Jjot now has a blog, and fancy new popout support for notes (ala Gchat). Except the popped-out notes stay open even when you close the main Jjot window

An artist doing interaction design:

Tom Otterness creates playful, storybook sculptures, many permanently positioned around the city. He spends hours secretly watching kids and adults react to his sculptures, then takes insights back to the studio, incorporating them into his next pieces.

From Ideaspotting, by Sam Harrison.

Saw this while trying to use a shipping feature on paypal. They show me this warning and omit firefox from the recommended-browser list (what is netscape’s market share?), even though they have a version of safari from 1993.

So I marked up the image a bit and emailed it to them.

… is my new personal page. I just can’t resist buying fun domains.

Personal pages are a great place to try something new with design, so that’s what I did. This design is hung on a strong grid, which has its middle point in the center of the page. Grids are hard to do on the web, especially horizontal ones, since text can reflow all over the place; so this page was a beast to finish. This thing even scales with font-size — try increasing your font sizes (ctrl+ and ctrl- in Firefox). And it works in all browsers to boot (except you, Lynx!).

Got tired of the old page; needed more color! I even have the version from one year ago. That page has come a long way =)

Let me know what you think.

I’ve just launched a new service that helps you take notes online. It’s like sticky notes on the web. If you’ve ever emailed yourself a reminder note so you could have it on more than one computer, or if you have tons of small text or Word files scattered across your computer, then this is for you. It’s good at keeping small notes (meeting notes, todos, class notes, web research) in one place, which you can then access from any computer. They’re very easy to edit.

I wanted Jjot to be as fast as possible, because I hate having to click on links and suffer page refreshes just to write something down quickly, or see all of my notes. With Jjot, you can type in just eight characters (”jjot.com”) and have all of your notes in front of you (not just links to them — the whole note), fully editable and ready to print or email to people. The only thing faster is to directly read your mind, and we’re working on that for the next release.

There are lots of desktop applications for taking notes, and a few on the web. I made Jjot because they all seem to suck in some way. Can’t we just keep things simple? I don’t need social video blogging in every app I use! For me, Jjot by comparison is refreshingly simple. When you go there, you get a page of note-like objects (looking like actual notes is important!). It does exactly what you’d you expect: you can type in them. No links to hunt through, no weird interfaces to figure out.

I admit, I get frustrated easily, but I don’t want to load a new page just to see the contents of my note, and I don’t want to have to worry about clicking a save button. Any slowdowns really hurt the effectiveness of an app that you use every day. Speed is key; we’ve got speed.

Give it a shot; I think it’s a very useful app. You can drag notes around, create bullet points, create noteboards, email notes to people or share a whole noteboard with them, print it, whatever. It’s fun just to play with it =) Try the search — it searches-as-you-type, and it’s wicked fast.

After 5 months of hacking, I can say something like this is damn hard to make, if you want to do it right. Designing a good UI is always hard, but the client-side scripting on Jjot needed to be very sophisticated. Here are a few examples:

We could have used one of the rich text editors on the web, but they are slow, poorly coded, and hard to extend with the feature set we need. So we wrote our own; it has capabilities no other editor has, like really fast initialization (important when you have tens of these editors on one page), drag and drop abilities, and support for those blue titles we use. That was really hard, but it’s made a big difference.

We could give you a save button or a “wait” cursor whenever you change something, but that would slow you down to a snail’s pace. So we’ve made everything save completely asynchronously, in the background, without bothering you at all. Much harder, but it’s the behavior we want as users.

We’ve engineered something that springs up quickly even on dialup and satellite connections. It’s easier to say “forget users with slow connections”, but we hate waiting. So we’ve made our site really slim.

Please, let me know if Jjot works for you — bug reports, usability comments, feature requests, or anything else can always be sent here:

contact@jjot.com

or just leave a comment. Enjoy!

Mr. Picasso Head is a fun webapp.

Masterpiece:

I’m calling it “The elusive Joe User.”

InstallPad got a 3 page spread in the February issue of Computer!Totaal, a Dutch IT magazine. Sweet! This magazine is pretty. I liked how they used little InstallPad logos for bullet points.

Now, if it could only get some domestic press…

Read Dutch? I don’t =/

I’ve recently discovered that running can be fun. I’ve hated running all my life, because it makes my lungs burn and my mouth gets all clogged up with dried saliva. It’s the worst. I don’t mind running while playing sports, because I want to win, and you generally can’t win if you’re not moving very fast.

So today, I went for an unprecedented, purely recreational run because my legs were on fire from sitting in a chair and hacking for the past 30 hours. And it was great! After I was done I thought, what the heck?

It turns out, the secret (for me) to make running fun is to want to run to something. If you see a sale for cool new trainers, with a free keychain upon purchase, do you saunter on over? No! You close the distance like a rabid lion seconds from devouring a thick jackalope. Same principle with running. I really wanted to check out these trees in the forest, so I ran to them. Then I ran to check out a stream and leapt over it like a graceful squirrel.

I think that’s why tracks and treadmills have never appealed to me. Who wants to run to see the other side of the track? Woohoo. And treadmills — they’re possibly the most counter-productive invention of all time. You’re literally running nowhere. You get to do the activity with no forward progress; that’s like washing clothes with dirt.

At around 7pm today, Ninjawords served its millionth definition.

I guess this is proof that people value an application that gets out of your face and lets you do your work. Look for more apps like this from me in the future

I’ve been keeping some stats. Here are the top… 38 words looked up. It was originally 50, but 12 of the top 50 are expletives.

1. ubiquitous (21495)
2. ninja (6551)
3. test (1241)
4. fast (1115)
5. hello (1040)
6. ninjawords (970)
7. sex (857)
8. dictionary (827)
9. god (820)
10. google (693)
11. A (690)
12. penis (673)
13. LOL (666)
14. dog (657)
15. cool (624)
16. word (622)
17. poop (574)
18. MMORPG (547)
19. love (527)
20. Ajax (496)
21. cat (486)
22. wow (471)
23. dig (466)
24. Zeitgeist (450)
25. what (420)
26. the (391)
27. car (387)
28. monkey (383)
29. loot (383)
30. hi (379)
31. apple (373)
32. F (369)
33. Schadenfreude (332)
34. onomatopoeia (325)
35. stealth (325)
36. help (306)
37. words (299)
38. No (287)

Yes, those are the top 38 words looked up by a large base of tech users. These stats demonstrate the most common spontaneous words people think of when they want to play with an interface. I’m glad to see ninja snagging the #2 spot. Dog beats cat by a wide margin, and “No” finishes up the list at a strong 38 (it doesn’t mean what you think it means — try no).

Ubiquitous is #1 by a wide margin because StumbleUpon links to ninjawords.com/ubiquitous.

These stats don’t include definitions served up from clicking the random button, or words that we don’t actually have definitions for. It took 2.5 months to reach a million (successful) queries, and it looks like on average each visitor looks up ten words per visit.

Thanks to everyone who uses it and contributes feedback!

As a corollary, not all ads are bad. Take this one from cafemom for example. I saw it on Digg (it’s animated; the frames switch every few seconds):

Very intelligent. The somewhat alarming picture of a giant baby face crying will unfailingly draw your attention, but not in an obnoxious way. It’s just a genuinely interesting, static picture, which I think is the best way to get someone’s attention. No need for some intrusive, flash-animated, sound-enhanced buzzing flies (you know those of which I speak) to wrest your attention away from what you’re doing.

Throw in some clever copy and you’ve got a click-through.