How much does Apply pay to ship an iPhone from their factory in China to San Francisco?

Answer: less than $1 or about 0.008% of the total cost of an iPhone 6! Learning about the global shipping / logistics industry excites me. The sheer volume of goods shipped every year, all the infrastructure needed to process these goods and its impact on the global economy is mind-boggling.

The introduction of the standard shipping container some 5 decades ago resulted in significant improvements in shipping. It also led to the creation of much larger ships. Some, capable of carrying over 18,000 40-foot containers. I’ll let you grasp the scale of that for a minute.

Ever wondered how Indian mangoes get to New Jersey or how a pair of Levis jeans got to Ghana? How about that Ikea furniture in your bedroom? They are all dependent on the ships and cargo planes that get them to their various destinations.

Here are some interestig facts that I uncovered today:

• It costs roughly $2.50 / kg to ship an item by air from China to San Francisco
• A new iPhone 6 in its box weighs some 385 grams so it costs Apple less than $1 to ship it from its factory in China to San Francisco
• Apple ships about 100,000 / plane and requires 124 flights to ship 30 million iPhones (the amount of iPhones sold in the US last quarter) to the US
• It represents 2% of the total air freight volume between China and the US and causes the price of air freight to increase 2-5x during the months of October and November when new models are launched
• It only costs $300 to move a 40-foot container from Rotterdam to Shanghai
• The Port of Rotterdam is the world’s most advanced and automated port. It cost some $535 million to build and handles 445 million tons of cargo each year.

Sound interesting? Here are some links from where I pulled these facts (interesting reads):

• Why are ocean freight rates so low?
• The iPhone’s Impact on Air Freight Prices
• Why is the port of Rotterdam more automated than the port of Oakland?

Boxed Water is Better

A company in Michigan is taking on the $144 billion global market for bottled water with a novel idea - sell water in a carton rather than in a plastic bottle. This, seemingly simple change has a dramatic impact on the water industry and on the environment.

Aside from the fact that paper cartons are far more recyclable, they can also be packed more tightly than plastic bottles. How much more? For every truck of plastic bottles, the company can ship 26 trucks of boxed water making transportation substantially more efficient.

Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the most revolutionary. Read the whole story here: http://bit.ly/1MvczsI.

Wunderlist Review

Most people who know me would agree that I’m obsessively organized and productive. Being organized helps me stay on top of things so I never miss important files, events or information. I rely on a number of tools to keep things in check:

• Evernote is where I dump random thoughts, ideas, meeting notes etc.
• My Outlook.com email has several rules to automatically triage my email
• Contacts are synced via Google
• All my files are organized and backed-up on OneDrive

I go to great lengths to maintain this ecosystem of apps and services. I’ve always felt that the missing piece of the puzzle was a task management app. I’ve dabbled with Asana and Trello in the workplace and they’ve worked great but they never seemed to translate well into my personal life. A number of iOS apps looked great but didn’t really solve the purpose well. They either had too few features or too many animations. Most apps didn’t work on other platforms and didn’t even backup / sync my tasks.

I’m an Evernote fan so when Evernote introduced tasks, I gave it a shot. I even hacked it to mimic David Allen’s GTD system (I’ve since stopped following this system, feels overloaded) but somehow, it never felt easy. Evernote is a solid notes app but when it came to tasks, it felt bloated. For a brief while, I even tried Things. It was better than most other apps but felt slow, clunky and most importantly, it was unnecessarily expensive.

Enter Wunderlist! Wunderlist is almost perfect. Almost, because I expect more from it. It’s a little like Apple. Apple creates some of the world’s most beautiful and functional products. Yet, people crave more from them because they can rely on Apple to deliver. I expect the same from the makers of Wunderlist. Within the first few minutes of using Wunderlist, it became clear to me that its makers built it with a whole lot of love. It felt like they thought it through.

As someone who spends most of my time in front of a laptop, a good desktop experience is more important to me than mobile in most cases. Wunderlist’s Mac app is a delight. It’s quick to load, quick to move around, looks stunning and most importantly, syncs instantly across all my devices. It does all this without compromising features. It’s easy to organize tasks into lists and lists into folders. You can even share a list with friends, family or co-workers. You can assign tasks, set due dates and reminders and even make notes. Interestingly, you can even have tasks repeat in set intervals. I’ve found this to be useful. This is just half the story. You can also comment on tasks that you’ve shared with others and more.

