All of the starters are now present at the Barcamp Berlin and it has already proven to be fruitful. Our first FourStarters tool has been developed just today. It actually is a freebee productivity tool for your desktop, and it is Mac and PC friendly.

Download the free tool here

A week ago I noticed zapreader.com, a site that makes it relatively easy to teach yourself speedreading. At least 1000 people also bookmarked it and from personal experience I can say: It really works quite well. In a nutshell, it takes a bunch of text and splits it into words. It then displays each word (or a block of two, which works a bit better in my opinion) in a huge font in the middle of your screen, for a fraction of a second, before moving on to the next word.

However, the ZAP reader itself has some annoyances so I decided to fix them.

Thus, I present: the (mac only!) desktop app version of zap reader. Download here: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMac.dmg.

It works very simply: select text in any application, then hit CMD+SHIFT+V and ZAPMac automatically starts and zapreads the selected text for you. Once the text is done, it quits automatically. Use Z and X to rewind/fast forward 16 words at a time, and use A and Q to speed up or slow down. space starts and stops, and there are preferences to change a number of things, though the defaults worked the best for me. It intentionally goes fullscreen - to make sure there is no distraction for your eyes.

Apparently it works so well because of two things:

• It saves you from having to ‘track’ - you no longer expend effort to keep your eyes in the right place. Your eyes no longer need to move at all, just keep staring at the same place.
• It makes use of ‘brain replay’. Ever said ‘What did you say?” to someone, only to realize that you DID hear them after all? Your brain has a limited ‘pipeline’ of sorts, but you usually incorrectly think you misheard or misread forcing you to take action. When reading, this means you often reread sentences that you don’t need to reread. With ZAP Reader you force yourself into going forward.

This is my first foray into Mac Os X Cocoa development, incidentally. I spent maybe 12 hours on getting this thing together, including learning a new programming language from scratch (well, enough to write this, anyhow), and including learning how to distribute it, set it up with a nice preference pane that stores its settings in the right places, and all that jazz. Basically cocoa development is really nice and very simple, which may explain why Mac software looks so good.

If you’re interesting in the source, here you go: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMacSource.zip.

This Friday we will be having a blogwalk in Amsterdam (the eleventh such edition) and I am happy to be participating.

(more…)

Creativity is fashionable these days. Many people I know love to fight about new ideas endlessly - or ‘brainstorm’ as they like to call it. It doesn’t bother them that most of those ‘brainstorms’ are nothing like the creative technique referred to here. Being a creative professional myself I feel the urge to share my thoughts on creativity with you:

First of all: what is creativity? According to my favourite dictionary it means ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.’ (source http://dictionary.com). That’s an elaborate way of saying ‘coming up with new combinations of existing things’.

Why would you like to be creative? Because it fuels innovation. Creativity doesn’t help you maintain reality as it is. So if that’s what you want in the first place, don’t be creative (and stop reading here).

If you’re still reading, you might wonder how to be creative? A common misconception is that new ideas just pop up. As I’ve pointed out before the key ingredients for creativity are existing things - that is everything you’ve seen, heard, smelled or tasted before. This means you’ll have to trigger your memory.

Luckily you’re not the first person ever to be creative - there’s a whole lot of tools and techniques available to dig up ideas. Apart from brainstorming there’s also brainsketching, mindmapping, problem reversal, forced fit, etc. (Google for more). All of them have two things in common:

• Less is not more - 99% of all ideas are insane, so in order to come up with one realistic idea you’ll have to generate one hundred
• First you generate ideas, then you judge them - postpone ‘yeah, but…’ until you’ve generated enough ideas to chose from

Many creative techniques require the exact opposite skills of those you’ve been taught at school. If you’re planning to use such techniques, ask somebody experienced to guide you through the process. Don’t think you know it all - watch and learn.

(originally posted at CristianoBetta.com)

I saw so many people at BarCampLondon2 with their own Moo Cards that I decided to ditch my old business cards and get some myself. I really loved the idea of personalizing your cards, and not having 250 cards with the same design. So I ordered 100 (minimum) with some of the nicer images in my Flickr feed.

Now, I learned a wise lesson with my last business cards that made it very worthwhile to buy only 100 this time for the same price (19.99 euro) as the 250 I bought before. The whole idea of buying a lot of equal business cards is just ridiculous unless you are a sales person. For the rest of us fewer is better because we are (A) not popular enough that we would be going to run out of them soon and (B) if we will, we are probably popular enough that the important people manage to find you without.

Now if you think you would eventually definitely run out of the cards, it is still good to only by a few. I for example ordered 250 a while back, on which most of the information is now outdated due to my move to the UK. Buying less cards makes it easy to update your information and maybe once in a while chose a fresh design.

One my Twitter contacts who did go to FOWA pointed out Soocial to me. The product is not yet released but you can sign up to stay informed. From their site:

Soocial is software that lets you use your contacts anywhere you need them. It’s a system that synchronizes your contacts between your mobile, pda, home pc, work pc, and third party applications.

It really sounds cool and takes another step from having to keep any critical information on my computer. My recent harddisk crash proves that having your emails and data online is a very valuable thing. I actually never got to setting my contacts because every once in a while I lose that data and it is not worth setting up properly. With only 522 signed up people I think they might need a bit more promotion so go sign up now!

As I recently moved to London to finish my Master thesis, I had to leave my entire network of friends behind. I used the first couple of weeks to find a room and settle down, but after that I wanted to get to know some people here. Unfortunately there was no-one really interesting to talk to at Imperial College as I do educational software and the rest of the department is into Visual Image Processing.

Lucky for me I was able to attend BarCampLondon2 in the beginning of February. It was my first BarCamp and the experience was brilliant. I was amazed of the quality of most of the presentations and met quite some nice people. This was when I noticed that all these social web tools available these days make it really easy to network. So the next thing I went to was the GirlGeekDinner (with Melinda) at which I again met some new people.

At this moment, I use a few tools to get around in London, and it wouldn’t have been this easy without them. Here are some of the tools I use:

• Upcoming feed for London in iCal for finding interesting events
• Twitter to stay in touch with people I met at BarCampLondon2
  • Tip: Direct mobile messages with Twitter can actually serve as a free SMS provider
• Plazes to find open hotspots and locations that attract people