Evernote QA Report: Merge & Sync

Hi Evernote,

Your sync and merge has long been broken, and I hope to provide you enough detail to get it fixed here. All the below should be reproducible, let me know if you find otherwise.
List Fruits 1

It starts simple. Create a note in Evernote webview. List some fruits. If you’re anything like me, you probably make a couple lists like this per day. All seems well. Later that day, you remember this list, and have a burning need to add “Starfruit” to it. All looks well?

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But things are not so well, because when we return to the webview, there’s some bad news awaiting:
List Fruits Double Note               ^– Now two notes, instead of one

That’s right, my fruit list has split itself in two lists with edits from desktop and mobile. Similar problems persist as I try to use the document.

Unless one is fastidious enough to sync every note when finished, and then manually sync when resuming on another platform, you are liable (at rate inversely proportional to speed of your internet connection) to soon find yourself with something like this:

Two Syncs Later

Every time I switch devices, I must remember “ensure save,” then pre-sync on the new device (and remember to confirm sync finished). Granted, there are a number of trigger points for syncs, but it’s impossible to be sure which, if any, have triggered/completed. One too-fast move, and I’m back in the ghetto of Mergetown.

I usually don’t even know I’ve been losing list items (to duplicated versions), until I notice the note lags in load/save time. And then I realize there are 10 copies of the list in my note, below the (already long) version I was treating as the “real list.”

I sympathize that getting sync to work reliably across disparate platforms is a hard problem [2]. So why not, instead of fully fixing the sync, just spend a few days fixing the merge?

If you could automatically add new lines to both documents without creating duplicate copies, that would be a good start. If you kept the note differences in the area they were found (not bottom of document), that would help. Source control tools have spent 20+ years building great systems to merge two documents. You can probably crib most of your implementation from a plugin/library in that domain? Or at least mark “duplicate documents” so I know I’ll need to hand merge them?

Thanks for considering these improvements. I take the time to write this because I still believe you’re the best solution in your space. If you could just address this fundamental stuff, I’d reap benefits greater than the (sizeable) time it took to create this report.

[1] Lists featuring fruits.
[2] Albeit the hard problem you ostensibly built your business to solve

Install Balsamiq (and Air) on Ubuntu/Linux Pangolin 64 bit

In my continued effort to ween myself off VMware (slow start speed, many gigs to copy every time I get a new computer) I decided to invest some time this afternoon toward getting one of my essential tools, Balsamiq Mockups, to work on 64-bit Precise Pangolin. I had assumed this would be impossible, so was stunned to find that it’s not only possible, but pretty darned easy. Here are the steps that I cobbled together from a few sources to get it working fast:

Install Adobe Air

wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

The middle bit makes some symlinks so that Adobe Air can access gnome keyring (required for install). If you’re running 32-bit Pangolin, those two steps are slightly different:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0

Install Balsamiq

wget http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-desktop/MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb
sudo dpkg -i MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb

Or if you’re running 32-bit:

wget http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-desktop/MockupsForDesktop32bit.deb
sudo dpkg -i MockupsForDesktop32bit.deb

Yay For Easy

Thanks to Linux.org for the guidance on installing Adobe Air. The steps on Adobe’s own site are an awful mess.

Books for a Better World, Pt. 1

There are a couple books (literally, two) that I find myself quoting from on a very regular basis. Today, I come to speak of the book that takes about an hour to read and years to fully assimilate.

But before I reveal the identity of this book, a question: when was the last time you started using a new application (for the sake of this blog, “applications” includes web sites) and felt like the architect of said application truly cared about your experience?

Speaking from personal experience, it never occurred to me why certain applications felt “better” and “worse” to use. Nor did I ask myself why frustrating applications had ended up being designed as they were. Now I reflect on both regularly, and the reason is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Before I go any further, I should probably throw in fair warning: after reading this book, my reaction to using poorly designed software has changed from a mix of frustration and confusion to simple anger. If I waste more than five minutes finding a basic piece of functionality in an application, this now generally leads to severe annoyance. There is a fair chance that you, too, will revile the authors of your poorly designed software after reading this book. Therefore, if you are a person of action with a strong sense of justice, think twice before reading a text this potent.
dontmakemethink.jpg
But if you think you can deal with the truth, here’s what you’ll learn:

The premise of the book centers around the fact that users are very busy people who have neither the time nor the will to give an application as much attention as designers think they will. Krug asserts that when encountering a new application, the human impulse is to scan a page in about 1-3 seconds, make a best guess what will get them where they want to go (in Krug’s words, “satisfice”), and muddle along from there. He points out that designers should take care not to waste users’ milliseconds through making unclear links or leave them stranded in an application without a clear sense of where they are. He goes on to do some exercises where the reader sees examples of well-organized sites (i.e., Amazon) and poorly organized sites (buy the book and see them).

