RIM refused to believe that it was possible to create the iPhone when it was introduced in 2007.

It was the morning of January 9th, 2007. Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to change the mobile industry forever. With a brilliant presentation, the Apple Chief introduced the very first iPhone.

The following day, around 24 hours after the 2-hour-long presentation, RIM (makers of the BlackBerry smartphones) executives invited the whole company to an all-hands meeting to talk about the newly-announced iPhone.

A former employee said they then concluded that it was impossible to create what Apple said they had created. RIM refused to believe the iPhone could do everything they said it could, without having terrible battery life.  They also allegedly thought several features was impossible to create. Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola and Palm is said to have had similar reactions.

Enter the release on June 29th, when RIM disassembled an iPhone for the first time, and found that they had been completely wrong. They found that the iPhone was almost one big battery, with a tiny logic board strapped to it, and that it worked exactly as Apple had said it would.

RIM only then started to work on a iPhone competitor, The BlackBerry Storm. Failing to believing the first time, they had however given Apple an even bigger head start.

Such an interesting story, and it shows how big of a leap the iPhone really was. No wonder we had such bad phones when this kind of attitude and ignorance was all over the place.

Via SlashGear via Electronista via Shacknews.

I’m going to start writing again, after six months of laziness.

So I feel kinda bad for not having written anything on my blog in 2011. Things have been crazy busy with new projects taking lots of time, as well as a new full-time job. That is however no good excuse. Everybody is busy, and it’s really just a matter of prioritizing correctly and taking the time to do it. That’s what I’m going to do now.

There’s a couple of new things:

1. The design has been updated. It has been crafted for the single purpose of giving you the best possible reading experience.
2. Comments are now activated and will be active on all future posts. I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and critique.
3. The blog will become more topic-focused as time goes on. I won’t write about things that doesn’t belong here. I haven’t picked any particular topics yet, but I’ll definitively create some guidelines for myself in a couple of weeks.

I hope you’ll follow along and hopefully find what I write interesting.

Image from cambodia4kidsorg.

This is so simple, yet so genius. Perfect user experience design.

The urinals in the toilets on the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, has what looks like a small fly inside of them. When you look closer however, it’s actually the outline of a fly, etched into the porcelain itself. The staff at the airport did research afterwards found that urinals with the fake flies reduced spillage by 80%! When a man sees a fly, he automatically aims at it. Genius.

Via Thomas Krampl Via Dickson Fong Via Xianhang Zhang and lots of googling.

Everything Pixar touches ends up being solid gold.

They have to be doing something right to achieve that kind of quality. The interview embedded below is a fascinating look at how Pixar works and how the company is organized. It’s full of good stuff from start to finish.

The interview was done in March earlier this year, at Innovation 2010 by The Economist. Martin Giles interviewed Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.

Via Ryan Singer via Scott Berkun.

Things don’t always work as you might expect.

When I was designing the temporary beta signup page for Timely App, I wanted to highlight the word “time tracking” strongly, because it instantly explained the whole application. I had already used up a couple of other visual effects such as bold and a light yellow background, so I went with an underline, which really made the text pop.

Lesson learned though: Never ever use an underline to highlight a text or sentence if it’s not a link, because everyone will think it is and try to click it. Look at the heatmap below to get a feeling of what I mean:

I use commands, instead of statements, to encourage people to do things. There’s a reason for that.

First of all, you should follow me on twitter.

I find subconsciously human behavior extremely interesting. It doesn’t matter what we do knowingly, it’s those milliseconds where our brain is making hundred of choices that affects what we do. All of our smaller actions, like clicking a link or not, is done utterly subconsciously. We just do it, but there’s always a reason behind it. There’s obviously different reasons, and often more than one, for us doing something (like the visuals), but for this article, I’ll talk about the text, specifically the difference between using a statement and command.

I’ve read several interesting articles over the last year about how certain smaller changes have affected clickthrough rates with huge results. I’d love to give them all credit and link back to them, but I could only remember and find two:

What I find interesting in both articles isn’t which exact phrase worked better than the other, but the fact that a command did so much better than a statement.

