I recently had breakfast with a group of friends at Austin’s Kerbey Lane and was delighted to see how they solved the frustration of check splitting. As you can see in the images below, the bill, by default, is broken up into price totals for each individual seat. It seems like a simple adjustment to the formatting of the receipt (which it is), but it made paying the bill a breeze.
It makes sense for a place like Kerbey Lane to institute this billing method; I’d imagine that the majority of their customers are groups of college students who would want to split the bill.
I wonder if there is an elegant way to solve the problem of some people paying with cash and some with credit cards. Perhaps a blank line printed with each seat number, meant to indicate “cash” or the name on the credit card.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts over @RussianPencil.
PS. If you find yourself in Austin, it’s a crime not to stop by Kerbey Lane. The Chicken Verde omelet is top notch.
I love this new web app for creating and maintaining To-Do lists. I’ve been searching for a really good cloud based list manager, and I think this one may be it. I love that this is explicitly stated in the FAQ:
Can you add feature x to TeuxDeux?
We’ve tried really hard to keep the app simple and so we are going to be quite rigorous about which features we add to it going forward.
Another post about simplified watches from Dezeen, this time about a watch sans minute hand:
Defakto is a young brand established at the beginning of the year 2009. We have made it our objektive to redefine the feeling of time by the creation of a mechanic single hand watch. Within this form the single hand principle is unique. We build place our confidence on understatement and stand for a new way of living in form of a relaxed feeling of time. Our central theme is to display time as simple as possible, but as exact as needed. Defakto builds watches for people with time whom are therefore not meticulous depended on knowing the exact time. We designed the watches for people which have achieved their own live’s rhythm in the fast moving time of today. (emphasis mine)
I award points for originality, but quite frankly feel this design misses the mark. There are a countless number of ways to simplify a watch (removing tic marks, for example), but eliminating the minute hand is not one of them, in my mind.
Albert Einstein once said: “Everything should be made a simple as possible, but not simpler.” Perhaps Defakto should have stopped after removing the second hand.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts over @RussianPencil.
I’m digging these super simple watches from Uniform Wares.
“Uniform Wares products have an intentionally paired down form that is characterized by distinct colour; this helps define their purpose, how they are used, what for and by whom,” says company co-founder and designer, Patrick Bek.
I would argue that some of the tick marks could be removed (really only needing marks at 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock), but that would take away from the British wall clock influence.
These file sharing services may be falling by the wayside now that email attachment sizes are growing and services like Dropbox and Drop.io are flourishing, but I love the simplicity of Senduit. Especially in comparison to other similar services, such as YouSendIt.
In spite of the delightful simplicity, however, there are still a couple things that could be improved upon. The default expiration should be increased (perhaps to one day, with time increments in both directions). I’ve had friends upload files for me and completely ignore the expiration, and I didn’t have a chance to download the file within the first half hour.
Perhaps a worse offense is the lack of any kind of progress indicator when a file is being uploaded. Once again calling on Mr. Maeda, users would much rather be clued in to how long they must wait. Some people, myself included, would even wait longer so long as the wait time was clearly displayed.
I posted a few days ago about a nice little UI touch in the menu for Smultron, in which an additional bit of metadata is added to duplicate file names in the Open Recent menu to help distinguish them.
Well, after receiving a friendly email from Benjamin Stiglitz over at Apple, it turns out that this is an OS X wide behavior. Any app written in Cocoa and running in OS X will do this automatically.
So, hats off to the AppKit team at Apple for this one. Good stuff.
The big news this last week has been Google giving a sneak peak of their new operating system, Google Chrome OS. It’s already been dissected at great length on the internets, but I think there are some interesting things going on here from a simplicity standpoint.
The video below gives a great introduction to what the OS is all about:
The key take-away here is that Google is betting on simplicity. They are valuing speed (the start up time was heavily reinforced in the demos) and simplicity over the functionality you might find on a more standard OS. In Maedonian™ terms, they are adhering to the first (thoughtful reduction) and third (savings in time feel like simplicity) laws.
Mr. Gruber is on the mark regarding the benefit of reduction:
The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating. That’s the opportunity, and that’s the idea behind Chrome OS and Litl and even Android and iPhone OS.
There is one group where I think these machines have a huge potential for success: college students. The machines are inexpensive, perfect for notetaking, listening to music, facebooking, etc., and the computer lab can be utilized for more of the heavy lifting. And at this point I would be surprised if most campuses aren’t completely WiFi enabled.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts over @RussianPencil.