Wunderlist does all this without feeling heavy and clunky. There’s a sort of natural simplicity to how it works. Most successful apps gain traction because their users get habituated to using them. These apps are a natural extension to how people work. Wunderlist seems to get this right. For me, it was three things:

• Pressing Ctrl + Shift + W opens a Quick Add window globally on your computer. This makes it easy for me to add a task the second I think of it. It’s very natural. No need to open the complete app or fiddle on my phone. It’s very much like firing up Spotlight on your Mac. Natural.
  
• Desktop notifications are great because I spend most of my time in front of my laptop. Wunderlist uses native Mac notifications that I never miss.
• Sync, sync, sync. It’s flawless.

I’m starting to get very used to Wunderlist. Few apps have this effect on me. Sketch is another app that had this effect on me. 

I love most things about Wunderlist and I’m going to continue using it. As a power user of most apps, I have a few feature-requests that would make it stick even more. If you’re one of the creators of Wunderlist, please make notes.

Keyboard Shortcuts

There are a limited number of keyboard shortcuts within the app. I like to use the mouse as little as possible. It makes navigation much quicker. I almost never use my mouse when navigating Gmail, Outlook, Feedly, Twitter or a number of other apps. Why does Wunderlist have so few keyboard shortcuts? It wouldn’t hurt to cover every feature within the app. Here are a few features that aren’t covered by keyboard shortcuts yet:

• Switch lists
  
• Mark a task as complete
• Add due dates and reminders
• Reorder tasks
• Jumping to sub-tasks, notes and comments
• Viewing available keyboard shortcuts (most apps use the Cmd + ? shortcut to show you a list of all shortcuts)
• Share lists

Advanced Notes

Notes are a missed opportunity in Wunderlist. Clearly, its makers think its an important feature. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let you open a note in full-screen mode. If notes are important enough to be opened that way, why limit it to plain text? I find myself taking notes from calls and meetings. Wouldn’t it be great to add a rich-text editor or Markdown support? It would be even better if, with one click, I can sync / copy the note to Evernote.

Minor Bugs

I like to sort my tasks by Due Date. Immediately due on the top, rest below. Yet somehow, new tasks simply sit on the top even if they are due later. I have to manually apply the sort again. It’s irritating. It shouldn’t be difficult to permanently set the sort order of a list and have it override the app’s global “add new tasks to the top of the list” setting.

I wish the makers of Wunderlist include these features into the next versions of the app. I have very few complaints though. Wunderlist is stunning and I’m going to continue using it.

List of Documentaries For Design Inspiration →

Moving to Sketch

I use a number of tools throughout my design process. Typically, I start by logging my research into Evernote and compile my thoughts there. Once I do that, I try to draw a really rough wireframe using a pen and paper. If I’m happy with the general layout on paper, I’ll transfer that wireframe to a tool like Balsamiq if I’m working on a web app or I’ll create a pixel-perfect mockup using Adobe Photoshop if I’m designing a mobile app. In some cases, I’ll even use Adobe AfterEffects to animate the UI so developers can recreate the concept pixel-to-pixel.

I’ve used most of these tools for years. Balsamiq is fairly simple to learn but very basic. It took me  2 years to get sufficiently comfortable with Photoshop. Photoshop wasn’t specifically designed to mockup UIs. People just soft of work their way around it. I’m not usually comfortable trading tools that I’ve grown accustomed to over the years but, I decided to give Sketch a fair try this week after hearing so much about it. I know I’m late to the party but boy am I glad to finally make it.

I may have not appreciated Sketch as much if I hadn’t used Photoshop for so long. In the 2 days that I’ve used Sketch, I’m about 90% convinced that I’m never going to use Photoshop again for designing interfaces. Sketch feels like it was purpose-built for designing UIs. It combines the simplicity of Balsamiq with the power of Photoshop. It took me just a few hours to get comfortable with its features and I even recreated a layout that I had previously wireframed using Balsamiq and built using front-end technologies. The whole process just felt natural.

