Tiago Costa

21 September 2011
by Tiago Costa
0 comments

The site must look the same in all browsers? No…

Fellow @numian was kind enough to share this very interesting post about the differences on the way browsers render HTML and display it to the user. You can also grab the nicely edited PDF version to share.

Of course that at WayNext this is a daily subject with Clients while developing websites and I believe this post sums up some interesting point of views, bringing up the kind of trade-offs one has to incur to make it look exactly the same on all browsers (and what a mirage that is…).

Some snippets from the post to make you want to read it in full:

“TAFEE (pronounced: taffy): tiered, adaptive front-end experiences. Customizing the experience to the unique capabilities of each browser, prioritizing a fast and good UX over consistency.”

“None of your users open your site in multiple browsers, so if you’re actively trying to make things look the same for that false goal, then you’re slowing down the page for your users on older browsers.”

“Consider what Google has done with the Google doodles: show off cool <canvas> or bouncing balls with just HTML+JS in “good” browsers and just keeping it the same old Google logo for slow browsers. You heard anybody complaining that they don’t get the bouncy balls in IE6?

Facebook, Google, Yahoo all embrace a TAFEE approach to show different browsers different things. It’d likely be wise for you to, as well.

It might make sense for you to segment your experiences into HD (high-def), SD (standard-def) and LR (low-res) tiers.”

5 September 2011
by Tiago Costa
0 comments

Company and shareholders taxes

Euro Coin Currently Portugal is undergoing a (surprinsingly silent) revolution after being bailed out and needed to fully commit to keep the numbers on the line.

When one needs more money he can either earn more or spend less. This is of course no different for a country, meaning that earning more means higher taxes and spending less equals the seemingly impossible task of spending less.

While we are yet to see strong cost reducing measures from our new government, we have learned a lot about all the tax rising that are already undergoing, specially on the individuals, more than on the companies (although it seems like there will be an extra tax for companies with profits on top of 2M). But from what I hear from most people I don’t think they even realize how much shareholders are already taxed.

Just quick example, to make sure we are on the same page. If a company sells something for 1.000 and the production costs (read, everything from gross salaries, salaries taxes, social security, electricity, hardware, software, rent, insurance, legal, trademarks, accounting, furniture, travel expenses, licenses, communications… well you name it) are of 800, it means the company gross profit is 200. If the company is posting a profit at the end of the year, it means it will be taxed @ 25%+10%, so you can count around 27,5% of tax on top of the profits. Using our example, that would mean the company would release 145 net profit, but, that is not the amount of money the shareholders are going to get. Why? Because those 145 will be taxed again, on the individual side at 25%, meaning he is in fact making ~108. What does this mean? It means that for each 1€ the company profits (remember we have already deducted all the costs) the shareholder will get ~0,54€, meaning a “de facto” tax of about 46%.

Update: numbers above were edited on 23 Apr 2013 for 2013 current tax rates.

So when people shout that companies should have higher taxes, I’m not sure they all understand what is at stake here. Firstly because companies themselves do not exist, meaning that when they claim more taxes for companies they are really asking for taxes for the company’s shareholders. Second is that with the increase in taxes, just like an individual might decide to go live abroad, looking for a better life and lower taxes, companies and again, not companies but their shareholders might just do the same taking their money elsewhere where they can get lower taxes on capital profits.

We are all going through a storm in Portugal (and in some other countries as well), I believe that everybody should do what is necessary to help the country move away from it and that this co-operation should be indexed to each individual means and capacity. But in the end we need to understand what it all means, because taxing companies will send them away (therefore increasing unemployment) and taxing individuals will send talent away. Is this what we need to get away from the storm?

We need the best companies and the best individuals this country has raised to turn things around, please don’t make them go away for good.

1 September 2011
by Tiago Costa
8 Comments

Huawei E1550 USB Stick on Mac OS X Lion

Edit [05Oct2012]: If you need help with this USB Stick on Mountain Lion please check my new post on this subject.

Just a quick post to help anyone else out there with the same problem.

After upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion I was not able to connect to the internet using my Huawei E1550 USB Stick because the device was not recognized.

I am not exactly sure why, but all I needed was to download and install the new driver you can find here. It seems this driver will suit other Huawei models too.

I started here but for me updating only the driver did the trick, so no need to go through all the steps described.

18 August 2011
by Tiago Costa
1 Comment

Why I changed from RSS to Twitter

A couple of years ago, when RSS became popular and all websites started having their feeds published I had this nice list of about 100 feeds I was following. First using Thundebird as an RSS client and later with Google Reader, since it allowed me to access my feeds anywhere, and those were good to read on the go.

Needless to say that following those feeds was more time consuming than I could afford, so I tried to skim through them on a weekly basis just to see what was going on, mostly on blogs and some news sites.

Since the beginning of 2010 I started using Twitter more and more as an RSS replacement. Mainly because it allows me to skim through all the information quicker and even if I don’t read all the tweets (in fact, I don’t even try) I know that if it is important it will be re-tweeted by some fellow I am following so I will catch one or two days later. Besides most of the sites offering RSS they also push the same stories into Twitter so it is indeed a fine replacement.

When I started this replacement I first started using Twitter.com as my client (I guess everybody does – right?) but I then migrated to Seesmic because the interface is less crowded and I can easily separate the main stream with the lists I have created. I can also use it to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Again I’d rather use a web app so that I can access it anywhere without worrying about setup or content replication.

But, my all time favorite Twitter client is Flipboard for iPad because of the way it deals with the stream, extending the feed information with the text lead or with some thumbnails it lets me browse without the need to open one link per tweet (because most tweets contain links). That way if I like what I see I just tap to extend the full content and read it through but if I don’t I just flip the page and keep on browsing.

So for me RSS is dead from the information consumer point of view (I doubt it was ever alive, I bet 90%+ of online users don’t know what it is anyway, even if Microsoft included RSS support on the dreadful IE7…). On the other hand, at work, we still use RSS a lot for web apps integration (Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, SAPO Fotos, SAPO Vídeos, WordPress, etc) and it works like a charm.

10 August 2011
by Tiago Costa
2 Comments

Upgrade to Mac OS X Lion completed: the good, the bad and other annoyances

Mac OS X Lion After making sure all the backups were in place and ready to rescue me with minimum downtime if things went south I went to upgrade Snow Leopard with Lion. Time Machine and Super Duper are your friends – Super Duper allows you to create a bootable disk image so you can just boot from that in case anything goes wrong. Even if my 24 Mbps ADSL is fairly fast I did went for a walk while it was downloading so I can pretty sure say it took about 1 hour to download almost 4Gb of Lion’s upgrade.

Then the usual crystal clear upgrading progress, some new bells and whistles here and there, and after a couple of hours I was on Lion trying to get some work done. I will point out below the good and the bad things as I found then:

Good

Full screen apps (for all native apps at least)
Preview and Mail with an improved interface
Go to Login Window (when you want to leave your computer unattended you can now easily lock it without any workarounds)
Reboot and Shutdown with “reopen windows on startup” (keeps the current state of apps)

Bad

3 column layout for Mail.app (I have tried it for a couple of hours but I lacked productivity so I went back to classic view)
No sidebar monthly calendar on iCal (couldn’t find a solution yet besides BusyCal.com)
Automatic file restore on launch or history state – it means when you launch an app it will automatically open the files you were editing previouly, meaning the launch takes longer and if you were using a VPN to edit remote files where you are no longer connected some apps crash – also most of the times I want to edit different files

Annoyances

Dropbox needed to be re-installed with a beta version otherwise I was loosing contextual menu (very helpful to “Copy Public Link”)
Spotlight took about 2 days to re-index all my files, meaning the Mac was slower during the first hours with Lion (not a good Apple experience but I guess it won’t be as bad if you’re buying a new computer instead of upgrading)

I will be updating this post on the coming days as I have time and things come on my way.

1 August 2011
by Tiago Costa
0 comments

Current running status

This post is sort of a personal note.

