I recently learned an interesting fact: Most of the fuel in a space shuttle is burnt in the first few minutes of launch, in order to bring the shuttle to enough speed and altitude to escape Earth’s gravity without falling back.
That speed is called escape velocity.
Once the shuttle breaks free, much less fuel is needed to make it to the orbit.
Why is it interesting?
- Are you worried?
- A little bit.
- But you’ve had this done a couple of times before. You know it’s not dangerous.
- I know. I am not concerned about something going wrong. I don’t even mind that funny feeling I’ll get in the next couple of days from that camera going into my throat and down through my chest and stomach.
- So what’s the problem?
- It’s the anesthesia, I answered, I hate waking up from it. I feel that I am being pulled slowly from a dark abyss, and I get nightmares and say creepy things to people around me.
- “Well. Let’s skip the anestesia then,” My doctor said with a confident smile
- What? Are you serious? That would be painful, wouldn’t it?
- Not so much. It will be uncomfortable. But instead of making it less uncomfortable, you’re not going to remember anything about it.
I looked at him with interest and suspicion. “Go on,” I said
Photo Credit: Pranav Mistry
Being a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?
Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.
I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what they’d be working on for the rest of the weekend.
I arrived Saturday morning to find people hard at work. Some people stayed overnight to jump start their ideas. That’s the startup spirit!
But I was surprised to see so many teams already writing code! It seemed that the rush to get something up and running by Sunday evening made most teams focus on implementing their first ideas, rather than exploring different ideas and hacking the best ones.
Sounds familiar?
Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post last June became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:
I pressed the update button and took a deep breath. The website was finally online, and a surge of questions rushed to my head: What if it’s not good enough? What if people call me an opportunist for redirecting the blog post to a product page? What if no one wants to buy it?
Apple Keynote has become my favorite rapid prototyping tool for putting together iPad and web interfaces, and testing them with real users. It quickly replaced all my previous prototyping tools, and I am constantly discovering new tricks and hacks to prototype more productively.
First, let me thank you for all the feedback that you provided about the iPad keynote prototyping. I hope that the hundreds of developers who downloaded the theme template are finding it useful.
As promised in the last post, here are some additional assets (all created in Keynote) that I’ve been using to rapidly prototype web applications and demo them within my presentations.
