I’m usually quite fond of weekends. There’s never a good reason for it, since they’ve looked like normal working days for quite some months now. But the feeling of a time off still lingers and I’m usually happy when it’s Friday.

I’m also quite happy that there are only few more hours of this hellish weekend, when nothing went right. Among other things, I got so exhausted that I slept straight for almost 12 hours (personal record) and I got acquainted really well with spinning wheel on my Powerbook. Probable cause: dying disk at time when that’s least needed. One more thing made by Apple (beside iMac and iPod) that I need to take to service when I get around to it.

So, not much work has been done in last few days and I won’t be able to finish even what I promised to do. This never fails to annoy me.

I have been thinking, while strolling around lake, about when to reveal our very buzzword compliant service to the greater public. Is the right time when it’s finally useful, but still obviously inspired by other services found on web or is it better to wait half a year or so, when it will gain the really interesting parts?

I still think the right time is this autumn, even though this will lead to accusations of plagiarism. At this point they won’t be really unfounded even if I believe we are just borrowing ideas from others to build something interesting and different (hopefully somebody will someday return the compliment).

However, it would be good to see how others react to what we build and to fix things now when this can be done more easily then if we wait longer. I also learned the importance of releasing things to keep developers motivated and at least somewhat happy. Nobody likes to be completely irrelevant. At last, there’s also the ever present problem of money.

If anybody actually gets around to reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. What do you prefer, big bang revelation or evolution of service?

When I started my company with a friend two years ago, I had many plans for it and myself. One of them was to make interesting, innovative stuff. Hard problems others weren’t tackling or we thought we could do better.

A year and a half ago we started to work on what is slowly, but clearly becoming Marela (which should see light of the day this autumn). It’s interesting how you start working on one clear idea and with each week that passes, your idea and your view change a bit until after a while, they are very much different from what you set out to do. Same passions, same goals, but quite a different result.

What really changed in last year is what I personally want to do. I’d still like to do things that nobody has done yet, but more important now is to take ideas from others and try to make them more accessible, easier to comprehend and use. I’ve noticed that most of my innovating these days, as much as it happens, is directed toward these goals.

Lately I’ve been having awful time using stuff made by Apple. Ipod refuses to wake up from sleep without reboot, Powerbook added broken Superdrive to random freezes and new iMac seems to find ever new ways to annoy me. So I’ve spent a good amount of time last week to recover pictures from last vacation and fix other random iPhoto quirks and while I was doing that, a wonderful thing happened.

Something shifted in my head and for a while I could see clearly how computers look to people, who unlike me haven’t spent a better part of two decades behind a keyboard, but use them with the same understanding and confidence as I can use lathe.

God, it’s awful how much crap we produced and still produce. I’ve never seen so much wisdom in Jacob Nielsen’s words as in those moments. Gray backgrounds with blue links and black text might be dull, but you certainly don’t have to guess a lot on what to click after you’ve seen one such page.

Luckily the insight isn’t completely gone, but I wish I’d keep more of it. I’m not saying we should abandon everything and return to bleak past, especially since the problem is self correcting one, but I do feel impelled to make my work more accessible to more people.

In a way, I think there’s a dilemma of who you want to reach. I believe younger generations don’t and won’t have problems with most of the things designers and programmers come up since computers and technology have always been a large part of their lives. However, in general, it’s a bigger problem for those, who haven’t picked up idioms of computer user interfaces young enough.

Personally, I think making things easier for later makes it easier for former too and therefore a reasonable goal to pursue.

Back from Ireland, a place everyone should visit at least once. If you have time, take a few days to explore Dublin and travel to west coast. Those like me, who find abundance of national pride and flags creepy, might skip Northern Ireland.

New development posts might take few days to appear, while I catch up with everything.