The Piano Inside My Brain

Another gem from Common Craft…

The other night, we ordered takeout food from California Pizza Kitchen. So I drove across town to pickup the order and back through traffic with the food. But when everything was unpacked, something was missing: the tostada toppings for my wife’s pizza. Needless to say, she was bummed.

As the dutiful husband, I offered to go back and rectify the situation. So I called the restaurant to let them know that I was coming back. The manager got on the phone, apologized, and offered to drive the replacement pizza (plus a couple of free deserts) right to the house.

And even better, the manager himself made the drive and apologized again. Even though it wasn’t perfect with the original order, the recovery was great.

Too often, we blog about bad experiences. That is why I wanted to post this story. It is a simple example of customer service gone right.

Now that the first wave of iPhone applications has basically hit, I’m anxious to see what the next wave brings. One application that I would like to see would be the ability to attend webinars from the iPhone.

Someone like WebEx or Citrix (GoToWebinar) would be the natural choice to develop this. As an attendee, you could call in on the phone and then view a shared screen, allowing you to zoom in for details. And add the chat window to complete the experience. I could see this requiring 3G or Wi-Fi access for speed reasons.

I would see this as a free application, since the goal is for attendees to participate from a mobile platform.

Does this make sense to you? Post your thoughts in the comments.

“It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.”
— Norman Lear

Norman Lear, TV writer/producer of “All in the Family” was born on July 27, 1922.

So this post is being written from a new iPhone application now available. While it doesn’t give full administration, it does let me add new posts.

It also lets me add photos to the post, in this case a screenshot from the application.

Also nice is the ability to schedule posts, add tags, set categories and preview the post. One major problem is the lack of cut and paste on the iPhone, but that is certainly not the fault of this app.

It will be interesting to see how this application improves over time as well as whether I find myself posting more often.

One of the keys to being an email Ninja is the tools you use. For many people, the choices are Outlook or Gmail. Lifehacker brings us the following post:

• Outlook vs. Gmail - The Definitive Comparison

They talk about everything useful, from search to folders/labels to rules/filters to contacts to spam and more. Gmail is getting better all the time and I find myself appreciating it more and more. I gave up on Outlook years ago when I switched to the Mac.

Many people in the business world perform a Google search on themselves to see if anything strange is showing up. Well, you can setup an automated search of new content on Google by creating a free Google Alert for either your name or business name.

• Google Alerts

All you have to do is enter the search phrase or keywords, set the type of search, set the frequency and enter your email address. Very simple to do and a nice way to monitor your online reputation.

“Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.”
— Edmund Hillary

Edmund Hillary was born on July 20, 1919.

Even though my day to day has more to do with strategizing with clients, I still love to roll up my sleeves, fire up my graphics programs and code editors, and get under the hood for some good old fashioned website development. With that in mind, one of my favorite tools is Iconfactory’s xScope.

Think of xScope as a graphics Swiss army knife. It helps with all of those little jobs where there is no really good way.

• Rulers - measure horizontally and vertically and even angle the rulers on the screen.
• Dimensions - measure the inside dimensions of any element on the screen, which is great for figuring out the margins or padding of objects.
• Screens - this gives you an overlay of standard browser windows at a variety of screen resolutions, which is perfect for design mockups.
• Loupe - magnify anything on the screen which also shows you the exact color of the center pixel and gives precise coordinates for the point.
• Crosshair, Guides and Frames - vertical and horizontal tools for additional ways to measure screen areas.

If you use a Mac and do anything design related, this is a great tool to have at the ready,

“I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.”
— Patrick Stewart

Patrick Stewart was born on July 13, 1940.