I’m really excited about the upcoming release of rrripple’s latest build. We’ve been working hard over the past few months to deliver a much higher performance, reliable and feature-important release to our teachers and students. Among the most important new features are:
And here’s a quick snapshot of the UI:
An amazing TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html
At this time of year, I reflect on the past 11+ months, all the things we’ve accomplished at rrripple, all of our small victories and small losses we’ve endured. It is always with a sense of gratitude and blessing that I enjoy stepping back and seeing our global team orchestrate around a common vision of private, controlled sharing of media. But today, I wanted to also talk about the enjoyment I selfishly enjoy working with my team of Engineers and Product Designers (including my research guru Thierry and our leader of visual design Lev) here at rrripple.
To most, the idea of enjoying a mixture of designers (often individuals who are more individual artists that collaborative universal team players) and engineers (often erroneously considered design-illiterate) may seem odd. I, however, love this mixture, and find nothing odd about it at all — instead, I find that both designers and engineers love the interplay with one another, feeding off each other at critical junctures of software development. However, this feeding frenzy has to be well spiced and prepared.
The combining of designers and software developers necessitates clear artistic communication and defined, firm delivery of technical specs. For the artist (and I mean Product Managers, R&D teams drafting ideas, Interaction Designers and Visual Designers), there must be 100% buy-in on the art being constructed. In the beginning, there can be various prototypes and neat variations of the artistic goal, but at the time of engineering engagement, there must be a clear message and understanding that all artistic team members buy into, or at the very least accept. While small changes can happen (through iterative testing, they must happen) the next phase of engineering specifications rely on an almost unmoving artistic vision — stable enough to reproduce (sort of like an artist painting a subject — the stiller they are, the better).
Thank you to my team, to my design advisors and to the many friends, as we wrap up 2010. Here’s to painting in stillness.
As chance would have it, our first-ever submission to Apple was rejected earlier last week, and we are now wrapping up the fixes (and taking the opportunity to throw in some new details) before re-submission. All in all, a valuable, efficient application to share your life with the groups in your life. One of my favorite features: being able to select ‘Family’, take a photo of a family member or event, and the rest (uploading to the family group and emailing everyone in that group) happens automatically for me. This feature alone is fantastic! Here’s a snapshot:
rrripple iphone application screenshot
Version 1594 improves on several bugs sent in from our great early user base — thank you everyone! Next up: performance enhancements on our submission of our iPhone app! You guys are going to love the app.
For those who want to try our group-sharing application (in Beta), please go to: rrripple.com and use the following invite code: tc50party
One remaining Mac ‘post/upload’ bug to take care of, and then we’re off to the races! We’ve been working round the clock (literally) over the past week, hammering out the remaining critical (blocker) bugs that we need to disarm before proceeding to letting our first users in. We’re now hours away. I hope you enjoy our creation: a new way to share with groups, privately.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html
Fantastic! Entrepreneurship at its best.
I am happy to announce that we will be part of the TechCrunch 50 demo pit companies on either September 14th or 15th, 2009. We are looking forward to being part of this yearly conference, and will provide audience members with an invitation code to be an early tester of our upcoming group sharing product.
I’m personally very excited to see the next release of rrripple.com tomorrow afternoon — codenamed Chicago (v0.9.6). Thanks to your generous support, feedback and a ton of work from our global team, we bring rrripple one step closer to our September 1st Beta release!
I’ve also had the pleasure to play with our v.3 of our iPhone application, and it’s coming along beautifully. Private, group sharing is coming for sure. And it looks and feels wonderful.
I’m personally looking forward to today’s release (code named Moscow) at 12pm PDT. Today’s release includes some of the following:
Launch time: 12pm PDT. If you’ve already been on rrripple, make sure to clear your cache before trying out new build. Just a tip. 
Since May of 2008, a mighty group of colleagues and friends have come together to dream big around the idea of group sharing. How can we take group sharing to its next level in terms of functionality, interconnectedness to social media applications, privacy and next-generation UI? We’ve spent a long time thinking through ways in which we share with groups — and are now beginning the alpha launch of rrripple.com to share with you the results of our thinking and hard work.
This is just the beginning of a constant conversation around the dream of private, group sharing, and we welcome your feedback, input and co-dreams.
To try out a new way of group sharing, visit rrripple.com.
I think our patent attorney is part of this group… fascinating.
You know the story — your daily craving for a shot of espresso hits right around 7:30AM local time, and if you don’t have it in your grasp by 0800 hours, you’re likely visiting the slammer for at least a day or two for barista battery. In a beautiful effort to keep addicts far away from prisons and ever closer to their productivity machines, Espressi has unveiled the mypressi TWIST, which is described as a truly portable espresso maker that delivers top-notch goods without the wait. The secret to the one-pound device is the pneumatic engine that provides constant pressure throughout the extraction cycle, and we’re told that a single CO2 cartridge can provide around eight shots. It’ll hit American shores this fall for $129 — ’til then, it’s on you to keep a local shop on retainer.
Article here
“There are a slew of popular books and systems, from favorites of mine such as Getting Things Done
This is a helpful list of the 2007 Crunchies winners. One can learn a great deal by paying attention to the details of why these companies made it to this winning list. Some won by logical business models, others by calm, intuitive design. All won by being extremely thoughtful. What characteristics do you feel were important too?
For Jeff, Rich
“Is Ruby on Rails the next Java? Benchmark Capital thinks so. It just invested $3.5 million in Engine Yard,
taking its entire series A round. Ruby on Rails is an increasingly popular Web application programming environment because it is dead-simple, open-source and very fast to develop on. The downside is that it is not always as robust as more mature frameworks such as Java….”
