March 2008
8 posts
Thoughts on the iPhone 'App Store'
My co-worker Laura thinks that Apple’s insistence on approving all iPhone apps prior to distribution is a bad idea. On reflection, I disagree; look at the benefits for Apple, for iPhone developers, and for iPhone users: iPhone owners get a more stable platform. Developers get a low-cost QA pass to weed out any high-priority bugs they’ve missed, before distribution. Apple gets to weed...
Blogospheronomics: Win Mobile, Blackberry, &...
Note that each chart has its own vertical scale. I haven’t sorted out how to fully control Technorati charting. Click on any of the charts to see Technorati’s collection of relevant posts. These three charts will display the past 30 days from the day you view this post, so bookmark it for future reference. Get your own chart!
Initial Notes on the iPhone SDK
For calender Q4 ‘07, the iPhone (28%) was second only to the RIM Blackberry (41%). Palm and all the rest are in the weeds. [Translation: Buy AAPL while it’s still cheap.] Full enterprise messaging and security features coming in the next update for all iPhones. [Translation: Go short on RIM.] It’s unclear whether the same is true for iPod Touch, but the SDK covers the Touch as...
Notional Slurry »There are exactly two ways: one,... →
William Tozier has written a great little essay regarding the nature and implications of the term “delay”. Here’s a taste…… One cannot see one pattern everywhere. You are not a generalist but a crackpot if you see everything as connected to your personal model of the world. When you cast everything as a nail to be struck by your One Important Hammer, you’re just falling back on another...
America's Most Admired Companies 2008 →
I’ve never much cared about popularity contests, but as I’m now in the ad biz, huzzah for the winners, for they shall receive market share.
Design Redux / Andy Rutledge →
My buddy Josh made my lunch break happier by pointing me at Andy Rutledge’s Design Redux, wherein Andy analyzes and redesigns popular and/or notorious web sites. Excellent work!
Word of the Day: Earcon →
Continuing the strip-mining exploration of the Tactons Project haptics research website, I came across this wonderful word: EARCON:[Wikipedia] An earcon is a brief, structured sound pattern used to represent a specific item or event but is not to be confused with an Auditory Icon. The term was coined in 1989. The earcon can be parameterized by specific attributes of the item or event. Although...
February 2008
9 posts
2 tags
Going beyond Multi-Touch [ @ Unwired View ] →
It seems to be raining future-interface links today. Here’s a detailed rundown of Nokia’s no-touch-required gestural interface for mobile devices. My favorite part? Nokia is planning to use ultrasonic sonar to track 3D hand gestures. Batphone, anyone? P.S. Here’s the Nokia patent application.
Google Code: iPhone haptic interface hack →
Hot on the heels of Dan Saffer’s new gestural interface book, there’s news that those crafty Glaswegians at the Tactons Project have added tactile feedback to the iPhone touch interface. Who cares if the iPhone screen has no buttons when you can trick the user’s fingers into feeling the onscreen buttons? I look forward to seeing — and feeling — what this group can do...
3 tags
Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural... →
Hey, gesture geeks! Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at design firm Adaptive Path, is working on a new O’Reilly book. Check out the website and download the sample chapter. [Don’t forget to bookmark the site, because you won’t want to type designinggesturalinterfaces.com too often.]
Confirmed: Yahoo Design Innovation Team AxedThe entire Yahoo Design Innovation Team, aka yHaus, has been axed en masse, Portfolio.com has confirmed with one of the team’s former members. … Uh-ho! So much for Mr. Bill’s plans for buying him some indentured servants ”great engineers”. More details at Information Esthetics.
Give your résumé a face lift →
Excellent advice from LifeClever.com regarding typography, layout and content.
Installing the GIT revision control system on Mac... →
Handy install notes from the ever-superb Wincent Colaiuta.
January 2008
10 posts
[REBLOG] Enable comments in Tumblr
Comments are the big debate between Tumblr users… to use them or not? At the moment Tumblr does not provide a comment function, but you can get them by adding some line of code in your template. The first option: Flobbe Chatbox (or anything similar) Chatbox are more like…err… a chat. I would use them only on certain posts. The second one: Linebuzz From the website: LineBuzz gives...
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[REBLOG] Installing The Perfect Tumblr Search
Jacob Dehart has created the perfect Tumblr search engine. It does not require pages to be indexed by Google or Yahoo and is based on the Tumblr API meaning if its on your tumble-log, it will be found on the search. The best part is you do not have to re-load another page or click a button to view the search results. You can see the search engine live on my tumble-log here. So here is a tutorial...
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A little something for my buddy Misty, on the...
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Technorati Profile
IBM apps coming to iPhone - Sell AAPL now!
