The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) “Maxims for Revolutionists”

Absolutely fantastic quote from Evan Williams of Twitter (found here):

As happens in most industries, value creation is moving up the stack. That is, companies make money in new technology-driven arenas at first by differentiating on performance, engineering, cost, etc. As industries evolve, core infrastructure gets built and commoditized, and differentiation moves up the hierarchy of needs from basic functionality to non-basic functionality, to design, and even to fashion.

For example, there was a time when chief buying concerns included how well a watch might tell time and how durable a pair of jeans was. There is still plenty of core technology to be built for the Internet, but the fact that you can now be a fairly sizable Internet company without ever needing to own (or even look at) your server hardware means a much bigger proportion of what companies do is add value on top what’s here. And one of the most powerful ways to add value is through design.

I’ve been reading a lot of Daniel Tenner’s blog (http://swombat.com/) and this following sentence brought back bad memories of what it was like to work for a large corporation:

The height of absurdity was reached, I believe, when I was asked to prepare the proposal for the preparation of a plan to produce a proof of concept for a module of a tool the client was implementing.

From this post: http://swombat.com/2011/6/7/accenture-before-startups

An important point: software is a conduit. Software has not, nor ever will, grant us the ability to do new things. It merely facilitates actions which we have been doing since the beginning of time.

iPod? Music was around before those shiny white boxes I think.

Skype? Yeah we used to enjoy an auld chat too.

MS Windows? Sadists existed long before Redmond’s infernal OS.

The majority of software in the world today does not Get Out Of The Way. Good software simply lets you “do”. It doesn’t even feel like your using it. Time spent looking for a button, trying to figure out what an icon means or squinting at tiny text is time taken away from actually doing the intended task. From now on, I’m going to think of customers as do-ers instead of users.

The most memorable software out there at the moment is made by the likes of Apple and 37signals. Their software is memorable because I don’t use, I do.

Paradoxically, it leaves an impression from the lack of impression it makes.

I listen to music a lot: at work, out walking, when I’m reading, exercising. I try to keep my iPod to 2,000 songs at a time otherwise it’s too hard to find something that I really want to listen to. Even at that, though, I still end up listening to the same old albums. If I want something mellow I’ll generally give Elliott Smith or the Beach Boys a go, whereas if I fancy upping the tempo then I play some Kanye West or The Strokes. Essentially the problem remains the same: about 20% of my library gets played.

I’ve tried using Genius and plain old Shuffling. Neither work – Genius seems to lump artists together based on genre which isn’t useful unless a band writes the same song over and over again (I’m looking at you, Dave Grohl). I’ve tried Cadence – an app which claims to group songs based on their BPM but found it didn’t work. Up to now, if I wanted a playlist for a certain mood, I’ve had to create one manually.

I say up to now because I’ve recently started using Muud.io by App Sandwich. Put simply: it’s a playlist generator that actually works. After analysing your playlist, enter your mood and Muud.io will create a playlist for you. If you’re looking for some chillout music then you probably don’t want some crazy Pavement track interrupting your train of thought – Muud.io makes sure this doesn’t happen.

The app is so effective that I actually use it more often that the regular iPod application on my iPhone.

A side effect of these custom playlists is that I hear tracks that I never would have got round to listening using my old manual selection approach.

There are a few minor points on which it could improve. The interface can be a little unintuitive at times (although it looks pretty sweet) – the play button on the playlists view can be a little difficult to hit (when I try to tap it I end up viewing the playlists detail). Additionally, it would be nice if I didn’t have to name my playlists – maybe the name field could simply be pre-populated with the date or something relevant to the mood (something like “Relax dude!” if you’ve selected some chillout music). Overall though, these are small gripes and don’t hold back the app.

Muud.io is available for €2.99 in the App Store and I strongly recommend you check it out!