Mike Coyle’s Weblog

We recently published our Fall 2006 Brochure. This document, available in PDF format, highlights our product and service offerings.

Here’s a short glimpse into the “Making Of” the brochure, for those of you that like that kind of thing:

As you know, our schtick is helping small teams solve large problems. So with the help of an ancient Greek, a copy of Photoshop CS2, and a few cans of Red Bull, here’s what I came up with for the first page:

The text on that page is the first half of what will probably get morphed into our “Small Team Manifesto” or “Ode to Small Teams”, or something of the like. The punchline, so to speak, is on the last page of the brochure.

The image started out as an old woodcarving of Archimedes, the famous Greek mathemetician credited with the quote:

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

However, our mission is not to help old Greek guys solve problems by themselves. This is where Photoshop came in. The image now has a small team (i.e. Archimedes and his oft-overlooked twin brother Floyd) moving the earth with said lever.

A couple of other production notes:

• The document was produced with Apple’s Pages. I’ve owned Pages (versions 1 and 2) since it came out, but hadn’t spent any significant time using it prior to creating the brochure. It was a pleasure to work with.
• Oddly enough, Pages doesn’t ship with a landscape-oriented templates but it was really easy to set up. I built the brochure as a landscape-oriented document so that it is easier to read on a laptop screen. Kudos to Seth Godin for that tip.
• Pages plays very nicely with Adobe Illustrator, at least in my experience. This made it trivial to move our vector-based graphics into Pages.
• Even though some of the brochure content is repurposed from the Botonomy.com and ProjectPipe.com websites, some material also flowed back the other way, thanks to the creative jolt that comes with working under a different set of constraints. Specifically, many of the graphics on the latest ProjectPipe home page were initially developed for the brochure, and then repurposed for the web.

Over the years, I have developed a bit of apprehension when it comes to using WYSIWYG tools, since many visual layout tools (at least in GUI design and HTML) are a “pay me now or pay me later” proposition where you trade instant gratification for maintenance complexity downstream. That being said, it was really nice to drag stuff around in Pages, and have the layout “just work” when it came time to ship.

So I guess I’ll jump on the September 12th “Showtime” Event rumor bandwagon. This is pure speculation.

I’ve had a MacBook for several weeks now, and I love it for all the typical reasons (it’s fast, runs Parallels, etc.), but there is one thing that has bugged me since the night I opened the box:

With all of their industrial design and packaging acumen, why would Apple bundle a remote control with a laptop that has a 13″ screen?

Sure, you could run the video out of the laptop to a TV. But when you paint the picture of a laptop sitting on the floor in front of a TV, tethered to both the wall (for power) and to the TV (for video), it comes across as, well, very un-Apple-like.

Tonight, I’m willing to venture a guess regarding the real reason behind the Apple Remote. But first, the backstory.

One of the things that Steve Jobs said years ago regarding phone phreaking was that he was fascinated how something as small as a telephone could control something as large as the Packet Switched Telephone Network.

So for a while now, I’ve been waiting for Apple’s Really Next Big Thing, when Steve would recall the magic of the Homebrew days (sans some phreakin’ details of course), and talk about how Small Thing X can control Large Thing Y, for some consumer-ish values of X and Y.

I am speculating that Apple will be unveiling an AirPort-like wireless router that plugs into your TV. Let’s call it “AirPort Video”.

Wait, before you get ticked off and stop reading, I realize that this type of device has been rumored for a while now. The extra twist that I haven’t come across yet is that the AirPort Video would work with the Apple Remote, by reading the RF signal from the Apple Remote and schlepping the requests over 802.11 to your Mac sitting in the other room.

So the experience of pointing an Apple Remote at a screen and having movies come out is consistent whether you are pointing at an iMac, an AirPort Video-connected TV, or even (cough) some future Apple TV.

Think about it: The smallest device that Apple makes (the Apple Remote) controlling the biggest thing out there: The consumer’s living room.

I think that this is totally congruent with Steve’s early fascination with network-based technology and Apple/Steve’s current role in the entertainment ecosystem.

It would be like a mashup of 1970s hacker Steve Jobs with his 2006 iTunes/Pixar/Disney self. Metaphorically speaking, its Pirates of the Caribbean III, starring Cap’n Crunch.

…it is from kicking the shins of the giants around them.

I’ve read a couple of blog entries from folks coming back to Python after jumping on the Rails bandwagon, citing the temperament of the community as one of the reasons.

I never thought much of it, until I read the DHH’s response to Joel Spolsky’s Language Wars article, and the comments that follow. Sure, there are a number of comments that are constructive and forward looking. But you have to look for them. Carefully.

I think that Joel Spolsky has done a lot for the software development community, and was not paid the respect that he deserves in DHH’s response and a multitude of reader comments that followed.

I’ll be honest, I’ve considered jumping on the Rails bandwagon. Several times. The thing that has held me back is the notion that Ruby/RoR hasn’t really gone through its adolescence yet.

If you look at the folks who are doing great things with RoR, lots of them (37Signals, the Pragmatic Programmer guys, etc.) would be writing great software with _any_ tools that they were using. It’s like the fact that Chet Atkins could make a toy guitar sound great.

Maybe it’s my ignorance of the inner workings of the RoR community, but I get the sense that RoR hasn’t had its “holy $#%&” moment, when the hard lessons are learned by average-to-good corporate IT developers, and the sound of pagers at 3AM drowns out the cheers of the language evangelists.

I think that Microsoft had its when they started playing Paper-Scissors-Rock with DCOM and Java. I think that J2EE had its when the Microsoft Pet Shop spanked the canonical best practices of heavy EJB development. Python had its when the momentum of RoR highlighted the fact that there were 80 web frameworks that each did 80% of what people need, and no knee-jerk answer for which one to use for any given application.

But the Rails community? Not so much. I don’t think that the RoR honeymoon is over just yet. Someday it will, and the hard lessons that come will forge the legitimate counter-arguments to Joel’s points.