Yahoo News:E-mail software from IBM Corp. will be available on Apple Inc. iPhones and iPod Touch devices under a new partnership that brings together two big rivals of Microsoft Corp …. IBM plans a formal announcement of the Lotus Notes e-mail package for Apple’s portable devices at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., next week… The software, which requires use of...
2 tags
WatchThe famous Guy Kawasaki, on innovation. (courtesy of Google Video and Dynamite: The Err Free Blog)
“Macworld 2008 keynote: Initial thoughts: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE...”
– Paul Thurrot, Macworld 2008 keynote: Initial thoughts I smell Microsoft’s HTML engine. That strong whiff of burning cabbage is a dead giveaway.
What a lovely phrase!
For those of you who aren’t following politics, a number of very strange and shady sources are putting out the story that Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly have won the New Hampshire primary, and therefore the Clintons, the Trilateral Commission, and the Invisible Russian Orbital Mind Control Lasers obviously are conspiring to steal the election. In the midst of all this hoo-ha, I was...
The Real Meaning Of Today's Octo-Core Iron
So Apple has announced new Mac Pros and XServes with dual quad-core Xeons. Big whoop. Ask any experienced Apple watcher, and they’ll tell you that Apple regularly ‘clears the decks’ in the last quarter preceding their keynote events at MWSF and the WWDC developer conference in order to make room for more important announcements at the keynote. What could be more important...
December 2007
2 posts
Interactive Gestures wiki →
A compendium of gestures and gesture patterns used on touch-screen devices.
Oh, yeah! There's a HUUGE market opportunity...
It’s a new Dell. The latest in company news is the release of a special edition World of Warcraft notebook computer with high-end components that are customized for World of Warcraft. It’s not just that. The notebook is loaded with a series of special packages just for Dell consumers that are relevant. Sure, the notebook is expensive at $4,450, but it just might be worth it for...
November 2007
11 posts
3 tags
Bill Buxton, Interface Designer →
Bill Buxton is one of the Grand Masters of touch-screen interface design, widely regarded as the true father of the Microsoft Surface device.
notebookism →
A blog about notebooks hurrah
Architecture? What architecture?
Me: So ... you've specified that the email server is supposed to send one of two emails based on which product the customer owns. What happens when we want to add a third email?
PM: But we only need the two choices now. If we need to add a third, we'll just get the sub-contractor to add that.
Me: But if the client likes this version, we're not talking about four installations. We're talking about hundreds. You think maybe the client might start thinking about changing the email message whenever they add more products to their lineup? So maybe we're talking about new email content every other week.
PM: We'll just get the sub-contractor.... Umm. Maybe ... not?
Me: OK, so right now you've spec'd passing a boolean to the server to indicate that the customer owns Product #2, which triggers the hard-coded Message #2. What about passing an int specifying the customer's product, and having the email server look up the message-of-the-week associated with that product?
PM: OH! I see where you're coming from. Wellll, we're pretty late in the process ...
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MORAL: Never trust a programmer to design the UI and never trust a non-programmer to design the API.
Thee Headcoatees cover of Plastic Bertrand’s...
3 tags
Scott Berkun - The Myth of Discoverability →
“Discoverability is often defined as the ability for a user of a design to locate something that they need, in order to complete a certain task. It’s common to hear programmers and designers utter the phrase ‘that won’t be discoverable’, while pointing to a specific command or link they believe users will fail to find. The trap, and the myth, of discoverability is...
Merlin Mann On Project Management
(Courtesy of Jeffrey Veen) I remember telling a friend that being a project manager is a little like being a bouncer: where there’s a problem *here* and a door *there* and it’s your job to get the problem out the door. So! For some a gentle gesture will do while others need a push and still others need to be picked up by their pants and carried. But! In no case should you ever let...
Regarding the Mac Word 2004 Demo Trojan
Blog Salvage from 05.12.2004 MacWorld UK is reporting that a Mac OS X trojan program has been encountered on a LimeWire file-sharing site. The program represents itself as an installer for a demo version of the just-released Mac Word 2004. In a related article, also on MacWorld UK, the program is described as a 108 KB AppleScript Studio application, sporting something like a Mac Word icon....
Your Customer Could Be A Space Alien, by Tonya...
This article, a deliberate takeoff of urban legend article, “Your Co-worker Could be a Space Alien,” goes out with a grin to people who do telephone technical support.Many callers are actually space aliens who sound human, but you can expose these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. Odd or mismatched software and hardware. Aliens might run “MacWriter on their...
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Bokardo →
Social web design blog
2 tags
Daring Fireball →
John Gruber, one of the best tech pundits around. Read his Ronco Spray-On Usability before you disagree.