What’s more, the book is chock full of pictures and great examples. As I’ve come to know other Internet entrepreneurs within the community, I have found myself repeatedly citing examples in this book, as it seems to take most applications at least an iteration or two before they can get enough user feedback to create a UI layout that makes sense. Without this book and a strong sense of responsibility to your user, an application can quite easily never get things right.

With this book explained, you can now look forward to hearing the exasperated tales of applications that drive me bonkers, like TopStyle. This application earned itself an express ticket to my bad side today when, after handily reporting files with CSS errors in them, it provides no clear path of how to fix (or even view) these errors. Clicking on a specific error in a list of errors just jumps directly to the top of the file that the error resides in, not to the error itself. Brilliant.

Admitting You’re Wrong is the First Step

It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge how screwed up you are, eBay. I applaud you. But one problem: the same way that AltaVista couldn’t be a search engine and a content portal and an everything-else, neither can eBay effectively be a collector’s site and an online store hoster and an average Joe’s auction source (amongst about 1000 other things that eBay currently “is”). Complexity is inherently part of their scope, and I’m not sure that adding a social networking layer and mobile apps is the solution to that.

If eBay is trying to figure out what happened to the wind in its sales (sic), they might want to take a look at the Etsy and edgeio traffic growth over the last year. Those several hundred percent growth rates are being reaped by sites that understand how to do one thing really well, rather than doing everything mostly OK.

I’ll be frank here that sometimes I wonder whether being in the same market as the Internet’s fourth-largest site was a good choice for my first true, large-scale business. I have to think that there are businesses out there that don’t have to constantly look over their shoulder at what is being done by the several-billion-dollar behemoth. But at the same time, we are jabbing a target so large that it takes years to swing back, if it even notices it was hit. For those that get to help build our alpha into a beta version starting next month, you will see a creative market opportunity that wedges between the cracks a giant can’t fit into.

Go-Go Gadget Design!

Another milestone in Bonanzle’s history was reached this week when we finally found a design partner up to the task of imagining the site’s design future. So without further ado, Ladies and Gentlemens, I present to you Bonanzle’s deity of design: Geoff Harrison of geoffco. His site is filled with a number of attractive and well-thought-out sites that geoffco has created as part of its design portfolio.

In his relationship with Bonanzle, Geoff will help us lay out seven of the site’s most critical pages. He will also assist us in creating a design template that can be reused across the site as new pages arise during development. We like to believe that Bonanzle will be a defining site in geoffco’s portfolio, and that we can continue to work with geoffco as the site reaches its future development milestones, expanding its reach with each month that we draw closer to beta.

** Posthumous Update **

Summary. I see this is pretty high in the search results for “geoffco design,” so let me comment posthumously on the experience we had working with geoffco. First of all, we are a CSS-heavy, web 2.0 site whose design emphasis is on simple, simple, simple. When we worked with geoffco (from about March to July of 2007), Geoff was one of the most impressive designers I could find from the Seattle freelance mailing list. Plus, he gave us a great price on what we were doing. He stuck Adam Faja on our project, while Geoff worked in an overseer/advisory role. I will henceforth refer to the Adam/Geoff combination as “geoffco”, though I worked more closely with the former.

Results. I was very satisfied with the overall process of working with geoffco. I entered the relationship with geoffco only having a vague idea of what our site might look like, and geoffco was very patient with the many iterations it took to get the design looking the way I wanted it to look. Our process was usually that I would give geoffco a high-level overview of the requirements/goals I had for a certain page, and geoffco would send me back a PDF (presumably created with Photoshop) to get us on the same page. The first pass usually wasn’t what I was looking for, so I would either ask geoffco to revise things (which they grew a bit weary of toward the end, given that I did it quite a bit), or get into Photoshop and re-arrange things myself to send back something that was more in line with my vision (they seemed amendable to this arrangement).

After a couple design revisions, geoffco would create the HTML for the pages. At first this was something of a touch and go process, as I believe Adam didn’t have a lot of experience writing HTML (the HTML we received appeared to have been auto-generated… lots of font tags, spacer gifs, entirely table-based layouts, all the good web 1.0 stuff). After talking with Geoff directly about our needs (div-based layout, well structured markup with nothing extraneous) we reached a compromise and Adam started learning CSS-based layout. He was a quick study, and after a couple pages, the quality of the markup was consistent with other design-first web designers I’ve worked with (which is to say, not all that great, but serviceable without all that much tinkering).

In the end, I thought that for the price we paid, we got a great deal, and I would work with geoffco again. If we needed our design to ultimately end up in HTML, I would probably double-check that the designer we were going to be working with had some experience with tableless layout. But other than that, it was a good experience, and the design we ended up with was sound starting point, especially since they really had to start from square one in figuring out what our design was going to look like*.

