Fun Life Hack Our Products

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of Bloxes.

Bloxes are essentially 3D cardboard Legos that ship flat, and fold up in modular building blocks that are strong enough to stand on. While they aren’t tech per se, we use them for building tables, walls, cubicles, and desks at the Humanized office. Google and Mint.com have already ordered some, and Mozilla has expressed interest in using them in their offices too. This may well be the new thing in terms of agile office-space deployment. Don’t like where a wall is? Just move it! Don’t like the way it looks? Just rebuild it! They are cheaper than cubicles, and much more fun.

They are also eco-buzzword-friendly (meaning that they are made from recycled cardboard and are recyclable).

So head over to Bloxes and order yourself some re-factorable furniture and walls. Then come back here and tell us all about it.

We are now a Python and cardboard shop.

Life Hack

I just had the dubious honor of writing my first patent. It was a laborious and arduous process that I would only force on my best enemies. Luckily I had help from my coworkers. But help meant collaboration, and collaboration meant too many hands in the cookie jar. Edits flew like popcorn kernels on the griddle. It was the stuff project manager nightmares are made of and we needed a robust method of keeping track of comments and edits to combat it.

When writing, I like to keep things simple. And while I don’t go to the extremes of Khoi Vinh’s Blockwriter, I use an editor that can’t even make text bold. When I write, it’s just the raw text and me, mano a mano. By using a bare-bones editor, the text can’t fight dirty by throwing frivolous fonts and formats in my eyes.

Everyone at Humanized writes the same way, so how did we collaboratively write and revise the patent? We couldn’t just edit, because in a patent every change is crucial and must be reviewed. We couldn’t just use standard revision control, because we needed to shoot things back-and-forth across myriad different file formats (we all use different editors). We needed another solution. We needed an elegant solution.

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Life Hack UI Design Fundamentals

I can only think about one thing at a time.

Any girl reading this just going to roll her eyes and think, “Of course. You’re a guy!”. But it’s not just true for me, it’s true for everyone. It’s true for you.

And not in that way.

At first, this claim can sound fantastic. We can talk on a cell phone while driving to work, and we can compose complex sentences while typing. But, if you stop to reflect on it, you can only do those things at the same time because at least one of them is automatic. In the first case driving is automatic, and in the second case typing is automatic. You’ve done them so often that you’ve habituated to them: doing them doesn’t require any thinking. Can you still talk on your cell phone while driving through a rainstorm on unfamiliar roads? Would you still be able to concentrate on writing if you had just switched to a Dvorak keyboard? I didn’t think so.

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Life Hack Rave

Jef Raskin proposed the First Law of Interface Design, paralleling Asimov’s First Law of Robotics:

A computer should not harm a user’s work, or (through inaction) allow a user’s work to come to harm.

Web browsers break this law regularly. When was the last time you lost all the data you entered on a form because your browser/computer crashed or something went wrong? And how many times have you spent 10 minutes relocating a crucial (or hilarious) web page because you closed the wrong window? Entering data into a form is work. Navigating through the petabytes of information on the internet is work. One wrong move, one brownout, and poof! There goes your data, your history, and that web page.

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Life Hack Rave

Last summer, before Humanized got started, Andrew, Atul, and I did some consulting work. Andrew and I were in balmy California, while Atul was back in humid Chicago. We were all working on the same project, and we had a big problem: we needed to talk. A lot. About everything: documents that needed commenting and editing, new ideas one of us had brainstormed, what we were going to do the next day, and the weather. Unfortunately, our tools (phones, AIM, email, and a wiki) were inadequate.

Enter MoonEdit.

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