Do we humans, subconsciously, like to be told what to do, instead of having to manually take a choice of doing something? Is there a much bigger chance that we’ll do something if we being directly told to do it, instead of having to create an action from a statement (or a fact)? And the stronger the command, does the chance of doing it grow as well?

When we’re presented with a statement, we process a fact and may choose to read the fact and move on, or to execute the possible action a statement can give us. For example, as Dustin uses in his article: “I’m on twitter.”. The primary here is that he’s on twitter. The secondary is that we may follow him on twitter.

When we’re presented with a command however, we process an action and choose to execute on that action or not. Again, in Dustin’s article: “You should follow me on twitter.”. The fact has now changed from the primary, to the secondary, and the command has become the primary.

So it would seem that the brain subconsciously responds much easier to a command, where it only has to go through one process (the action), compared to a statement where it has to go through two processes (the fact and the action). The data shows that in both Jason’s and Dustin’s cases, changing from a statement to a command more than doubled the action they wanted people to do.

And that is the exact reason I use commands, instead of statements, when I really want people to do something. Obviously you can’t use commands everywhere, but on important things, like encouraging things to signup for something, subscribe to something, or follow/like something, a command will probably work much better than a statement.

I’m still very much interested in wether a much stronger command will create better results, and if there’s a limit to how strong a command can be. I’ll definitely try different A/B tests around this topic in the coming future and report back on my findings.

Image from Wikipedia, created by Patrick J. Lynch.

Apple sold 2.8% of all mobile handsets worldwide, but rakes in a whopping 39% of the profits.

Let me say that one more time. Sold 2.8% of the market, gets 39% of the profits. And this includes all phones worldwide, not just smartphones. Apple sold 17 million handsets during the first half of 2010. Nokia, LG and Samsung, combined, sold 400 million. Their profits, again, combined, are lower than Apple’s.

Look at the graph below to get a better picture at how this is split up:

Via The Mac Observer.

Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.

So true. Excerpt from the excellent book Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals, makers of Basecamp and Highrise among other applications. You should read it.

This is a fantastic story about how everyone involved in a viral story on the social web can benefit from it.

Yesterday, I watched a short 6-minute-long TED talk from Margaret Stewart, YouTube’s head of user experience, where she talked about how YouTube thinks about copyright.

The talk shows how a viral YouTube video called JK Wedding Entrance Dance (which is excellent btw! It always makes me smile.) generated massive new revenue for Sony Music and Chris Brown. The creators of the video also received enormous attention and collected 26 000 dollars to help fight domestic violence. The huge youtube-hit was also parodied in an episode of NBC’s The Office.

This truly is a great example of how the creators, the content owner, the artist and the general public (from the joy and money for fighting domestic violence) can all benefit, together, from the same video.

Do you think Google is open? If yes, you’re completely wrong.

Google time after time talks about how closed Apple is, and how open Google is. They present themselves as the good guys and makes Apple the bad guys. They are, however, just as secretive and closed about their main products; Search, AdWords, AdSense and more, as Apple is about their main products; iPhone, Mac, iPad and more.

From the article by Mark Elgan:

AdWords and AdSense are Google’s products in the same way that the iOS and iPhones are Apple’s products.

Schmidt says iOS is “not open” because “You have used their development tools, their platform, their hardware, their software… their monetization and their distribution.”

But with Google AdWords, you have to use Google’s tools, their platform, their hardware, their software code, their monetization and their distribution.”

Apple has open sourced secondary products (Webkit, Darwin, Facetime-technology) that generates money and sales for it’s primary products (iOS devices and Mac). Google has open sourced secondary products (Android) that generates money and sales for it’s primary products (Searches and ads). All in all, they are really equally closed, or open, based on your definition.

You should read the whole article: How Google Is ‘Closed’, Just Like Apple

PS: If you have any comments, please read the whole article first, then send them to me on Twitter.

