November 2014 – Sean Shadmand

Finally, I got in to use Twitter’s new Fabric platform. Here’s the scoop.

I finally got an email from Twitter giving me the green light to use Fabric. Before I go into the service, I thought I’d share the funny little welcome letter I received.

Not the greatest first impression for a product being released by a multi-billion dollar company. It looks like it was sent to me accidently by a Nigerian businessman looking for someone in America to give his millions to. Luckily the experience improved from there 😉

Fabric attempts to “stitch together” all the components required in building great applications such as crash analytics, managing builds, sign-in, and ads. The latter two obviously tie in directly with Twitter’s business model and exposes what the end-game for this free service is; I don’t think it calls into question the value or like-ability of Fabric. As long as the free service they offer works well, there are no tricky “catches”, and it is doing more to help the developer than pushing Twitter’s agenda I’m happy.

First Take on Using Fabric

I am really digging how well they integrated the service with my Mac and XCode. The guided installation tour was amazingly smooth. Usually, when a tool attempts to integrate multiple platforms locally on a client (e.g. Mac OS, XCode, Fabric, iTunesConnect) the solution must take into account a multitude of unknown variables between them. Managing those variables makes it difficult to create a robust, smooth, experience, but for me it worked seamlessly (no pun intended.)

Fabric comes as an application you install on your machine and (for Mac) it is added to your menu bar alongside other tools like Dropbox, Cloud App, your WiFi indicator and clock.

Once installed Fabric pops open a step-by-step guide detailing what you need to do to integrate the SDK into your project. The built-in guide allows you to select the project you wish to integrate from your project repo along with all the SDK files and lines of code required; it does so elegantly and with minimal clicks. The platform also listens to your XCode build process to make sure you’ve integrated the tool correctly.

After you have successfully integrated the SDK, a dashboard becomes available for your project to monitor your integration.

Another feature I found quite interesting was their beta testing integration. I’ve been using the newly released Apple TestFlight integration which is a major improvement to both Test Flight (a recent Apple acquisition) and Apple’s iTunes connect provisioning service. Fabric has built in their version of a testing platform that allows you to invite beta users to test your app through Crashlitics. I’ll give it a shot, but the new Test Flight and XCode pre-release workflow is pretty damn easy, and Fabrics layer doesn’t seem to be adding much value.

I’ll keep playing with the platform but as of now, with the projects I am working on, the Crashlytics is the only thing I’ll be using from the suite; followed by Twitter login. I am curious to see how much using this SDK will interfere with my usage of the FB login SDK, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Plans for World Tour 2015

Jackie and I will be taking a trip around the world in 2015 and based on feedback from friends we’ll be tracking the trips here on this page! We’ll post maps, updates, pictures, and destinations; if you want to join us at a stop just check in! You can also follow our updates by following me on Twitter.

Things We Will Do On This Trip

Explore: Our love for travel and adventure will be a major driver for this trip. We have many places we’ve always wanted to see and activities we are excited to try. If you have an activities or adventures that are a must we’d love to hear your ideas! One thing we are thinking of trying is hiking every mountain we visit, or snorkeling in every ocean 🙂

Work With Startups: There are many “startup hubs” around the world starting, growing and blowing up. While on this journey I’ll be looking for ways to get involved, help grow/create them, and contribute to the ecosystem in any way I can. I’m excited to see how different each city has developed their mix of cultures, perspective, and goals that are sure to be even more diverse than ours in the states.

Volunteer: We’ll be pursuing a mixture of the things we love (in addition to one another.) We plan to volunteer a few weeks between each trip offering help to local communities such as working with kids, farms, and/or employing Jackie’s nursing experience and my entrepreneurial experience where we can. If you have suggestions let us know 🙂

Find A Home Base: We are not only looking forward to traveling in all these amazing countries, but we are interested in making one of them our home for a while. At the very least an HQ to call home between each trip. That being said if we find an environment we can add long-term value to and a community we like – we may stay! I’ve always wanted to live overseas, and I hope we can find a place that fits us nicely! Our potential home base ideas so far are: Berlin, London, Dubai …

Extend The Trip: From now and throughout the trip I’ll be working on projects that can hopefully generate passive income to extend the trip as long as possible. I am further inspired by what this entrepreneur calls a “digital nomad”. I’m looking forward to getting back to basics and building small focused products, finding a niche, and supplying a demand without “searching for the next big thing.”

Itinerary
Below are some interactive maps (click on the map to get an interactive version) of where we are planning to go. From what I’ve heard, “planning” a long trip like this can be self-delusional. The reality of what you really end up doing will occur along the way. How long will it last? Well, as long as we can make it last I suppose. Making the dollar stretch for two will be an adventure of its own. We get a lot of questions asking where we’ll be – below is our best guess so far.

UPDATE: As predicted our our trip route hasn’t gone as planned below. You can track our actual route as we create it here.

Part I: First Teaser Trip – Pacific Islands / Hong Kong / Japan [COMPLETED!]

Part II: South America [CANCELED] 😦

Part III: South Pacific/Asia Legs – (Old Route)

Part IV: Middle East – Europe (Incomplete plans)

Part V: Africa (Incomplete plans)

3 reasons why I’m bullish on extensions, plus a better scheduling app.