Here’s what I love about Sketch:

Simplicity

Somehow, you instantly feel comfortable when you use Sketch. I found myself navigating around the UI very easily. I even picked up all the keyboard shortcuts in just a few hours. If you’ve used Photoshop before, you’ll like how Sketch organizes layers. As a Mac user, the Inspector also feels very natural.

Artboards in Sketch are like canvases in Photoshop except, you can have more than one in the window. Sketch even comes with pre-defined templates to design responsive-web apps, iOS apps, Android apps (Material design) and icons.

Speed

The Sketch interface is extremely well laid-out. Photoshop can’t afford to do this because it’s used for a whole bunch of other reasons. You’ll find yourself ignoring half the menu items in Photoshop when designing UIs because they just don’t apply to the UI design process.

Sketch is not like that. It’s purpose-built. You’ll use just about every feature it has to offer. Not because it’s there but because it’s exactly what you need. This means that you’ll get from idea to UI about 3x faster (at least from my behavior).

Sketch also has a host of handy 3rd-party plugins that will make it even quicker to design UIs. Here’s a plugin that I especially liked: Content Generator. It’s already saved me hours of work. You can download hundreds of plugins and configure Sketch just the way you like it.

Community

It feels like Sketch is the only app that can give Photoshop a run for its money in terms of community support. There are hundreds of plugins & freebies created by the thousands of Sketch users. There are also 3rd-party tools like Framer that directly import Sketch files. I’m sure that I don’t have to ever use Adobe AfterEffects once I’ve mastered Framer.

Purpose-built Features

I can’t count the number of times I’ve copied a Photoshop layer style and applied it to other parts of the layout just to keep my UI consistent. I also didn’t bother with custom-swatches because they’re so time consuming to create and maintain. I would just copy colors, styles and whole layers. Not anymore with Sketch.

In Sketch, you can simply define a component of your UI as a “Symbol” to be reused. You can even define custom text styles that you can use across your UI. When you modify the style of one text field, all other text fields that use the same style inherit the changes. Magic!

Among other things, you can even copy the generated CSS styles for any element within the Sketch file and easily export images to be used in web, iOS and Android apps.

Conclusion

I’m convinced that Sketch is the right tool for UI design. It’s simple and yet, powerful. Why pay $700+ for Photoshop when you can get everything you want in just the right package for under $100? I haven’t even scratched the surface of Sketch. I’ll report back when I have used it some more.

UPDATE (12/20/2014)

Chinese Translation Available: This blog post was generously translated to Chinese by Laba Zhou - http://www.labazhou.net/2014/12/moving-to-sketch/.

Firefox is 10 years old!

Today, Mozilla Firefox turns 10 years old! I still clearly remember the day Firefox was announced. Around 2004 - early 2005, I was in front of a Windows 98 PC at a cyber cafe in Bangalore (I still didn’t own a PC myself) and read the news on a bulky CRT monitor.

It was around that time that I’d started to learn how to build websites. I remember downloading countless free HTML templates and tearing down the source code to understand how it all worked. My typical workflow went like this:

• Download free HTML template
• Load up the source file on Notepad (clearly, Sublime Text didn’t exist back then)
• Make modifications
• Open the file in Internet Explorer and see what broke

Often, I’d edit multiple pages at the same time and open each page in a new IE window. Before I knew it, I had 15 IE windows open. It was a mess.

The reason I remember the launch of Firefox so clearly is because of one very specific Firefox feature - tabbed browsing. This may sound trivial today but, back in the day I remember being very excited about it. It instantly solved my web development workflow and kept things organized. I’m sure there were several other under-the-hood improvements compared to IE but I didn’t know enough to get excited about those back then. Mine was a UX issue and Firefox nailed it. It helped me learn quicker and that’s all I wanted.

While I’m no longer an active Firefox user (I use Chrome), that doesn’t mean I think less of it in any way. Ten years later, Firefox is still an integral part of my development process. I test and debug my code on it. I’m sure my early learnings would have been very different without Firefox and don’t know what I would have done without it back in the day.