Jason Feifer in Fast Company:

This is the problem with open-office layouts: It assumes that everyone’s time belongs to everyone else. It doesn’t. We are here to work together, sure, but most of the time, we actually work alone. That’s what work is: It is a vacillation between collaboration and solitary exploration. One isn’t useful without the other. When we are working in a group–literally when we sit around a table brainstorming, or when we are having a conversation–we don’t pretend we’re alone. That would just be weird and awkward. So when we’re alone, let’s not pretend we’re in a group.

Having been in this industry for multiple decades, I can say with confidence that the current open office mania is a fad. At Borland, we built an office for every single engineer. At Netscape, it was open space – same with the start-up you’ve never heard. At Apple, it depended on your building and the available space, but in general managers had offices with a door. At the current gig, it’s a mix with the open space religion gaining steam. Again.

As an easily distractible person, I believe the company is getting higher value out of me when there are less distractions. It doesn’t matter if I had headphones on, I am compulsively aware of what is going on around me – there’s this little voice narrating everything. This doesn’t mean I need an office all the time. I need a office when I’m having a private conversation which is a lot of the time in my current role. I need an office when I need to think hard which isn’t as often as I’d like.

Still, some of my favorite moments of the day is when I stumble on serendipity – when I’m sitting in a big open space and a random conversation from a random person alerts me to a random piece of data I would have never discovered ensconced in my office behind a door.

It’s not cost or space efficient, but I think the answer to the question “Open space or office door?” is “Both.” Everyone should have equal access to productive silence and serendipitous chaos.

Sticking with our Keynote theme for the week, Andy has solid and usable advice for building your non-boring slide deck. One thing I would add is to create a test slide at the beginning of your deck which contains the following:

• A border which represents the expected resolution of your slides,
• A set of colored objects which you know,
• Text formatted in the fonts you use in your deck, and,
• A big circle.

Something like this:

The reason for this slide is so that when you’re doing that inevitable run through of your deck, you can easily answer the questions:

• Is all of the usable space on your slides being displayed correctly.
• Do the colors look right?
• Are your fonts loaded correctly?
• Is the aspect ratio correct on your slides? (Hint: if the circle isn’t a circle, it’s not)

UPDATE: Here’s an awesome fork by Tim Brown in Keynote.

SECOND UPDATE: Here’s the current version that I’m using which is used in the screenshot above. You’ll likely receive a font warning when you open this and that’s the point.

In posing a real threat to Facebook, Snapchat proved that it may have that one elusive thing that no money can buy: the ability to change how people behave, to become central to their relationships with one another, to re-architect human contact, to be masters of the human domain.

Best analysis of Snapchat’s rejection of the Facebook bid that I’ve seen.

As I mentioned in the launch post, there are now two RSS feeds for Rands. One feed contains every single post that I throw up here which includes a new type I called Excerpts – you’re reading an Excerpt right now. I’m still getting a feel for these posts, but my intent is they will:

• Be short.
• Add original commentary – they won’t be simple links or quotes to other articles.
• More frequent than the long form posts.

If you’re reading this in a RSS-reader, you are already subscribed to Everything. Welcome. If you’d like to remove Excerpts from your content, you can subscribe to the Long Form feed.

It seems that Peak has a lot of potential, but the team working on it should take all this into consideration. I’m sure that they mean well and, in an ideal world, people will take the metrics as they are – possibly flawed outputs of a complex process aimed at creating value for the company. […]

Except we’re not in a perfect world.

Managers will abuse it, employees will game it.

We engineers like to measure things. In a world full of chaos and confusing humans, the ability to measure a thing gives us both a comfortable course of action as well a delicious delicious data. I believe there is a huge opportunity for applications like Peak to derive insight from the various tools we engineers use to build, but I treat mechanized derived insight with extreme skepticism. It’s rarely a reason to take decisive action and usually a reason to start asking more questions.

The hardness of sapphire will make it resistance to ‘flaw initiation’ (aka starting to scratch) and its ‘toughness’ is how it resists fracture once a flaw has begun (cracking altogether). This strength doesn’t come without a bit of cost, Hall notes. “The density of Gorilla Glass is 2.54 g/cm3 while sapphire is 3.98 g/cm3. Given equal-sized pieces, Gorilla Glass will always be lighter.”

The counter-point to the greater weight is that Apple could use thinner pieces of sapphire due to its greater strength overall. This would result in weight and thickness reduction, which is something Apple is very conscious about. You may have noticed that the latest iPad Air was reduced in thickness in part due to its use of thinner glass and IGZO display panels.

In what is a first in my gaming experience, after years of not playing World of Warcraft, I fired the game up several months ago and have been actively playing – leveling several toons including a panda. This that while I shouldn’t care about Worlds of Draenor at all, I actually care more than I should.