Scheduling time to meet with someone is one of those things that’s just hard enough to be annoying, but probably not complex enough to need a whole new tool to simplify it. It’s one of those problems that makes for a perfect example of how-to, or how-not-to, create a great product.

Often in the product world we find a problem we want to solve and end up creating a far more complex system to solve it; one in which the user has to change usage patterns or require ramp up time. As a result, minor problems and annoyances (like scheduling meetings) don’t get dramatic improvements because the cost v. benefit v. ramp-up never quite get to a point in which the user is willing to change their habits to gain the benefits from a new tool. “I’ll just send an email” or “I’ll just use a spreadsheet” can kill the potential for “robust” products. And rightly so, email and spreadsheets are comfortable, versatile and already understood between groups.

That’s why I have been bullish on extensions, especially the Google Chrome ones.

The good ones are able to find a balance between:

A lack of ramp-up time.
An integration into the tools and workflows I already use.
No requirement for other parties to have the platform in order to use it.

An example of a great extension I was introduced to recently is Assistant.to. Assistant.to is a Chrome extension that links to your Google Calendar and extends your Google Email composer so you can easily drop-in potential appointment/meeting times as text and links in your email. There was no setup, all the interaction happens within the GMail composer, and the form factor works in a way that needs no additional explanation or signups for the receiver.

It is a must have tool for sure! Here are some screenshots of the workflow:

Checking_in____-_sean_shadmand_gmail_com_-_Gmail — Extension overlay

Checking_in____-_sean_shadmand_gmail_com_-_Gmail 2 — Expanded overlay

Checking_in____-_sean_shadmand_gmail_com_-_Gmail 3 — Select availability

Checking_in____-_sean_shadmand_gmail_com_-_Gmail 4 — Available times copy and pasted

Assistant_to_-_Your_Personal_Scheduling_Assistant — Meeting confirmed

As a note, another great extensions I’ve been using lately is the one Grammerly.com that allows great inline writting corrections and tools.

Wanderlust

Jackie and I will be taking a trip around the world in 2015 and based on feedback from friends we’ll be tracking the trips here on this page! We’ll post maps, updates, pictures and destinations; if you want to join us on a stop just check in! You can also follow our updates by following me on Twitter.

Things We Will Do On This Trip

1. Volunteer: We’ll be pursuing a mixture of the things we love (in addition to one another.) We plan to volunteer a few weeks between each trip offering help to local communities such as working with kids, farms, and/or employing Jackie’s nursing experience and my entrepreneurial experience where we can. If you have suggestions let us know 🙂

2. Work With Startups: There are many “startup hubs” around the world starting, growing and blowing up. While on this journey I’ll be looking for ways to get involved, help grow/create them, and contribute to the ecosystem in any way I can. I’m excited to see how different each city has developed their mix of cultures, perspective, and goals that are sure to be even more diverse than ours in the states.

3. Explore: Our love for travel and adventure will be a major driver for this trip. We have many places we’ve always wanted to see and activities we are excited to try. If you have an activities or adventures that are a must we’d love to hear your ideas! One thing we are thinking of trying is hiking every mountain we visit, or snorkeling in every ocean 🙂

4. Find A Home Base: We are not only looking forward to traveling in all these amazing countries, but we are interested in making one of them our home for a while. At the very least an HQ to call home between each trip. That being said if we find an environment we can add long-term value to and a community we like – we may stay! I’ve always wanted to live overseas, and I hope we can find a place that fits us nicely!

5. Extend The Trip: From now and throughout the trip I’ll be working on projects that can hopefully generate passive income to extend the trip as long as possible. I am further inspired by what this entrepreneur calls a “digital nomad”. I’m looking forward to getting back to basics and building small focused products, finding a niche, and supplying a demand without “searching for the next big thing.”

Itinerary
Below are some maps on where we think we will go. From what I’ve heard, planning a long trip like this is illusion to ones self; eality hits quickly when you finally jump in. Most critically #5 will determine how long this adventure will end up lasting. Making the dollar stretch for two will be an adventure of its own, but since we get so many questions on where we’ll be you can use the maps below to stay updated as we “learn” and “do.” Feel free to follow them by clicking the respective links.

South East Asia Part 1

Central/South America

Africa

Asia/Australia

Europe/Middle East

Product Review: Duolingo a free language learning app

Based out of Pittsburg Pennsylvania this app was created by the founder of reCaptcha and has taken a truly new approach to learning foreign languages. For one, as compared to other tools like Rosetta Stone that costs its customers hundreds of dollars per language, Duolingo is free to use!

Beyond just being free, the app has done an excellent job in gamifying the language learning process with daily challenges, points, and levels. One simple feature that caught my eye was they option to “test out” of individual levels avoiding the need to review an entire section you may know. I’ve been using it for the last three days and have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here are some screenshots of gameplay:

There is a second mission to Duolingo’s story that makes the app even more unique. In the backend, while you are using the app to learn a language, their algorithms are simultaneously using your answers to help improve translations for websites and other documents!

If you are interested in picking up another language Duolingo leaves you with few excuses not to start today. Adios y gracias!