Software As She’s Developed

Amid the tablet hype is an interesting article from Derek Powazek – http://powazek.com/posts/2234: “”” I’ve been thinking about how to make money from online content since I launched Fray in 1996. Really, I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve sat up, obsessed with it. It’s been my white whale. And here’s what I’ve come up with: [...]

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Last week saw a confluence of excellent events. In the same week as a house move, it proved to be a week of much learning and little sleep. I’d hoped to do a better write-up, it never happened, a combination of being too busy and new MAC BATTERIES SUCK, meaning the lappy couldn’t last [...]

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It’s been said that the world hasn’t been this excited about a tablet since Moses came down the mountain. January 27, 2010, is the day Apple is slated to finally put us out of our misery and tell us what it’s all about. But imagine Steve Job moseys onto the stage, launches a forceful history [...]

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Convincing argument that it really is different this time round, compared to the days of “pen computing” and windows tablet edition at the start of the decade. Microsoft always loved the stylus, but most people hate it. Apple and others understood that actually touching the screen is far more appealing than using some funky pen. And [...]

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Update – some links: Pauls deck/audio (needs a bit of time to buffer) slide deck Standard live blogging alert I’m here at GumTree offices in Gumtree, thanks kindly to @cyberdees++ letting me know about this lunchtime talk. Paul Annett (@nicepaul) just gave a fun talk about “oooh that’s clever” design, which contains lots of fascintating ideas and examples around [...]

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As mentioned in the previous post, I was at Open World Forum in Paris these past couple of days. Previous notes covered today’s FOSSBazaar workshop, here’s a veritable panaply of miscellany from the other sessions. Opening Keynotes Risk of balkanisation in communities govt (mil.forge) commercial (gcode) ?developer (eclipse) Worldwide IT spend 3.48T 18% of apps abandoned 55% “challenged” Poprietary software quality [...]

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Quick notes Looked at Bill Buxton – Sketching User Experiences. Lo-fi/Hi-fi – can even use video as lo-fi if keep it sketchy style production The idea is to use human bodies to model the interaction – the humans represent different things in the UI moving around. Reminds me of software design techniques. e.g. I recall physical versions of [...]

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Digg Bar launched with some controversy recently. It's iframe trapping all over again; sites like About didn't make themselves too popular with this technique, and so it died down until recently. I think there are legitimate uses for the top bar though; certainly the Digg Bar is useful to at least those people who are [...]

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Osmosoft, Hackathons At Osmosoft, we have been engaging in a one-day hackathon about every month or so. There are several benefits: It helps us prove our tech in a range of application contexts. It helps improve and demonstrate our capabilities for reuse. Reuse can be as simple as slapping a Javascript file with inline comments on a server [...]

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Following up The New Registration and Login Grammars, I thought it would be interesting to look at how signup forms have changed over the years. 1999 Excite!. Goes so far as to ask you your race, and then a further question about whether you are of Hispanic or Latino descent. Oh, and then your household income! Talk [...]

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