Archive for February, 2015
Matters of the present and future
I read this piece by Oliver Sacks in the times last week, and have reread it 5 or 6 times since. It’s a reflection upon learning that he has terminal cancer. Read it before continuing, it’s beautiful.
I couldn’t figure out exactly why it spoke to me so deeply, but now I know. Sack’s sets up a framework between living in “matters of the present” vs. “matters of the future” which rings very true to me. Friends, travel, enjoying each day…these are matters of the present that anyone alive can choose to prioritize. There is common wisdom that guides us to “live in the present,” and workaholics are always warned of the hospice nurse who reminds us that “the dying never say ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.’” Peace in the middle east, global warming…these are matters that belong to the future. Unresolved…but hairy problems that are only of concern to someone who will be here tomorrow, or next year when solutions are more in reach.
I found it fascinating that Sacks has chosen to live in the present in his last months, not because he wishes he had done it differently before, but rather because he can no longer have a role in matters of the future. I love the notion that matters of the future, when put against the present, represent struggle and effort…that matters of the future are work…and focussing on them is…by definition…not living in the present…yet Sacks obviously valued his participation in these matters as, if not more deeply, than those of the present. I loved the gratitude he expresses around having had “an intercourse with the world. The special intercourse a writers and readers.” I take away form these words that work and struggle, and toiling with the future is a great privilege…and that “living in the moment” while such a privilege is available to us is to forgo a right granted to all with a tomorrow.
I live this privilege to toil with future…everyday…as I go to work…and struggle…to answer questions unanswered…
Not everyday does it feel like a privilege…when your run down, and tired, and the answers aren’t coming fast enough…when the next meeting on you calendar looks like a brick fucking wall…remember what a deep privilege it is not to be traveling…not to be living to enjoy each day…you are exercising your right to deeply participate in matters of our future. Sacks had the intercourse of writers and readers, and we have the intercourse of startups and users…and when we reach the moment where necessity commands we give up this right…when we have to travel, and enjoy each day…we will look at this intercourse with the deepest gratitude, and not wish we had done more yoga and bike rides…There is an army of youth who surrender to matters of the present before required…they are surfing and meditating and seeing the world…and when they face the moment that they can no longer concern themselves with matters of the future, they won’t even realize the privilege they lose…
Some days…when living in matters of the future is particularly hard…when the struggle has been the struggle for too many days…I long to surrender my privilege…to move to the mountains and live moment to moment…how much easier life would be without the toil of tomorrow…but I will not…until i see my end as clearly as I see what could be.
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We’ve got this new product coming out at Wildcard. It’s for IOS developers and I’m really excited about it. You know that feeling when your in a nice, fast app…and then you click a link and it kicks you out to a slow, weird, frustrating webpage…yea that sucks…and it’s really the only choice IOS developers have if they want to show you content from other places in their apps…Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Google Now all recognized how bad this sucks, and invested a lot of time and money building a way to show 3rd party content (or links) natively in their apps. Each built a proprietary card platform to handle links and transform them into native cards to save you that frustrating click out. Well…for every other IOS developer, who doesn’t have tons of money to invest in that infrastructure, Wildcard has developed a free IOS SDK that gives you that functionality for free in a few lines of code. Watch the video below and holler if you’d like to test it: jordan.cooper@gmail.com.
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Wildcard Update: New Card Types, New Search, 3rd Party Apps
We’ve got a new Wildcard update out today. A few things to look out for:
Three new card types in Wildcard
1) Stock Cards: You can now search any ticker in Wildcard and get back a beautiful stock card. Try searching YHOO, FB, GOOG, etc. for the latest pricing and market information for stocks you care about.
2) Weather Cards: You can now search for the weather and get back beautiful weather cards for any zip code. Try searching Weather 10014, etc to see the new Weather Card in Wildcard.
3) Image Cards: This is my favorite new card type in Wildcard. Although elusive at the moment, you are going to start to see image cards returned in search results quite frequently in the next few weeks. Wildcard’s image cards are a beautiful way to discover and view images form the web at native speed. For a glimpse of the Image Card navigate to Flickr via the Search bar.
We care about adding new card types to Wildcard because we want you to be able to access all the information of the web at native speed in Wildcard. Hope you enjoy them…more to come in next update.
Vertical Search
In this update, we’ve enabled you to filter down search results into the vertical or type of results you’d like. So if you search for the Grammy’s, these clever filters at the top of your results enable you to drill down into Videos, Shopping, News, etc…so that you are only interacting with results that are relevant to what you are trying to do in Wildcard. We have a HUGE update coming on search which will address relevancy of results, volume of results, and allow you to type ANYTHING into the Wildcard search bar and get back near perfect results…but this design improvement toward vertical specific search is a good first step, and when combined with the bigger search update, I think we’ll be a dangerous and true alternative to google/chrome on your phone… to test vertical specific search, run a couple different searches in the Wildcard search bar.
3rd party applications in the Wildcard Browser
We’ve been exploring the notion of not only cards and content in Wildcard, but actual applications that run inside our browser. The application layer in the Wildcard browser was previously restricted to Wildcard’s Homescreen application, our search application, and publishers/brands homescreen applications. We’ve started to branch out and enable other types of applications to run in the browser. For examples of third party applications running in the Wildcard browser, check out
1) Hacker News: Wildcard is an engineering driven culture and most people here read Hackernews…now you can too without clicking back and forth between annoying blue web links. To try out the Hacker News application in Wildcard, navigate to Hacker News via the Wildcard search bar.
2) Designer News: Wildcard is also a design driven culture and many people here read Designer News…now you can too without clicking back and forth between annoying weblinks…To try out the Designer News application in Wildcard, navigate to Designer News via the Wildcard Search Bar
P.S. We are running a little beta of our IOS App SDK. If you have an IOS app and you’d like to replace links to webpages with native cards in your app let me know and I’ll send you docs. It’s basically blue link in, native card out with a few display options (modal, in line, etc…)…It’s very fucking cool. Jordan.cooper@gmail.com.
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