Via Daring Fireball.

Have you ever wondered when people break up? Look at the graph below.

I watched a TED talk the other day from David McCandless called “The beauty of data visualizations“. It was quite amazing and included lots of different datasets. One of them was about Facebook and breakups. David and his team scanned over 10 000 status-updates and set out to learn more about when people broke up. This is what they learned:

• A big peak right before Spring Break
• Most breakups are announced on Mondays
• People like to start the summer being single
• A big peak right before Christmas
• The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day (thank God)

I never stop being amazed about how much Facebook can actually teach us about human behavior. When everything is being digitalized and searchable, some really interesting stuff appears.

You should watch the whole presentation on YouTube. Also, did you know that the volcano outbreak on Iceland was the first ever carbon neutral volcano? You’ll understand why in the video.

This article from MG Siegler over at TechCrunch is a really interesting read.

What if say, Google, in their attempt to finally create a cohesive social experience, decided to forgo building yet another service and instead went for the ultimate layer: the browser?

There’s certainly nothing more powerful than to turn the browser itself into a social layer. The browser, for most people, will probably become the OS of the future, skipping the need for even having Mac or Windows installed. Owning the browser and turning it into a social experience would be huge. As many failures Google have had with trying to capture the social web, this could be their one big thing that puts them in a completely different position.

You might laugh at the notion of a Facebook web browser, but be honest: how many of your friends would use it? Probably a lot. If it had chat, alerts, and, of course, the News Feed, it would be a huge hit. You could visit any site on the web, but you’d be already logged in to your Facebook account. And you’d have one-click access to all your Facebook credits to buy whatever you wanted. And you would already be logged in to comment anywhere.

For Facebook, a social browser owned by Google has to be one of their biggest threats. Facebook is trying to create a social platform with Facebook Connect. A platform users bring with them everywhere, to every website, application and phone. Imagine if they had their own browser, built from the ground up with this in mind. It would be exactly what a really, really large group of people want.

While they’re at it, why stop there? They could easily continue creating a Facebook Phone OS on top of Android. Instantly logged on, instantly social.

Suddenly, a Facebook Phone, a Facebook Tablet, or for that matter, a Facebook Computer, doesn’t sound that far-fetched.

Read the article over at TechCrunch »

My number one killer-app for the iPad is hands down, the excellent Instapaper by Marco Arment.

I skim a lot of articles, and soon as they are interesting and of a certain length, I hit the Instapaper extension, Instachrome, that I use in Google Chrome. The whole article is then saved to Instapaper for iPad, stripped down to a text-and-images view, free of all the horrible advertisements and other badly designed elements that destroy the reading experience on a lot of websites. It all syncs seamlessy with an iPhone application as well.

Anyway, I think the iPad is by far the best reading device ever, so I’ve taken the time to really optimize this site for viewing with an iPad. It’s probably the best way to read the articles I post. While I was at it, I also optimized it for the iPhone.

Please send me an email or a message on twitter if you find any bugs.

I really want to become a better writer.

I want to write great, insightful articles. I want to comment on things that interest me, like amazing user interfaces, beautifully crafted experiences, new technology, business, web applications, Apple Inc and many others. I love to create, and to learn new amazingly cool stuff. I love details and I really enjoy people which go to great length about small topics. I appreciate the amazing work others do, and I hope to showcase lots of what people create and write.

I also want to share knowledge. Knowledge that I acquire from my own experiences creating two web applications, Timely (with a friend) and Coact (via my current employer), and knowledge that I acquire from other people.

This wont be a typical blog, it will probably fit somewhere between Twitter and a traditional blog. I like to look at it as a stream of things I enjoy.

I’ve removed everything from the previous site, including my portfolio and contact-page. I plan to add these things later on in time, but right now I want a site with only one goal; extremely satisfying to read. I think I’ve come pretty close. Smaller things like search, archive, etc will be added as I move forward. Comments are also disabled, but you’re welcome to send them to my twitter-account or via email.

Thanks for listening.