Making the most of OS X Spaces
I read with particular interest a blog post proposing a navigational re-design for Apple's Spaces, the OS X feature that implements multiple screens user can switch between. What sparked my interest is that I'd just diagrammed how I layout my Spaces this weekend, thinking I'd blog this someday. Like today.
I configure my Macbook Pro with 9 Spaces, arranged in a 3 x 3 configuration. The center space (#5) is my dedicated "Home" space: the one I always come back to. The blue spaces are for key activities. The rest for auxilliary ones.
In practice the center space is where I do email (Gmail), catch up with Twitter, take notes, and surf the web. Right now, I find I don't need four blue "dedicated activity" spaces and only use three, The remaining "sand spaces" usually have the programs listed but will change as needs dictate. For instance if I'm doing a lot of Rails development (#4) then I may use the spaces above and below (#1 & 7) to display documentation or work with files on the server with Cyberduck.
Advantages of this layout:
- Using the center space as "Home" makes it easier to return to it, my fingers can find their way without me thinking about it
- The four spaces above, below, left and right of center are very quickly accessed, and there are two spaces either side of them if I need more room to work
- I don't use MacFreedom (even when I'm focused I still need the net) but I'm a firm believer in eliminating distractions. Keeping email and Twitter on the center space achieves this just fine
- I do use Optimal Layout as my task switcher (love it!). It sorts my windows / apps according to the screen I'm on: very handy
One detail I've left out: I often use my MBP with an external 24" monitor, effectively doubling my total real estate to 18 screens. Here's an example of this looked like over the weekend. (Oh, and 8GB RAM helps to run all those programs smoothly :-)
Other tips? Let me know!
Why Developed Countries Don't Experience Food Riots
I was listening to NPR on the iPad this morning (nice app, but so unstable). The subject was rising food prices (30+% increase over the last few years) impacting poorer countries, like those in northern Africa, and that this was one of the main causes of the riots in Tunisia and Egypt: when people go hungry for too long, revolution happens.
Still, if food prices are rising why haven't we seen price increases here in the US? After a bit of digging, I found this explanation. It turns out that in the US (and I expect developed countries in general) the actual cost of the food we eat is a fraction of what we actually pay for (the bolding is mine):
Production and marketing costs determine the minimum price of food in the retail marketplace. Production costs are typically called the "farm value" of food, and they comprise about 20 percent of the final food cost. This percentage varies by type of food, depending on how highly processed or perishable the food is. The farm value for meats and dairy products is around 28 percent, for poultry around 41 percent, for cereals around 5 percent, for fresh fruits 16 percent, and for fresh vegetables 19 percent. As consumers demand more highly processed foods, fresh foods from distant places, and foods ready to eat, the farm value falls as a percentage of the retail price.
So when you buy a $4 box of cereals at the grocery store, the raw ingredients only cost about $0.20. In a country like a Egypt where 20% of the population subsists on $2/day or less (some articles I've seen put this at 40%), people spend a substantial portion of their income on food. A 30% percent increase is going to hurt. A lot.
Here's the price of wheat over the past two years.
In the US most citizens probably wouldn't notice a 30% increase for two reasons. One is that we're (on average) over 20 times more affluent than our Egyptian counterparts, so we spend a much smaller portion of our income on food, and we can tolerate an increase.
(Hard not to notice how 30 years of dictatorship have flatlined Egypt's GDP per capita...)
The second reason we don't notice is that a 30% hike would push the farm value of that $4 box of cereals to $0.26, which is usually absorbed by the rest of the value chain without being passed on to consumers. So what are we paying for then?
Raw commodities (farm value), labor, and packaging comprise 67 percent of the cost of food. The rest of the costs are in transportation, advertising, rent, profits, energy, business taxes, depreciation, interest payments, miscellaneous costs, and repairs. These last types of costs have increased at about the rate of inflation and have not changed their share of the food dollar much over time.
No wonder more and more people (ourselves included) are buying local.
Note: Yes, I know there are many other reasons developed countries don't have food riot (e.g. democracy & the ability vote bad leaders out of office). What struck me most is how most of the money we, in the developed world, pay for food doesn't even go towards the food itself.
Delivering Great Service? The Journey counts as much as the Destination
A few years ago some colleagues and I were dining at a Parisian restaurant. It had been a long day and we'd picked an establishment close to our hotel. I ordered a seafood dish. The waitress was perfunctory: just doing her job. After a few mouthfuls of gritty crunching between my teeth, it was clear that the food hadn't been properly cleaned.
I called the waitress and mentioned there was sand in my food. Used to living in the US I expected her to apologize, swiftly whisk my plate away, and offer me something else (on the house maybe?). Possibly the chef would come over to proffer his excuses. Did any of this happen? No. Instead the waitress explained in a sarcastic tone: "It comes from ze sea Monsieur, of course it will 'ave sand!" Then she walked away.
This attitude, though extreme in this example, is more prevalent in Europe than the States, esp. in Northern Europe. People in service industries focus on the destination, i.e. the ultimate transaction, such as curbing your hunger, at the expense of the journey. Who cares if there's sand if your food? At least you're no longer hungry, right?
Focusing on the transaction is fine if the service is low value. Fast food joints focus on a cheap, repeatable, consistent experience. Margins are thin enough that there's little room for personalized service, though even here courtesy and a smile can go a long way. As the price of the service rises, how the transaction is delivered, the "journey", is as important as its delivery, the "destination".
This applies online just as much as offline: your site may sell goods cheaper than the competition but if that's not enough if you care about your customers' lifetime value. And if you don't focus on repeat business, you'll be putting yourself at the mercy of search engines and spending more and more on advertising. In fact, unless you're selling commodity items being cheapest probably isn't even the most important criteria.
Ultimately you need your customers to reach the destination, i.e. purchase something. To achieve this you should focus on their journey: understand why people buy from you, what their needs are, how you can differentiate your service, how you can make their shopping experience more enjoyable, informative, and relevant (reviews, videos, testimonials, leveraging the social web, etc.), and deliver great customer support.
If you can consistently delight your users with a fantastic experience, as well as a good product, your customers will happily reach your destinations over and over and over.
(Picture by James Jordan)
