep those few really cool design books in my shelf and put the rest of the fast replacing books on hard-rives of my Apple family devices.

Backtract allows you to track your progress while you running, rollerblading, cycling or enjoying any other outdoor activities.

I have not had a chance to try the app. as I do not have currently data plan on my iPhone but hopefully I will be able to try it pretty soon. I am looking forward to it! If you guys already tried the app. let me know how it went.

For those of you who remembers the cafe version of my blog, you might see certain similarities with the Bactrack home page. Yeah, the second version of my site inspired the guys and they were after something with the same feel. I have designed three views for this project. The home page, the logged in page where you can see how you performed during your outdoor activities and the page which is available to public if you decide to share your data.

The co-operation with Backtrack guys was excellent. They have clearly described what they need and we were able to finish the project in matter of few days. Overall I am very happy with the final result as they are. I wishing them a success and hope that thousands users will start using the app. while they enjoy the nice weather outside.

This is one of the biggest advantages of freelancing. You can meet lovely people with interesting projects and still make living. Great stuff.

So the title of the article is: What is in your bag?

I would be curios to know what do you keep with you all the time. I obviously take my laptop (MAC Book Pro 15″). No mouse. I have talked about this before. Most of the design work I do I do not use mouse. I always keep my iPhone and iPod with me. Lately I listen to audio books on my ipod. (Rework, Crush It, Sticking Point) but I also listen to quite a few podcast while I travel. Just lately I have decide to take my camera with me every single day. I have got Canon 400D with long and short glass. Do not ask me technical details I have not done my home work ;) I start taken the camera because I have realized I hardly use it anymore except holidays and that is not good. The camera is pretty big and heavy but who cares, my bag is heavy anyway. I forgot to mention that I keep there one of my last paper bags which I plan to read couple of times. The book is called The Elements of Typographic style. Why is it one of the last paper books I own? Because I owned Sony eReader and now I am waiting for iPad. By the way, does any of you know if they have them in Vienna? I seriously need to get one pretty soon ;)

So what is in yours?

I am adding few pictures I have taken today while I was relaxing next to the river. Hope you like them.

If you have been coming here for some time you could notice that the site is slowly shifting from blog into a company website. People are mainly interested in my portfolio and type of work I do so I am trying to give them just that. It is pity that I have so many design projects on my computer which I have done during the past year but these projects are still getting build so I can’t present them in my portfolio. So you can expect to see my portfolio grow massively in the future.

So what next lewro.com?

You can see on the screenshots that I am trying different approaches. One is very sharp, business oriented and the second one is more artistic. I have not decided yet which way to go and hoping someone can help me with direction.

Which style do you prefere? Would you rather like to see more colour version?

Quantify have reached the first milestone. Quantify can’t do a lot at this moment but it has been great experience so far and I would like to share the result of the hard work.

For those of you who do not know what is Quantify, please visit getquantify.com

What Quantify can do at the moment

I have the user registration/login/logout in place. I am now able to create/update/delete projects and inside the projects I can define Title/Description create/delete categories and set user access to the project.

I have produce small video which shows most of the current functionality. I have never produced this type of video so please be nice to me ;). I have tried to produce a video with music at the background and slides which tells you what kind of action is going to happen on the video before it happens but it all came down to single thing. I only have iMovie which provides nice video and has all sorts of nice features but if you want to produce video of application which focus is on user interface that you might be disappointed. The small level of compression removed 90 percent of the visual waw effect I have put into the interface design. I have decided to produce better quality video even without sound and descriptive slides using only iShowU screen recording sofware and nothing else.

I am paid Flickr user so I can upload up to 500MB for single video but that was just enough for this small screen-cast. I even had to reduce the screen size to 70% to be able to get the file size below 500MB so even I would like the size to be bigger that was not possible without reducing the quality of the video even more.

So my first experience with video online is not that great. The quality is still quite poor but it kinda work. Hope you like it.

Update:
I have produces slightly better quality videos for each action (create/update/delete), they can be watched in bigger sizes.
- Create new Project
- Update Project Details
- Delete Project

As you might know I am working on my upcoming web application called quantify. Here is the think. I am probably building one of the simplest application on earth. When you hear simple you might be thinking. That is easy to do. Right? Actually not. Here comes the list of skills you need to have to be able to build the simplest application.

