As everyone who reads technology news knows, on June 9th, Apple is rumored to unveil the second generation iPhone. It’s predicted to have all the features of the first plus twice as much memory (16/32 GB), 3G network connectivity, and a GPS. In addition, AT&T or Apple is likely to subsidize the phone by 50% [...]
Category Archives: Software
Death by Dialog Box
UPDATE: See the comment below. Huw from Sapphire Steel agrees. Ruby in Steel no longer has the same evaluation experience.
I’ve always been interested in Ruby on Rails development. The rapid adoption and growth of Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework has been inspiring. Unfortunately, it has yet to grow beyond the ranks [...]
Google Bumps Desktop 2.0
It’s been several months since I first pondered the future of desktop applications. I argued that web applications had a significant pain point in that they are unable to run offline. Yesterday, Google announced a new browser plug-in called Google Gears. Gears is a step in the direction of removing this pain point. Basically, it’s [...]
Xml over SMTP?
Account verification workflows have always perplexed me. What I’m referring to are the common steps you usually have to go through to register a new account on a site:
I understand the logic behind this (spam prevention, guaranteed means of contact, etc), but the task is arduous and repetitive. It’s also problematic if you sign [...]
Maybe Twitter Should Have Used Castle?
This interview with Alex Payne of Twitter is an interesting read. Question number 2 is the most striking:
“All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly [...]
Making Good First Impressions
I regularly download and experiment with new software tools. Just this week I’ve experimented with Cozi, New York Times Reader, Touchstone and the latest beta of Windows Live Writer. Most of these apps have an installed life-span of three days. I install them, play with them for a bit, shut them down and see if [...]
Desktop 2.0
When designing our last product we had a tough time deciding whether it should be a smart-client desktop application or a browser-based web application. Prior versions of the program were desktop apps with a component for online synchronization. However, the past few years had seen a few web-only competitors spring up in the marketplace. It [...]
OMG We’re All Going To Die-alog!
I was reading through the new Office 2007 UI Style Guide and found the following UI Design Tenet:
No surprises. Task panes or dialogs do not appear automatically on document open. Only user actions should open and close task panes or dialogs. Ideally, all task panes are opened using a button in the Ribbon.
Many developers and [...]
Usability Testing is Useless?
An article posted on Adaptive Path’s web site from back in 2004 has started making the rounds on digg, dzone and soon my entire OPML file. The article is dolefully titled “90% of All Usability Testing is Useless.” Go ahead and read the article. I’ll wait.
All done? This article really struck a chord with me. [...]