How Important Is Instant

September 27, 2019
2 min read

As every company in the world and then some think that creating streaming service is easy you just need some content, I think they forget a couple of very important aspects of the successful service that are not trivial to implement.

The human brain perceives anything less than 250 milliseconds as instant. So when making Spotify, the CEO and founder Daniel Ek wanted the service to feel instant to make an illusion that every single song is right there on the users hard drive.

“We spent an insane amount of time focusing on latency when no

one cared because we were hell bent on making it feel like you had all

the world’s music on your hard drive. Obsessing over small details can

sometimes make all the difference. That’s what I believe is the biggest

misunderstanding about the minimum viable product concept. That is the V

in the MVP.” – Daniel Ek

When creating Evernote, Libin believed that responsiveness is crucial to the app experience and there couldn’t be any delay between searching for something and results popping up, so Evernote stored everything locally on the hard drive (although it was a right incentive, the implementation was bad, but it is different point).

The same point goes for Netflix, you’ve probably experienced it, when you start watching a movie or a TV show, press play and it starts playing immediately. Especially if it is something new and popular. That is because Netflix partners with ISPs and deploys appliances with the most popular content right to them, that way, when you are watching the newest Netflix original that Netflix heavily pushes, you might be streaming it not from Netflix itself, but from your ISP. And by the way, Netflix doesn’t charge the IPSs at all, so they have only technical or legal requirements to fill.

That is why Netflix has a big advantage over other streaming services, this is an expertise you gather over the years and understanding of your customers, you get only by collecting watching data. That way Netflix can predict what will people in certain regions watch and preload the appliances with the most relevant content.

You may not even realize, but you notice little hiccups in the apps you use, the instant is very important in the user experience.

Windows Software

September 24, 2014
3 min read

Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.

Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.

Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.

Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.

Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.

Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.

Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.

Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.

That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones. 

500 Words Every Day Challenge: #18 Distractions

September 18, 2014
3 min read

Today I’ve decided to use prompt from 500 Words Every Day Challenge on Lift.do. I’ve been writing at least 500 words for 17 days already and it’s the longest I’ve managed to do that and the theme of todays prompt Distractions – is very important part of this process.

Just now, as I was writing this post, I’ve reached for my phone and started reading Twitter, so it shows, how hard it is to stay focused while writing, but the problem of distractions arises even before you begin typing your first words. You have to choose time and place to write your post. I’m usually planning to write just after lunch. After working all morning, it’s a good way to clear my thoughts and focus on something different and also, if I didn’t have time all day, I still have evening to write something last minute, just before bed. In terms of place, I usually write at coffee shops or at home. It’s easier to focus at coffee shops, since there are less things asking for your attention, but if I’m referencing something a lot, I prefer writing at home, since there is big monitor, which makes working with multiple windows a lot easier.

The biggest distraction for me are messages, Twitter and Pocket queue. First two are on my phone and the last one is on my laptop. When I’m referencing something, it’s hard not to go to Pocket and read something not related, but also very interesting. And I have to stop myself from grabbing my phone and checking Twitter every couple of minutes (it doesn’t help, that I like to read every single tweet). I also like to answer messages right away, so I’m pretty much given up trying to remove this distraction. As I’ve already mentioned, I couldn’t resist checking Twitter even writing post about how bad the distractions are and regarding articles saved in Pocket, this time I’m not distracted by them, because I don’t use the browser writing this post, so it’s harder for me to slip.

I’ve tried to use couple of distraction free text editors on my laptop, but they didn’t stick. The one good application I did like, was Evernote for Windows 8.1. (Metro version). It’s the Evernote client for the tablet side of Windows, but it works great on a laptop, even without touchscreen. It’s the same old Evernote, but it occupies the whole screen. So that’s a plus. Recently, I’ve been writing all those posts in Word. I have Office 365 subscription, I love this version of an office suite, and it saves all my documents to OneDrive, which I now use instead of Dropbox, because of this great integration.

Sometime distractions, even help, when you write your post, then change your attention to Twitter and then return to your post, read it and have some new thoughts, you just have to be aware and don’t make those distractions too long or often. If you are not a heart surgeon, all those messages and notifications car probably wait a couple of minutes. It doesn’t take too long to write 500 words, so try to enjoy yourself. Just figure out, what works for you.