- you need to be able to design the app first in software like Photoshop, Illustrator or Gimp

- you need to be able to register and setup the domain name for it

- you need to be able to set you web server, in the worst case (mine case) you need to be able to install the whole server almost from scratch

- you need to be able to setup you working environment, things like accessing remotely your server with ssh etc

- you need to be able to setup your deployment, tools like Capistrano could help a lot

- you need to know bash commands

- you need to be able to setup backup for your code, server database data

- you need to be able to setup repository for your code using services like GitHub

- you need to be able to use Text Editor

- you need to be able to produce HTML code

- you need to be able to produce CSS code

- you need to be able use one of the existing Javascript libraries like jQuery

- you need to be able to build the back-end of the application in languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, ASP

- you need to be able to write tests to check the quality of your code

- you need to be able to setup payment gateways so you can charge for your app

- you need to be able to setup SSH so your app uses secure connection

Did I forget anything? Probably yes.

Once you done with the application you need to be able to marketize the product, provide customer service, handle the payments correctly.

So the question is. Is this really the future of web apps? I guess it will be even more complicated and it will require even more knowledge.

What do you think?

Fun with paperwork

We arrived on Vienna airport with a nice time reserve. So far so good. I should say that we booked the cheapest flight which went from Vienna to Dusseldorf and from there to Big Apple. So here we are on the airport waiting to get the flight approved so we can move on to the duty free zone. I came to the guy who was going to check the passport and bagage and hand him over our passports and the “codes” which works the same way as Visa used to work. Here comes the fun part. The guys said I need the confirmation email not the code. I obviously did not have anything print out as I am the one who lives in the digital world, right? I had all the necessary data stored in my iPhone that wasn’t enough for this guy. We spent some pretty stressful time looking for the place where we can print the necessary papers. You know what was on the paper? The code, nothing else, not even my name. I wish everyone was thinking digital. We arrived to Dusseldorf and waited about an hour for the flight to NY. I was asked a funny question again. Do you have the return tickets printed out? Obviously, no. I live in the digital age. Secondly we were not even thinking to buy the return ticket from US as we wanted to travel father down the country and we were not sure when we are coming back. Luckily our plans have changed and we had return tickets, but not printed out. The stuff in Germany was useful and found them them-self as we were flying back with the same company.

Big Apple

So yeah, we finally made to NY after pretty fast (about 6 hours) flight. New York is huge city but actually did not feel that big to me. I was expecting everything bigger, even the skyscrapers. We have spent most of the time walking around different parts of city, taking pictures, tasting some local food and cafe, obviously. The weather was pretty hot, about 30 degrees so we were trying to walk in the shadows of those massive building as long as possible.

My poor laptop

I managed to get appointment in Apple store on fifth avenue where I asked them to repair my laptop. The cover of my screen was coming off, nothing big (that is what I though). They gave it back to me after seven days with replaced screen, new hard-rive and something else I can’t remember. I was thinking that is pretty cool. I have a new laptop again, but only until I came home and opened it. Something is making funny noises and I do not think it is fan or hd. The noise gets better when I plug my iPhone cable in. That is wired. I have already find repair store here in Slovakia where I am staying for the next two months.

Nice places

So back to NY. I really liked Central Park. It is one of those places with lots of positive energy, where you can relax or exercise or enjoy nature. It is huge. There are several lakes and lots of different interesting places. I can see myself siting there every day during the summer time if I was living in NY.

I also like a lot the Chine Town, Little Italy and the whole south part of the city with all its cool shops and libraries where you can get ice-cafe while you reading some cool magazines. Fifth avenue is the most busy street but it feels the best of all of them. Specially the area around the Apple Store.

Overall experience

New York is a nice busy place. I am glad I had a chance to see it. Hopefully I will have a chance to see other parts of US some day.

The book starts with a personal story of the Zappos founder Tony Hsieh. He talks about his childhood, how he played with business ideas from his early age. How he build successful pizza business during the school age and at the end how he build a internet advertisement company which he sold to Microsoft for millions of dollars because the companies culture went downhill.

The Zappos story wasn’t that easy and simple as it might look now but Tony believed in success of the company and supported it from the beginning up till today. For those who do not know Zappos. It is one of the most successful companies on the web. They have started selling shoes and today they sell cloths and other stuff as well.

So you what is so special about the Zappos?

