• If we want to create passionate users, we need to help them get better.
  • ‘Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at.”
  • Many people still have their cameras permanently set on “P” – automatic mode — even though those cameras offer finer control over things like shutter speed and aperture
  • What would it mean to our users if we unlock the door and help them be awesome?
• In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, a major theme is the “10,000 Hour Rule”, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something.
  • 10,000 is a long time – it’ can be a depressing prospect
  • [Joey: According to Outliers, 10,000 hours makes for about 3 hours of focused practice every day for 10 years.]
  • To get good, you have to practice all the time.
  • Anything that makes it easier for your users to get practice – any time, anywhere – will help them get their 10,000 hours (and get good) sooner.
• Give your users patterns for success
  • In any pattern you give your users, make sure that there’s “the one thing” that they can take away as a lesson
  • You need to answer the question: “What’s the one thing you can do to be amazing?”
• Give your users better gear
  • They’ll work better
  • “Spend the money!”
  • Give people a way to justify the better gear you’re offering them
• Motivation is important
  • Treat motivation as a gift
  • Make a product that people will actually use
  • “Your treadmill is not in the corner gathering dust because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.”
  • “Make the right thing easy for people and the wrong thing hard.”
• And now, some anti-patterns:
  • We focus on the tool and not the thing the users want to accomplish with the tool
  • “We treat people really well before they buy, and afterwards, we treat them poorly.”
    • This is also the reason people don’t want to upgrade
    • If we want to help people upgrade – which is what they’ll need to do if they want to go forward – we have to accept that it’s a loss and a hit to their self-esteem
  • We write FAQs as if our users they were intellectually curious and have a tablet PC handy
    • People hit the FAQs and help because they’re having a horrible experience
  • “Don’t let the ease-of-use police” step in an dumb something down
    • You don’t feel awesome when you’ve mastered something that a 3-year-old can master
  • Hiring a social media consultant is the wrong thing to do
    • They focus in the wrong direction
    • Social media consultant are focused on making your users love you, which is the wrong thing – nobody is awesome because they love you
    • They think the goal is to make users want to party with you
    • The true goal is to make your users want to party because of something you did that helped them become awesome. They should want to party because of you, but without you
    • You want to connect users with other users, not with your company
    • A much better use of social media is to find out:
      • What role we play in our users’ lives
      • What role our competitors play in our users’ lives
      • What the pain and pleasure points for our users are
    • By trying to be competitive and focusing on our competitors, we end up being uncompetitive
      • This leads to featurities
      • We end up building things that end up harming our users
      • The best thing we can do is to look at the bigger, cooler thing – the world in which our products and our competitors’ products exist, the problems that the products are trying solve, the things at which our users are trying to kick ass – and blog, tweet and use social media about that
  • Getting WOM (Word-of-Mouth) may be the social marketers’ holy grail, but the true goal is WOFO – Word of [Effing] Obvious.
    • If your users are so good, you get WOFO.

This time I decided to tune Aptana’s Java virtual machine to achieve top possible performance. To do that I edited the file AptanaStudio.ini usually located in “C:\Users\<YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Aptana Studio 1.2″ if you install it on Vista using default settings. You may just search for AptanaStudio.ini to find out where it is.

So here is the contents of my file. I will explain the meaning of each line I added or modified. The arguments added or modified are located after -vmargs (arguments to the virtual machine).

-name
Aptana
Studio
-vmargs
-Xmx384M
-Xms128M
-Xverify:none
-XX:+UseParallelGC
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods
-XX:CompileThreshold=100
-Djava.awt.headless=true
-Djava.awt.nativeDoubleBuffering=true

• Xmx384M – maximum heap(memory) size Aptana can consume (384Mb). This value is set automatically by the installer based on the amount of memory installed on your computer. You may adjust it to give Java machine more memory to cache compiled code
• Xms128M – the initial heap(memory) size. It is the minimum amount of memory Aptana will consume. Increasing this value will speed up start up a little
• Xverify:none – skip the class verification stage during class loading . Using -Xverify:none disables Java class verification, which can provide a 10-15% improvement in startup time
• XX:+UseParallelGC – use parallel (throughput) garbage collector. Can provide significant performance boost on modern computers with several cores or processors. Surpisingly, it shows good performance even on single core processors
• XX:+AggressiveOpts – turns on point performance optimizations that are expected to be on by default in upcoming releases of Java machine.
• XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods – turns on fast method entry code for accessor method. Improves performance.
• XX:CompileThreshold=100 – this switch will make startup time slower, by Java machine to compile many more methods down to native code sooner than it otherwise would. The reported result is snappier performance once Aptana  is running, since more of the UI code will be compiled rather than interpreted. This value represents the number of times a method must be called before it will be compiled.
• Djava.awt.headless=true – this line is present in the .ini file by default
• Djava.awt.nativeDoubleBuffering=true – tells the UI to use hardware double buffering instead of drawing everything in software. Not sure it have any effect because of the switch above (headless=true) which tells Java there is no monitor or keyboard connected to the computer

The result of the modifications of AptanaStudio.ini is faster and more responsive Aptana. I also use the Port of Ruby Blue color theme for Aptana which looks very nice See the screenshot below:

Aptana Studio with color theme "Port of Ruby Blue"