I have been logging about 30km a week, on average, since I came back from Barcelona’s marathon; this is, after about 4/5 weeks that I was down after the race because my knee was injured.

Right now I am not pushing so hard, but I still try to go out at least 3 times a week. In fact I really feel the need to run at least every other day, unless I am able to go kitesurfing and if it is a good windy day I will be tired enough not to think about running!

With that said lately I have been noticing that during the first 4 to 5km my body does not feel at ease and only after those 20/25 minutes my body is warm and my stride gets in sync with my lungs. After that point I can either push speed a bit more or go on up to 12 or 15km without much effort, especially if I am running at around 5min/km.

30 July 2011
by Tiago Costa
4 Comments

Web browser usage

Browser Usage Evolution - January to June 2011

I was just going through some websites stats and I noticed the steady growth for Google Chrome, which is confirmed here. It is interesting to notice that although Firefox was the first mainstream alternative to hit the market, it seems like it is not growing any more for the past months, while Google Chrome has been absorbing all the happy quitters from Internet Explorer.

From my personal experience, although I have adopted Firefox as my main browser for some years now, I frequently fire up Google Chrome and it really is much faster and lighter than Firefox. I must consider changing.

On a side note, at WayNext we also get more and more screenshots sent by Clients using Chrome which is additional confirmation for the market share rise.

11 July 2011
by Tiago Costa
0 comments

Ideas, startups, downwind and upwind

I just started reading this old (2005!) article from Paul Graham because I found it linked on Quora where someone is trying to get a hold of opinions how how hard or how easy it is to develop a web app that will bring 1k USD / month. Since I have loved to learn recurring revenue I was paying attention to the post.

I had an increased motivation to follow that thread because for the second time in WayNext‘s lifetime we have built a product, which is (of course) a web app and we are already generating recurring revenue from it. It’s called Socialzed.com and it’s a Facebook App to run contests within this social network while following Facebook’s terms and guidelines.

The first product of this kind that we have created was called LojaDoSite, it was built back in 2005/2006 and it was a do-it-yourself simple website creation which started up in a nice way but soon it was not bringing in enough revenue to make it worth maintaining it, and that is why it had a kind of MBO and was sold to one of the agency’s partners.

Big Idea - By MartyMadrid

Back to Paul Graham, his article is really about ideas and the way most people think of ideas like they are some kind of miracle. Paul Graham explains that if you see a 1M business idea you automatically think it must be to damn hard to get there, but, of course, most likely that business didn’t start generating 1M from the first day (very few do, I would add).

Paul Graham continues explaining his point of view using concepts like upwind and downwind, which for me, being a kitesurfer, it’s a very meaningful expression since I always try to ride upwind of the crowd because that gives you more options. But I never did think about it applied to start-ups, business or jobs and the article brings an interesting insight about that:

“(…) I said a good rule of thumb was to stay upwind– to work on things that maximize your future options. The principle applies for adults too, though perhaps it has to be modified to: stay upwind for as long as you can, then cash in the potential energy you’ve accumulated when you need to pay for kids.

I don’t think people consciously realize this, but one reason downwind jobs like churning out Java for a bank pay so well is precisely that they are downwind. The market price for that kind of work is higher because it gives you fewer options for the future. A job that lets you work on exciting new stuff will tend to pay less, because part of the compensation is in the form of the new skills you’ll learn.(…)”

And then continuing with his article you still get a couple of interesting thoughts:

“(…)it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, think what they should be doing, and do it yourself. Even if they already know it, you’ll probably be done faster.

(…) It seems like it violates some kind of conservation law, but there it is: the best way to get a “million dollar idea” is just to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway.”

This post is form 2005 but it is still worth your time to read it.

1 July 2011
by Tiago Costa
2 Comments

Google Plus – invites are back

Just a quick update to let you know that the procedure to invite people that was being used yesterday is working again.

All you need is to add your friends to a circle and then share something (anything) with them so they will receive an email notification from Google and from there they will be able to join Google Plus.

Have fun.