Jezper.se

Thoughts

by Jezper

  • Song of the day: GERD – Happier Than Me

    Late 2023 I discovered Swedish artist GERD via Spotifys Discover Weekly. It’s one of those rare moments when Spotifys AI truly delivers value to me as a user. GERD is so right up my alley you wouldn’t believe it. That also makes her the perfect starting point for a perpetual series of “song of the day” posts.

    My first reaction to GERD was that she sounds like the closest thing Sweden has to a Hannah Reid in English act London Grammar (one of my all time favorite bands). GERD is a little more electro pop and retains the same type of vibe while adding a level of playfulness to her songs and vocal delivery. Oh how I would love to make a track with GERD singing.

    Her catalogue is only a handful of releases so far, but big enough to spot the trend of being brim full of creativity and lacking conformity to regular structure. The songs seem written and produced the way they want them to, following their own whims, without any particular care for how it should fit any type of formula. It’s by no means avant garde experimental music, but it’s also not your good old standard format radio pop song. And it is EXCELLENT!

    I could’ve made it easy for myself by just picking Let Me In as the song of the day, since it’s my favorite GERD song. But her recently released Happier Than Me has that rare quality of being a song that get’s better the more I listen to it. And songs that have that quality truly fascinates me since it’s so very uncommon.

    Enjoy!

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    Output, outcome and impact

    A great ten minute video by Jeff Patton on how to approach product development by focusing on the behavioral changes you want in your users while addressing the uncomfortable truth that there are too many ideas, most of them suck and we can’t tell which doesn’t.

    So much in product development are either broken or measured in a way that doesn’t promote methods to actually succeed in providing the value that ensures a long term sustainable business.

    I’ll likely write at length about product development from my UX and PM perspective going forward and I will make no claims about knowing what I talk about all the time, it’s a learning process for me too. Product development is complex and it’s nowhere near “figured out”.

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    What’s up with Google Photos?

    For “we’re-printing-a-book-with-baby-photos” reasons I’m currently forced* to use Google Photos to organize the photos we want included. And I’m baffled. I just assumed that since Google Photos has been around for so long it would be at least a couple of steps ahead of iCloud Photos Library.

    But oh no. This service is clearly not built by people that care about photos. Or people. Or use cases. Or volume. Or curation. Organise albums in folders? Nope. Batch delete? Nope? Different types of views? Faces identification? It’s complicated for unknown reasons.

    The only thing I’ve found that I was pleasantly surprised by was the ability to batch edit dates of a group of photos while keeping the time relative to each other. That’s quite neat. But that’s all.

    It makes me truly appreciate iCloud Photo Library even more, how far it has come. I need to up my game to convert my Xbox loving, Windows hugging, Android swinging future wife to be to join me on this side.

    *the only service we’ve found that supports the amount of pages we want is Optimalprint, which allows for Google Photos integration or direct file upload. However, if you want the book chronological, direct file upload doesn’t work since they will come into the order they are uploaded which is not sequentially, so it turns into a mess. And there’s no meta data, search or filtering, so you then have to re-arrange based purely on looking at them. That’s a no go. That leaves Google Photos.