They say it’s the company culture. It is absolutely right but I would say what matters even more is that they have Tony on board. He is the one who build the company, who created the culture and who set the rules. I absolutely love the way this very smart guy works and lives. We need lot more people like him on this planet so there is more happy people in the world.

Values

I totally agree with Tony when he talks there should be no separation between work and life. It should be just one “your life” and you do not need to change when you are at work as many do. If the company has been build the right way you have people around you who share the same values and you become bunch of friends who help each other. You go to work happy because you looking forward to be with your friends. You become more productive at the same time.

Customer service

If there is one single point which puts Zappos on top of every other company on the web and perhaps not only there, it is customer service. They go their own way, the way which means to provide the biggest values for their customers. For example, the call center. They do not count how many customers each employee handled during the day XY. Why? Because, when you do so the employees will try to handle as many as they can and that basically means they will try to get rid of you as quick as possible so their counter could get quickly another one. Is that good for customer? No. It is much better if you spent as much time as you need with your customer to make him/her happy and that is only thing which matters at Zappos.

The new business

If you look at business in general you see lots of pretending, unhealthy competition, laying. People who thing that wearing suit will make their business more official and so on. I can see here a good trend which has just started. People like Kevin Rose, Tony Hsieh, Gary Vaynerchuk do not try to hide, do not try to pretend, do not try to bring officialness with suits. They bring honesty, true feelings, real caring. They bring new way of doing business and I love it. If I would be blessed enough in the future to run my own business and I would try to implement as much from their ideas as I could so the people who work with me would be truly happy.

Thanks Zappos, thanks Tony for the big inspiration!

If you wish to buy the book you can do it on Amazon.

You have read the title so you are asking where is the fail?

As I have mentioned in the beginning I bought the reserved instance. The trick is, if you by the reserved instance in zone C you need to build your instance and elastic block in the same zone in order to get the better rates otherwise you will be charged the standard rates. Now you know where I am going … ;) Yes, I have bought the reserved instance in zone C and I have build couple of instances in zone C before but the final version I have made was in the zone D. Why? Just because I wasn’t paying attention to it at a time. I have obviously find out when I got a bill from Amazon.

The good thing is…

As I have also mentioned I build the server the way so I can build any number of servers in matter of 5 minutes from my backups. So I have simple killed my instance in zone D and build another in the zone C from the image I have made before which consist the whole configuration of the server and I have also killed the elastic block but before I have created a new snapshot which consist of latest database and application data so when I build a new elastic block in zone C I have just simple load the snapshot data into it.

I have been up and running in 5 minutes and now I can finally enjoy the reduced costs of the reserved instance. It cost me additional 40 dollars but find out that I have made mistake but I could also test my environment at the same time ;)

Have you done a mistake which has cost you money?

Bratislava

I came to Slovakia and start working straight away on my personal project – Quantify. I have spend the first week just fixing the Amazon EC2 servers, setting up the configuration, creating bulletproof backup policy and so on. I have successfully launched the pre-lauch page for Quantify and got more then 500 signups up till today. I still can’t believe that so many people find it interesting. I am very happy about that.

After first week I have been contacted by London’s agency to do a design and front-end work on various projects. Since then I have divided my time between customer work and my personal work. I have manged to write couple of articles about Amazon servers for my coding blog, I have also managed to write a Photoshop tutorial for Smashing Share magazine.

Barcelona

What Barcelona? you might be asking now. After couple of weeks working for London’s agency I have been contacted by Spanish agency to work on a quite a big project. I have agreed and I was asked to fly to Barcelona to work couple of days with them. It all went pretty quickly and in couple of days I was landing in Barcelona. The company took brilliant care of me and the team of people was just perfect. So many lovely people in one place. The city is wonderful as you would expect. I have done lots of design work during those few days, explored the city during the night and enjoyed their amazing food. It was brilliant experience.

As I have said its quite a big project so I am still working with them. I am currently managing my time between two agencies and my personal projects.

Advantages of being freelancer

So you might be asking how do I feel doing the work not from 8_to_6 office every day. I tell you, it has been great so far. I mainly work from city center’s cafe places. It is the environment I enjoy most. I can decide what times is mot suitable for me so you can find me working during the weekends and close to midnight some days and early morning other days.
Freelancing is more risky as you might not have a project to work on all the time and you need to take care of your taxes and all the legal issues but I think it’s worth it. At least that is what I am saying now. Ask me in one year time.