Thursday, November 14, 2013

Leap + Three.js: Boilerplate post at Leap Motion Labs





On the 15th of October Leap Motion Labs published a post written by me:

Thinking as a Designer: What’s a Good Leap + Three.js Boilerplate?

From my point of view it's a fairly good post because the contents fulfill many of what I consider to be essential requirements for a good technical post which might include:

  • An assortment of visuals
  • Access to source code easily obtainable on GitHub
  • A YouTube video
  • Plenty of links to useful information
  • And a demo app that works

And, above and beyond the specification items, there's a even fairly lively story.

So how did this post go from the original email request into a published post in about five days?

The answer has little to do with me. The answer may be surprising at first, but then becomes eminently reasonable.

Look at the publisher of the post.

labs.leapmotion.com

And when I say 'look' I mean click on the link and flip through some of the articles.

In my opinion, this site stands out as one of the best online vendor-specific tech journals currently in operation.

The articles are lengthy and yet entertaining, in-depth and yet readable and do a great job of marketing without a heavy sales pitch. I don't think you will find many other start-ups with such a well-worked out formula for disseminating what is actually very complicated stuff.

Why is the Leap Motion Lab doing such a good job when other aspects of the Leap Motion organization are quite lacking? Perhaps, it's the people. The editor I worked with, Alex Colgan, in a matter of hours transformed the job of preparing the article from being a task into being a pleasure. Alex lives/works in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia but the distance in time and miles did little to prevent a speedy and engaged conversation. And the Google Docs real-time collaboration was a blast.

The main thing is that Alex picked up my style of writing ever so quickly. He made a lot of edits and yet looking back at the post I can't tell if a phrase is his or mine - even in the most technical parts. I worked through the weekend to finish the post, but Alex made it easy.

So if anybody at Leap ever asks you to pen a post for the Labs journal, you should immediately place your hands over your Leao device and reply with a thumbs up.