“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”
- Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything.
I recently came across MacFreedom via @Malbonnington. A brilliant concept that allows you to escape the online distractions for certain period of time. When needing to concentrate with a busy workload, temporarily zoning out of Twitter, email, casual browsing and instant messaging is something that appeals to me, but when working in digital I often need access to the internet.
I starting playing about with other options. I started by using a basic timer; 'Apimac Timer' and manually allocated my time to tasks. Setting one to one-and-a-half hour work periods I would then allow 5-10 minutes for checking emails and Twitter (favouriting/instapapering any Tweets I wanted to read later.)
This worked relatively well, but I found myself forgetting to restart the timer, it became very matter-a-fact that it was running in the background. I decided to try another approach, this time using iCal.
Although iCal does work, it's a bit of a pain to update, and it doesn't allow you to run a single timer. I decided to start designing an alternative.
I want the app to do a number of things:
An item on the wishlist would be the ability to control certain apps connection to the internet, like MacFreedom but with far more control.
From my initial sketches I'm moving down a 'timeline' style route. Much like iMovie, the user could drop task items onto the timeline, the user could then move, extent and contract them.
I should be posting the rough designs of the 'Discipline app' here soon.
Apparently it doesn't take much to shatter helicopter glass, just a short drop off a sofa arm should do it.
frog design: Zen And The Art Of Design:
http://www.psfk.com/2010/07/frog-design-zen-and-the-art-of-design.html
Today I thought I'd take a Spotify Journey.
It's a lot like a YouTube journey, where you watch a video, click on a link to a video it recommends for you, watch that video, click on the next video and so on until you've realised you've spent way too long on the 'Tube and wonder how the heck you got there.
