So what is Loose Leaf?

Loose Leaf is a brainstorming and note taking app that’s ideal for use in a coffee shop meeting. It’s a perfect piece of scratch paper, or loose leaf if you will, ready for your back-of-the-napkin-no-longer doodles to help you get your point across during an informal meeting. You can draw, type, cut or create small scraps of paper, import and annotate images, and quickly export anything meaningful to a more permanent home like Evernote.

Sound like a lot of features? Don’t worry, there are no tap-to-hold popup menus, no overwhelming brush texture properties, no arcane MS-Word-feeling image formatting. Loose Leaf is simple and intuitive, and no more intimidating than a simple sheet of paper.

Loose Leaf is good at one thing – helping you get your idea out and on paper quickly. Loose Leaf maintains the sheet-of-paper metaphor without skeuomorphism. Loose Leaf is fast, simple, fast, and simple.

Want to find out more?

Then sign up at http://milestonemade.com/looseleaf/!

Most of my time has been spent on two iOS applications that I hope to announce soon, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with the Adonit team on their new iOS SDK. They’ve done an absolutely fantastic job with their Bluetooth connected Jot Touch stylus, and it was a lot of fun to help out with the iOS side of their development efforts.

Their new SDK provides:

1. Extremely quick setup
2. Provides 2047 distinct pressure values from the Jot Touch
3. Advanced Palm Rejection
4. Works with your gestures, not against them
5. Easily configure the two stylus shortcut buttons

The latest and greatest Jot Touch 4 is shipping to resellers now. I can confirm this is the best stylus I have ever used, and I’ve tested quite a few! It’s precise, has fantastic battery life, feels like a real pen, connects fast, just feels right in the hand. If you’re an iPad note taker, you owe it to your self to get one of these.

If you’re a developer, clone the new Jot Touch SDK on Github and run the example app. Peek through the Getting Started Guide and spend a few minutes to integrate the SDK into your app!

The past year I’ve been working at Visere, where we’ve done some fantastic work for the team at Unstuck (even winning two Webbys!) and Jawbone, among others. In fact, the team at Jawbone was so happy with our work that they decided to acquire Visere outright and bring the team on full time, and I’ve decided to take that opportunity to branch out on my own once again. It’s been nearly 5 years since Jotlet, and I’m eager to get back into the game at the ground level.

These past few years my head has been slowly filling with new ideas and new apps that I’m eager to build. I’ve already started work on two new iOS apps that I’ll be revealing over the next few months. I’m also getting back into Here, File File! development, which I’m extremely excited about. No one on the team has ever been able to devote full time to the project, so I’m bullish that we can finally make significant updates to the app. Last, I’m just happy that I’ll have time to spend on Columnizer and Jotbook again – just some fun small projects to keep the mind working.

And the best news?! I’ve moved back to the great state of Texas! Since I’m working for myself now, we’re able to move back home and be much closer to family. Instead of $2000 in plane tickets and a 6 hour travel time, we’re a mere 20 minute drive from both sets of parents. Cailyn can finally see her grandparents on a regular basis, which is just awesome for everyone.

First steps: pull this site out of the rubble heap and get it cleaned up, get Columnizer updated, get demos prepped for the two iOS apps i’m working on, and get something brand-spanking-new released in 6 months. Wish me luck!

Page 11ish:

I had come to realize that my sense of myself had changed very little over the fifteen years or so. Despite getting married, having children, moving several times, and switching careers, I didn’t feel profoundly like I was profoundly different than my 30 year-old self; so why should I see my 60 year-old self as a different person? (The Grant study’s participants likewise showed a great consistency over the decades in their personality and psychological makeup.)

The paper talks primarily about risk profile and personality, but I think this is true about a number of my traits. While I also see my personality and risk profile relatively unchanged with age, I also constantly focus on how I’ve changed over those years, why, and for better or worse? “What part of me do I most want to be gone in 5 years?” or “What would I rather see in myself that I don’t see yet?” Every year, my goal is to be ashamed at how naive, foolish, and unfocused I was the year before – my hope is that this strategy will push me to be always more focused, productive, responsible, and good to my family than I am today.

Download here: https://github.com/adamwulf/Columnizer-jQuery-Plugin/zipball/1.5.0

GitHub here: https://github.com/adamwulf/Columnizer-jQuery-Plugin

Project page here: http://welcome.totheinter.net/columnizer-jquery-plugin/

My sister is traveling to Sri Lanka and has a longer than expected layover in Mumbai. I log onto the internet, purchase a hotel for her while she’s on her flight, and a driver picks her up at the airport.

So far so good.

That international purchase triggers an alarm on my account, so the next day when I’m shopping for groceries my card gets declined.

Even supposing a mastermind criminal stole my card and bought $400 in Mumbai, here’s what just happened:

1. master mind steals card

2. master mind buys so much stuff for $400 in Mumbai

3. hapless customer buys a ham sandwich

4. sandwich declined!

Guys, if you’re smart enough to know that 99.99% of my transactions are in Portland, Oregon, and suddenly there’s a transaction in Mumbai. If you do anything, please reject the Mumbai transaction and continue letting me buy my groceries in Portland, Oregon.

