We’ve added some new screen casts to Graphient.com. Hopefully they’ll help you get a better sense of what Timebinder is and how it works.

The first one is an overview of the Timebinder interface:

The second one is a How To guide for building a basic stock graph.

Now that we have a good process down for making these, you can expect to see more in the coming weeks. If you want to see them on our site, go here.

How do you know what you’ve done is good? This is a pretty serious question for pretty much everyone involved in making things. It doesn’t matter if it’s software or tableware, if you have made something you need some criteria to judge it by. There are a lot of ways to come up with these criteria. At Graphient we view everything we do as Design. This gives us a handy two thousand year old philosophical back catalogue from which to draw ideas about judging the goodness of what we make.

Slightly less than two millennia ago a Roman architect named Vitruvius wrote a guide for building projects called De Architectura. In it he declared that a well made building would have three qualities: Firmness, Commodity, and Delight. This formulation is helpful in understanding how to judge not just buildings, but also smaller things like cars, or more abstract things like software. There is no way to rank these three qualities in importance, they are all equally important and a deficiency in any one can sink a project.

Firmness refers to the stability of a structure and also to the feeling of stability that structure conveys. A well made building shouldn’t fall over and it shouldn’t feel like it might fall over. Similarly well made software shouldn’t crash, and it shouldn’t feel like it might crash. For us, this means paying very careful attention to how control surfaces feel and respond and to how interface elements lay out. If a button renders funny, or seems out of alignment with the rest of the layout, this communicates to the user that the software is not truly firm and worthy of their trust. If they don’t trust the software they won’t enter their precious data into it.

Commodity is a word that has changed in meaning over the years. The original latin word was Utilitas, which should help to point the way. Commodity is the quality of suited-to-its-purposes-ness. It means the the thing you have designed must be made in such a way that it serves a purpose. You could also call this usefulness, or product-market fit.

Delight can also be hard to pin down. A well made thing can be beautiful simply through its firmness, but a delightful thing is fun to use or interact with. It inspires the human heart. Perhaps, it even helps us to be more human. I’ve heard it expressed as “desirability” or even “sexiness” but I don’t think that goes far enough. The delightful thing reaches further into us than desire, it provokes a response.

These three qualities help us frame discussions about Timebinder and Graphient. They are three qualities we know we must aspire to in all aspects of our work. They help us to judge what we’ve done and they help point the way forward.

Back in 2009, when we were really just getting started with what is now Timebinder, Mark and I went to see Dan Bricklin talk at the New York Tech Meetup. Dan is the co-inventor of the VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. One of the anecdotes that dan related was about hearing back from his users for the first time. It turned out that anesthesiologists were big fans of the new software. They were using it to calculate dosages for their patients. Dan described this as completely unexpected. No matter how much research you do, there will always be users and use cases that you have not anticipated. Some of those users will seem perfectly obvious in retrospect. Of Course! Anesthesiologists!

As we tighten the last screws on Timebinder prior to launch, I keep asking myself who our anesthesiologists are. To be honest, there’s no way of knowing. Still, I can’t wait to meet them.

There are shortages of many things when you are running a startup. Cash, time and talent are all limited resources that must be carefully managed. One thing that their is no shortage of is advice on how to run things. Whether it’s Six Simple Rules of Logo Design, or Ten Ways to Manage Engineers Better, or yet another article on what “Minimum Viable Product” actually means, the internet is awash in blog posts on best practices for startups. Filtering through all this can be a bit overwhelming. The amount of opinion presented as fact is staggering and a lot of it, not necessarily good, is repeated ad infinitum on blog after blog after blog.

This is where things get potentially hazardous. As has been famously noted, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. As a corollary to that, nobody knows if you have any idea what you are talking about either.

My background is graphic design. I’ve worked on major brand campaigns, I’ve designed hundreds of logos and I’ve worked to coordinate the look and feel of companies across multiple media platforms. Until I quit it all to found Graphient, I charged a lot of money for these services. I can safely say that I am an expert graphic designer. I routinely encounter blog posts on graphic design that present superficial understanding of the topic as expert advice. This of course calls into question all the “expert” advice I’ve read on other startup or product development related issues.

So what? The internet is sort of known for a bad signal to noise ratio, right? Yeah, I guess. That doesn’t really justify the sheer volume of posts. I was mulling this over after work the other day with my esteemed colleague, Mark Trumpbour. We decided that like so much in the world the fault lay with Search Engine Optimization and a lack of critical thinking about received wisdom.

One of the first pieces of advice you get when you launch a startup is to have a blog. It is suggested that you use this new platform to project your opinions on things related to your domain in order to increase both your mindshare and your google ranking on searches related to what your company does. This dovetails nicely with the advice that an entrepreneur should seek to become a thought leader within the business community. So, there’s your means and motivation for publishing. Now, what are you going to publish? How about some advice for other entrepreneurs? Maybe you could tell them about the importance of having a blog?

Two final statements before I go back to the salt mines:

1. There is in fact some very worthy advice out there.
2. The irony of the fact that this opinion is being published on the blog we set up when we founded the company does not escape me. We were following some advice we read on the internet.