design — No comments
27
Feb 13

Book Review: Mobile First

ABA-hero-6
I’ve started reading A Book Apart, a series for “people who make websites”. There’s now seven short books (about 100 pages each), with two more on the way.

Here’s my cliff notes on and review of Mobile First, by Luke Wroblewski, the former Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! and co-founder of Bagcheck, which was acquired by Twitter.

The first part of the book introduces the ‘huge trend’ that is mobile. The stats, from 2010, are now well-outdated and the author really should’ve skipped this section altogether, I know I did. It isn’t necessary in a book on designing for the mobile web, leave that to the research reports.

The book is focused on the mobile web, not native apps. Continue reading →

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22
Feb 13

A New Thermostat: The Big Dial

I’ve started looking at the world through the eye of a designer. It’s part of my job as a product manager at Wandou Labs, but it’s also just something I enjoy. And since this is my personal blog, I get to do as I damn well please, thank you very much. So I plan to start writing here, as well as on TechRice, with my thoughts on interactive design from time to time. Here it goes…
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08
Oct 12

Graphing Kai’s 1439 Facebook Friends

This graph was made as part of a free online course that i’m taking via Coursera called Social Network Analysis.

To create the graph, I exported my friendship data from a Facebook app called NetGet and then visualized it using the Gephi software. I named the clusters and individuals myself. Given my travels, I’d guess my graph has more independent clusters than the average person’s.

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24
Dec 11

A Christmas Truce

Last year for Christmas, my German grandmother sent me a true story that captures the spirit of the holiday. I reread it again this year, and wanted to share it here. My family’s story is intimately tied to World War II, as my grandfathers fought on opposite sides of the war.

Below is the English edition (source) and the German is here: “Winternacht in den Ardennen“. The story is also available in this book of Christmas stories.

Merry Christmas!
Kai

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travel — 2 comments
16
Feb 11

A Post from England & Germany

Over the Chinese New Years, I escaped to Old Europe.

LONDON

My first stop was to observe Max, James, Chloé, and Priyanka in their native habitat, the quaint island of Great Britain.

Hiking with James and Chloé in the hills of northern England. If you squint into the distance you may just spot King Arthur, or at least that's how I imagine it.

After living together for one year in Shanghai, Max could no longer stand my company and fled to London, where he’s flourishing in his role as a budding shipping tycoon. Shortly before I arrived he closed a 4am deal for shipping thousands of tons of iron ore, and my mind flashes to scenes of Wall Street and Jerry Maguire: “SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!!!” And his Chinese continues to put mine to shame, even though he no longer lives surrounded by 1.3 billion native speakers. Continue reading →

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