Your state-of-the-art-from-the-year-2000-security is not making my money any safer, it’s just annoying the hell out of me.

I hate you Capital One.

In Google+, like many websites, there is a Send Feedback button. It is unassuming.

But when you click it, you don’t get a boring “yeah what?!” text box, instead, in true Google fashion, the Google analyzes the page before the form shows:

And then it asks you to draw on the page to annotate your feedback!

You can draw boxes and select elements on the page. It’s quick, easy, slick, amazing, neat, and useful.

Extremely polished stuff. If i were to guess, the quality and usefulness of the feedback they receive is unparalled compared to other sites feedback mechanisms. Extremely cool stuff. I wish they would package it up as a product, maybe paired with Google Analytics, and let any site user embed that feedback system into their own site. Extremely cool.

And the fact that it’s on Google+ is particularly interesting. Its such an easy to use and useful tool that I wish I could use it to share content with others. Browse to site, “neat!”, click share/crop tool, click “post to Google+”, done. Reminds me of Scoble’s interview of Convofy (forgive Scoble’s lousy recording, but that few minutes of the video is pretty slick stuff.)

Update:

Turns out it may very well be its own Google product according to this Quora question. Tell Google here to be notified if/when it’s released.

Glasses-free 3D Time Crisis on iPad:

This is Time Crisis 4 for iPad. It uses Glasses-free 3d for a stunning gameplay experience. This is true anamorphic 3d, which means you don’t need glasses to get a full 3d effect. Just tilt the iPad and the iPad2′s camera tracks your eyes so everything looks like real 3D! Watch the video from cnet below for a quick what’s-what on how it works.

I predicted games like this 4 years ago with the release of the first iPhone. The combination of the front facing cameras and accelerometers in the iPad 2 make this an unbelievable gaming experience.

The Bad News:

This is still not real! There have been exactly zero first/third person shooters that use anamorphic 3d for awesomeness. The screenshot above is a [pretty impressive, i may say] photochop by yours truly.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the year 2011. We have robots driving robot cars and playing robot tennis. Random people sending iPhones into outerspace just because they can. How do we still not have awesome anamorphic shooters on the iPad?!

The Good News:

For a relatively small development budget you could have a proof-of-concept-version-1.0-anamorphic-3D-on-rails-first-person-shooter-for-iPad-2-and-iPhone-4, and you would make $10 million.

Free Business Idea:

Step 1: Just build something like:

1. Use anamorphic 3d first person shooter. Something akin to a Time Crisis for Area 51.
2. Easy gameplay: spray and pray style shooting, tap to reload. that’ll be 98% of it right there.
3. Just make 10 minutes of gameplay, and then repeat it.
4. Maybe some aliens? Or zombies?
5. Or both?!

Step 2: Collect money

1. Turns out people have a long history in falling over each other to give away their money to pretty-graphics-and-novelty.

Or, if you just like to program a lot:

Email me. Twitter me. Linkedin me. Get in touch. We won’t wait for the world any longer. We’ll do this thing.

Leaving Jive is bittersweet. The people I worked with are amazing, I still believe it’s the best collection of engineering talent in Portland. The company is going places. I’m proud of my work there. I’ve been doing heavy lifting in JavaScript for nearly 6 years, but I’ve been stretching my iOS wings, and Visere gives me the opportunity to work on mobile development full time. It’s incredibly exciting to be working in a tiny startup again!

And this move solidifies it for me – I love small companies, and not just small: tiny. At Visere, I’m employee number 9. It’s such a breath of fresh air for my day to day responsibility to include: project planning, UI/UX design, marking, recruiting, coordinating, budgeting, sales, and of course, programming. I love the variety, I love the chaos, I love fighting for life, for market share, for mind share. And most of all I love the product I’m working on.

To date, Visere has been primarily focused on contract design work: you may know it from products like Microsoft’s Courier tablet, the Uncommong iPhone app, or Motorola Droid branding. We’re also working on a product very much our own, and I hope to have much more detail on it soon .

In his recent TED talk he mentions that the Tylenol incident led to tamper-proof caps — a perfect example of what Schneier likes to call “security theater”:

As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. I’ll give you one, a syringe.

So far this is typical Schneier. It’s a great point, but one I’ve heard him make many times before. In the next sentence, though, he breaks new ground:

But it made people feel better. It made their feeling of security more match the reality.

Bruce Schneier used to mock the theatrical dimension of security. Now it seems his thinking has evolved — and in a really interesting way. He’s alway viewed security in a relativistic way, and as a game of economic tradeoffs. Here he twists the lens to bring something else into focus: the relationship between how secure we feel and how secure we are.

This hit home for me, because is exactly the same way I feel about product development, especially mobile development. We can fight all day about mobile web vs mobile native, but that’s only half of the issue. An equally important piece of software development is making sure to set and exceed user expectations.

When developing software, step 1 should be: “What are my user’s expectations? Can I change those expectations before they even launch my app? How should those expectations change how I design the user experience?”