Yesterday, I was reading a thread on evolt.org’s thelist, perhaps the oldest community of web designers and programmers around.

The topic of the thread was OpenID, the implementation of which on websites is one of the most contentious issues I’ve seen in a long time. Some of the input from the thread:

I have discovered OpenID,
Here is a link if you haven’t heard of it, http://openid.net/
I am un-sure at the moment whether this is a good secure service and I was wondering if any of you folks had any experience with this.

Last I checked, it was going to be too much of a headache for us to implement

I’ve only seen it used on stackoverflow.com, which is even a headache
for a user if you don’t habitually authenticate with one of their
OpenID providers whenever you surf.

I gazed over the specs and that’s exactly what happens.

Personally, I wouldn’t even bother with it. I think it’s a case of “good
ideal, bad implementation”.

Given that Backboard allows you to authenticate with OpenID:

and that embedit.in requires you to do so (the buttons for AOL, Yahoo!, and Google are merely shortcuts to the OpenID URLs for those providers):

you might suspect we have something to say about the whole matter. And you’d be right. The way we see it, OpenID fundamentally solves two very important problems while creating one new problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was speaking to a young man at a Silicon Valley American Marketing Association meetup a few weeks ago who was interested in entrepreneurship.  He mentioned the whole process of starting your own company seemed chaotic.  I looked back at him and said, “If you don’t like chaos, you might want to reconsider.” After a round of chuckles, the group I was in had a discussion about the role of chaos in entrepreneurship. Our conclusion came to something like this:

The great, fun, interesting and successful entrepreneurs we know enjoy the process just as much as the result.  Your enjoyment of the chaos along the way (and a lot of learning) is it’s own reward.

Two weeks ago some of the Increo team took a small field trip to Stanford’s Startup 101 career fair.  I’ve already shared a bit about what impresses me and this time I figured I’d share some of the fun.  I brought a camera  and snapped a few pictures of the team “hard at work”.  Enjoy!

At Increo, we put a great deal of time and thought into our designs and features – we keep things simple while giving users the power and options they need. We believe a clean UI is integral to a smooth and memorable user experience. Here are a few examples of our philosophy in action:

3 easy steps to creating a Backboard

1. Choose your file to upload.
2. Pick some settings and write a few words about what you uploaded.
3. Invite your reviewers (or invite them later)

That’s it. You don’t need to leave the homepage to start Step 1.  You don’t need to change anything in Step 2. And you don’t even need have an account before you start to create your Backboard.

Hide stuff when you don’t need it

• Step 2 (Customize) is probably the least fun step, so we tried to make it as simple as possible. For instance, the Advanced Options (for downloading, printing, and deadlines) are initially hidden so they’re not intrusive. The user who is looking for more options will find them, and the user who is going through quickly isn’t bothered by more choices.
• In the case you do need a deadline, we make it as easy as possible - just one drop down menu for any day in the upcoming two weeks (and, of course, you can use the full-blown monthly calendar selector if you need a custom deadline).

Read the rest of this entry »

We know it’s a tough time to be looking for a job right now, so we’re pleased to announce we have partnered with Resume Boutique to offer free resume reviews via Backboard.

Stand out from the crowd with the best resume you can offer. Just upload to a Backboard and paste the URL into the request form.

Reviews are free through March 31, so dust off that resume and upload it for your free expert review.

Every language has its gotchas.

In Ruby, for example, zero and the empty string both evaluate to true in a boolean context. In PHP, several of the built-in functions aren’t functions at all but are really just language features disguised as functions. In Perl, the local statement doesn’t make local variables, but the my statement does. In Objective-C, you can send messages to nil and nothing happens.

Of course, those other languages are a whole different blog post: today’s topic is JavaScript, and what may be its most subtle gotcha.

Consider the following two relatively similar functions. The first is in JavaScript:

function alertLater() {
    var local;
    for (local = 1; local < 6; local++) {
        setTimeout(function () {
            console.log(local);
        }, local * 1000);
    }
}

The second is in Ruby:

def alertLater
  threads = []
  (1..5).each do |local|
    threads << Thread.new do
      sleep local
      puts local
    end
  end
  threads.each { |thread| thread.join }
end

What is the output from each?

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever noticed how most restaurant websites link to PDFs of their menu?

As a potential customer, I really don’t want to have to download and open the menu of five or six different restaurants to figure out where I want to eat.

At the same time, the restaurant owners want me to be able to see the menu right away, so the butter-dipped lobster tail catches my eye.  The more potential customers that see the menu, the better.

Imagine if those restaurants used embedit.in to display PDFs of their menus on the website.  The menu shows up right in the page, tempting me with the caramel-apple cheesecake.  Restaurants retain the flexibility to change the embed as often as they would like.  It’s a win-win for everyone.

As an example, here’s the dinner menu for the Palo Alto cajun spot Nola, sized to fit the Increo on Ideas blog:

Last week brought some big changes to Backboard.  A few things that we wanted to push didn’t quite make it into that release, so yesterday, we updated Backboard yet again with some nifty new features.  Upload a new Backboard and check them out!

Text highlighting

Ever find yourself wanting to highlight the text in a Backboard instead of underline or circle it?  Well now you can.  Simply mouse over the text in question and highlight away.  You’ll still get the familiar text entry box to make your suggestions, but now the selected area behind the text will remain highlighted.

The need for speed

If you have a lot of Backboards on your My Backboards page like we do, then you probably noticed that the page took some time to load.  Well wait no longer, we’ve significantly improved the loading speed of the My Backboards page.  Images are only loaded when you need them and no earlier, meaning the page loads and responds much quicker.  We also made some tweaks to the javascript loading on other parts of the site to improve response times and will continue to look for places we can improve the speed of the site.

As always…

We love bringing you new features and we hope you’re as excited about these changes as we are.  As always, let us know what you think!

I gave a short three-minute presentation to the Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup Group last month about Backboard. I talked a little bit about Backboard and how it does real-time feedback using Orbited. Enjoy!

For the second time in as many days, Backboard has major new features! We’ve been really busy doing lots of great stuff, and the whole team is excited to share them with you today.

A new look

The first change is the most obvious: Backboard has a fresh new look:

Time zones

The Backboard team lives and works in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and having Pacific Standard Time on the server works great for us. But we realize that some of you live in other time zones, so we’ve added support for multiple time zones.

If you don’t change anything, Backboard will make its best guess as to what the correct time zone for you is, but you can always set it by visiting your account settings:

Deadlines

Want all of your feedback by a certain time? Backboard can’t force your colleagues to be any less lazy, but it can tell them by when you want their feedback.

Backboard will email your colleagues when the deadline is approaching and tell them if they’ve missed it. Castigating them for being deadbeats, though, is still up to you.

Built-in printing, with markup!

One feature requested more than any others is printing your documents with feedback. Even though we love extolling the virtues of a paperless office, there still are times when you’d love to have a hard copy. Wait no longer: right below your document, you’ll find a print button that will give you the option to print the document, the feedback, or both:

Read the rest of this entry »