Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with Andrew Parker.  After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed.  This post (which I'll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical. I wrote recently about reinventing the home row, and specifically about Brewster and Cue, two apps that I think have a lot of potential.  As it happens, in both cases, my primary frustration is that they're not fast enough.  In both cases, what I want is "instant magic" -- fire it up, get straight to what I want to do, and bam! Speed is important everywhere, but it's extra extra important in apps that I fire up often, and for short periods of time.  In the case of Brewster, it's to find someone -- quickly -- and contact them.  In the case of Cue, it's to find out what's next in my day.  In the case of Foursquare, it's to quickly check in wherever I am.  In all of these cases, I'm just hopping into the app for a second, to do one quick thing, and hopping out.  Many times a day.  When this happens quickly, my heart is warmed with web awesome.  When I find myself waiting for these apps to launch or load data, my blood pressure rises and I curse technology's crushing grip on my life. In talking about this with Andrew, he pointed me to CloudMagic, an app that creates a search index across your cloud services, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter.  CloudMagic's slogan is "Find stuff in a second" and the first testimonial, from TechCrunch, is "It's really, really, really fast".  And boy, is it. Within seconds of installing CloudMagic, I was flying through it -- popping it open, searching for something, finding it, and hopping off to the thing I was looking for. Warm happiness filled my body instantly.  After using the app for 1 minute, I moved it to the home screen on my phone.  After installing the browser button, it's first in my list.

Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with Andrew Parker.  After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed.  This post (which I'll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical. I wrote recently about reinventing the home row, and specifically about Brewster and Cue, two apps that I think have a lot of potential.  As it happens, in both cases, my primary frustration is that they're not fast enough.  In both cases, what I want is "instant magic" -- fire it up, get straight to what I want to do, and bam! Speed is important everywhere, but it's extra extra important in apps that I fire up often, and for short periods of time.  In the case of Brewster, it's to find someone -- quickly -- and contact them.  In the case of Cue, it's to find out what's next in my day.  In the case of Foursquare, it's to quickly check in wherever I am.  In all of these cases, I'm just hopping into the app for a second, to do one quick thing, and hopping out.  Many times a day.  When this happens quickly, my heart is warmed with web awesome.  When I find myself waiting for these apps to launch or load data, my blood pressure rises and I curse technology's crushing grip on my life. In talking about this with Andrew, he pointed me to CloudMagic, an app that creates a search index across your cloud services, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter.  CloudMagic's slogan is "Find stuff in a second" and the first testimonial, from TechCrunch, is "It's really, really, really fast".  And boy, is it. Within seconds of installing CloudMagic, I was flying through it -- popping it open, searching for something, finding it, and hopping off to the thing I was looking for. Warm happiness filled my body instantly.  After using the app for 1 minute, I moved it to the home screen on my phone.  After installing the browser button, it's first in my list.