Software As She’s Developed

Andy Hunt asked a while ago, What happens when t approaches 0?” One of the interesting topics that came up today at Software Trends was “what happens when the time to develop a new application approaches zero?” It will never be zero, of course, but it will, over time, asymptotically approach zero. Suppose we finally get to […]

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Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al’s Design Patterns and Alexanders’ equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as “replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality”. First, I want to note that the critique above surely defies belief to anyone who […]

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It goes something like this: Startup website takes off New features continue pumping out like crazy. Soon, you have everything covered - tags, RSS feeds, gradient bling, and your very own corporate blog Cha Ching. FunkyBigDotCom just bought you. You explain on your blog now you’ll have the resources to do all […]

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Having already tipped my hat to the iPhone with an off-key post about finger gestures, let me now go rambly with the (distant) second biggest story of the week: danah boyd’s class division paper which argues something along the lines of “Facebook is for preps, MySpace is for Emos”. In the week since I’ve read […]

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It’s an attribute as in <img alt=”this is an *attribute*, not a tag”> and not <alt>, but 603,000 matches on Google (which apparently means about 750 pages) use the term “alt tag” along with countless other people, including me on occasion.

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It started with this Code Craft blog post on the Code Garden - an analogy that sucked less. It got me thinking and ranting about metaphors in software and metaphors of software. Designing your technical architecture with software, the XP “Metaphor” practice, metaphors for HCI, metaphors like those used in the Head First series and […]

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If I had a dollar for every time I clicked on an E-Commerce ad and got nowhere fast, I’d be a … Rephrase If Google had a dollar for every time I clicked on an E-Commerce ad and got nowhere fast, *they*’d be a billionaire. That’s better and just about close to reality. After two unsuccessful attempts at purchasing […]

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It’s no secret that clipboards in all the major platforms suck, hence any number of third-party apps to do things like save multiple buffers (like Vi did in the mid-80s). There’s also initiatives like Ray Ozzie and MS’s Live Clipboard for transferring data between web apps and the like. For many years, Sony researchers have […]

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It’s cool to see Yahoo! posting a job for pattern curator: CURATE THE YAHOO! PATTERN LIBRARY Yahoo!’s Platform User Experience Design team is looking for a new curator for the Pattern Library. The curator works with designers from across Yahoo! to develop new patterns and to eventually migrate a pattern to the public library. You will be […]

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Email and the web have traditionally been the two ubiquitous services on the internet (prior to the web, it was email and usenet). Podcasting (and vidcasting/vodcasting) is now becoming another ubiquitous service. The reason I mention this was an interesting quote on BBC news today in a story about the web’s birthday. Despite the story […]

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