CherryTomato v0.4 is out. It now shows the remaining pomodoro time in the system tray. I realized that I really wanted that feature and a number of people have requested it so here it is.
There are also a number of minor bug fixes and performance improvements. There is more to do but I thought I would just get this one out.
Get it here: http://www.beatpoints.com/cherrytomato
Kimmo and I have been arranging Sun, Sand and Startups in Barcelona for about a year and it has always been great fun.
We decided to do one in New York and for a first event I must say that it is looking promising. At this time, 75 people have signed up and more keep ticking in, including some people with very interesting companies and projects. I am really looking forward to it. We will be at Water Taxi Beach, on July 22nd at 7pm. If you are in town, you should join us, it’s free and it will be both inspiring and fun! Sign up on EventBrite.
I released version 0.3 of CherryTomato a couple of days ago. It has the two most requested features so far. One is the ability to be reminded to start a new pomodoro after a break of five, ten or fifteen minutes.
The other is a mini dashboard that shows a large timer. This works particularly well if you have two monitors – you can keep it visible on your secondary monitor all the time.
The dashboard also shows you how productive you have been this month and last month. It is mostly an experiment. In time, you will be able to keep track via a beatpoints web app where you can do various analytics, but that is evolving slowly.
If you haven’t tried CherryTomato you might be wondering how it would know this. Every time you finish a pomodoro, CherryTomato asks you to rate it from 1 to 10. This rating should reflect how focused you were, how much work you did and not least, how well the work you did finish matched your estimations. If you did more work than you estimated, that is not a good sign and should subtract a bit from your rating.
Now, these are accumulated over the day and form what I call the productivity index. Theoretically, you can run 57 pomodoros in a day, making the maximum possible productivity index 570 if they are each a 10. I find that with the way I rate myself, I tend to reach somewhere around 100 on good days. I am hoping that seeing my own statistics will help motivate me if I am running behind.
In Barcelona, I worked from a gorgeous studio on Plaza Real.
Plaza Real is located centrally in Barcelona, right next to La Rambla and there are many many tourists. From the studio, we can observe them as well as all the people who try to make money on them.
There is one juggler who has a signature performance. His trick: failing. I have seen him do it over and over again. While doing a difficult performance, he will drop the balls in a way that doesn’t look like it was intentional. He looks kind of shy and vulnerable, and while I think he is actually a pretty good juggler, it is obvious that he has discovered an improved business model of appealing to peoples compassion.
If you use Google Chrome it is already built in. If you use FireFox, you can get Prism. With it, you can transform a web page into a “desktop app”. Which is realy nothing more than a shortcut to a single-tab browser window.
I saw the utility of this but I never really used it. Until I switched to GrooveShark and Deezer as my main music players, that is. Running GrooveShark in a tab among 30 other tabs in FireFox is a pain because it takes way too long to locate when you want to pause because the phone is ringing (or skip the track because the “smart” radio is playing a super-embarrassing track, giving the entire office the impression that you really dig Celine Dion’s greatest hits).
XKCD: Pandora
Also, it is annoying that you accidentally close the music player tab every now and then, all surprised about where the music went.
So, go and get Prism or Chrome and turn your music sites into apps that you can run separately (even in the system tray if you so desire).
Cheers!
The first “official” release of CherryTomato has been launched.
Download it from here: www.beatpoints.com/cherrytomato
What’s a Sonic Boom?
You know about the Doppler effect. It’s what happens when an ambulance passes you at great speed: the pitch of the siren changes. This is because the ambulance itself is moving along with the sound waves, resulting in a higher frequency reaching your ear when it approaches you than when it is moving away from you. This can be expressed with the following formula:
f0 is the observed frequency, f is the frequency emitted by the source, vt is the velocity of the source and v is the velocity of sound.
Right.
You also know that when a plane travels at mach speed i.e. the speed of sound, there is a large burst when it “breaks the sound barrier”. Why is that?
Simple: Given the formula, when the speed of the plane equals the speed of sound, v = vt, the divisor becomes zero and BANG! Natures throws a Divide By Zero exception. I suspect God thought he didn’t need to handle this one exception because at the time, none of his creations were able to move at such speeds anyway so there was no way the situation would ever occur..