Olive Juice » gmail http://saraolive.com/blog Creative Technology at Large Mon, 02 May 2011 01:09:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Face-Saving GMail Feature http://saraolive.com/blog/face-saving-pgmail-feature http://saraolive.com/blog/face-saving-pgmail-feature#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:22:03 +0000 Sara Czyzewicz http://saraolive.com/blog/?p=201 Don’t pretend you’re omitted from this happenstance. You’re writing an email including a recent design comp, or partnership agreement, or screenshot, or family photo, what have you. You’re detailing the contents of said-attachment, excited and anxious to finish the mailer and get to your next to-do of the day. You remind yourself, mid-writing, “Don’t forget to attach it before clicking send”, and your mind responds “C’mon, I won’t, give me more credit than that”. Finally you finish the last sentence, type “Regards, Best, Your Schnookems, Sincerely” and your name. And send.

Ah! Forgot the attachment. Forehead slap (repeat thrice). You thence compose a new one-liner email stating “Sorry, forgot to attach.” and send your file, as the previously excited productive feeling turns to shame and remorse.

Alas, GMail saved me from such a fiasco this afternoon, as it will many more in the future, with it’s new feature so appropriately called “Forgotten Attachment Detector”.

Dear GMail Engineers and Inventors - Thank you kindly for this feature.

Regards, Yours Forever Truly, Sara

]]> http://saraolive.com/blog/face-saving-pgmail-feature/feed 1 On FOWA-Miami http://saraolive.com/blog/on-fowa-miami http://saraolive.com/blog/on-fowa-miami#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:25:20 +0000 Sara Czyzewicz http://saraolive.com/blog/?p=16 Although FOWA has hardly come to an end (double-days of Nikki Beach parties beginning tonight!), and tomorrow I’ll be winning the MacBook Air… however, some notes on todays happenings.

Kathy Sierra opened with a keynote “Creating Passionate Users” and cognitive seduction, stating the seemingly obvious but so often overlooked methods for relating to people and engaging users in exceptional experiences. Kathy spoke of our duty towards humanizing technology, getting people to meet – offline, while making more usable/human software. Develop easy-to-master-FAST apps, leaping to the “passion threshold”, where users are able to be great at what they *do* with the tool. It’s not about the tool. It’s about what the tool allows them to do. Get through to feelings and legacy brain. And place a “WTF” button nearby for your site’s users.

Blaine Cook, Twitter Engineer, held together his whimsical panel throughout audience notifications that Twitter was, no surprise, down. Cook warned of feature creep and the importance of adding what users *strongly* request, keep it clean, open APIs, and “use and love” the app you are creating. If you don’t love the service, others won’t either.Leah Culver, Pownce, followed, also pressing “opening code” as a top priority for any web service. 

Microsoft showcased the ever-awesome Photosynth, and a rad 3D maps application, which I didn’t catch the link to.

A panel pointing “what makes the next great startup”: Brilliance, team, confidence/ambition, depth of knowledge/research/ capital structure/right vw/legal issues, open!, distribution, extremism, and of course serendipity.

Remember the Milk’s Emily Boyd presented a quite enjoyable panel on FTM’s birth and lifespan, $0.19 budget, and various interface options (including the iPhone, yet available to the Aussies) (and a hacked GMAIL! love it). 

Off to the party, hosted by Scrapblog!  

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