* At this point, about 6 months later, we’ve revised (I believe) every page that geoffco had given us, but the skeletal layout for what-goes-where on those pages are still very similar to what geoffco had provided us, a sign of their knack for UI.

Be Better

In the last blog, I discussed the first half of the pivotal question for the great idea: How is your thing different and better? This time I’ll discuss the second half of that question.

To be sure, there are a lot of ways to be different than the competition. An eBay-like site that exclusively sold variously-aged Cheetos would pass the “different” test. Etsy would also pass the “different” test. So the question is, how can one tell if their idea is more like selling variously-aged Cheetos or artist-created handiworks?

The answer: ask around. This is a more difficult task than it sounds like for many entrepreneurs, because many of us introspective, visionary-types are used to listening to ourselves when an important question needs to be answered. It doesn’t help that other common qualities in entrepreneurs include the need for control and willingness to buck the norm. Simply put, most entrepreneurs at some point get used to living in a world of doubters and the short-sighted. So when it comes down to the most pivotal question of an idea’s existence, why would we turn to the same choir that has so regularly tried to stomp our initiatives… until around the point that said initiatives become unfathomably successful?

The first reason is that while people may not be able to imagine something better, they can often spot something they don’t like. Even if they can not absolutely determine why they don’t like an existing offering, asking people questions about their past experiences is instrumental in determining the relative degree to which certain opportunities exist in an established competitive landscape.

The second reason is that, if you’re asking your target audience, you are talking to the people that will ultimately determine your idea’s success. While human nature is naturally skeptical of all things “new” and purportedly “better,” ultimately it is the entrepreneur’s mission to dispel that skepticisim by creating a tangible product that resoundingly fills a need its competitors don’t. Without asking your target market about their needs and desires, what will guide you toward creating that tangible product that manifests your idea?

The third reason is that maybe you’re wrong. Yeah, you. Maybe your idea is variously-aged Cheetos. And if you spend thousands of dollars creating the perfect site for selling these, you will succeed only in becoming thousands of dollars poorer. Gaining feedback about your idea from the people that will ultimately use it is the ideal means by which to determine to what extent your idea needs to be adapted before it hits the bullseye.

Entrepreneurs are ultimately big dreamers and big dreamers are often very protective of their dreams. As such, I have found it difficult as a relative youngster in this game to take the first steps toward exposing my idea to the potential of Valid, Important criticism.

But that’s what this game is founded upon: having an idea, being wrong, and productively responding to that reality.

If all continues according to schedule, I should be able to report in the next week or two how being wrong feels.

Differentiation

It’s the three-inch titanium wall between you and the loot. It’s the ghost you feel on your ceiling in the middle of the night. It’s the $64,000 question challenging your otherwise-grand business idea: How is your thing different and better?

This question has been dancing through my head for weeks. It’s one thing to have an idea that could make people’s lives better. I have those every day, and you probably do too. In fact, talk of “how to do things better” has graced watercooler after watercooler since some business wunderkind had the idea that our lives would be improved if we didn’t drink from the tap. However, barfing out some idea of how things could hypothetically be better is not unique. If only the ideas heard by the watercooler were judged in a void where “degree of improvement” was the sole arbiter of success, then the world might properly appreciate the value of a good idea.

But they aren’t and it doesn’t. My idea kicks eBay where it counts, while providing a service that person after person has agreed they could utilize. But the $64,000 question remains, because the 800 lbs gorilla is often only of peripheral concern to the new business. Big businesses tend to lumber along with scattered focus, and as a result, are easy to be negatively contrasted with a nimble startup if one focuses on the idealistic: “Could I do a certain thing better?”

The crucial gauge of the great idea, then, is no more how it compares to the gorilla than how it compares to everything else. Once I find a site that seems to be trying to do something similar, I ask: How do I compare to what these people are doing? How will I compare to them once they see my idea and start trying to copy it? And of course, how well is this business doing? Quite frankly, this final question is an annoying one to ask, because if they are doing well it means more competition, and if they’re doing poorly it means the need we’re trying to meet might not be as great as anticipated.

From what I can gather, it would seem that there are a lot of “entrepreneurs” who don’t have the tenacity or wherewithal to ask this question, and their site ends up missing the key point of differentiation. For example, Powersellers Unite provides a list of the 20 most successful eBay copycats, er, Internet auction marketplaces. You visit these sites, and you see very little to distinguish them from eBay, save that they €™re willing to make less money with lower or no fees.

It takes tremendous courage, tenacity, and perseverence to honestly evaluate a competing idea and confront the question of why that idea won €™t work and yours will. But it alone is what charges a €œgreat idea € with the power to become €œa great, successful idea. € Over the course of refining my great idea, I’ve focused on learning to be honest about the similarities, and persevere through them with an even greater understanding of where are the cracks in the fortress of competition. There is no second option for businesses that want a realistic chance to succeed.