Software As She’s Developed

“The novel’s success brought the term “pollyanna” (along with the adjective “pollyannaish” and the noun “Pollyannaism”) into the language to describe someone who is cheerfully optimistic and who always maintains a generous attitude toward the motives of other people. It also became, by extension – and contrary to the spirit of the book – a […]

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Poking fun at hollywood depictions of computing is an old favourite on the net - compilations of dumb computing scenes outshadow even mentions of anomalies in the star trek universe. Meet The Hollywood Operating System, you know it well: The Hollywood operating system, or Hollywood OS, refers to any fictional computer operating system clichéd in movies […]

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Someone sent Don Norman a critique implying that a machine was more usable because it contained only one button. His response is interesting: Nice story, but wrong. Fewer buttons do not necessarily mean easier use … When assessing simplicity, don’t get all hung up on the number of buttons. Look at the whole picture: more is […]

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‘Tis Goud reports from Mix ‘06, Microsoft’s web bash currently happening in Vegas. One of the presentations focused on the most important thing about Ajax: Usability. The session started with referencing two sites with information on: Usabillity Patterns, Michael Mahemoff Usabillity Guidelines, Thomas Baekdal Thomas’s guidelines were the first […]

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Uh, thanks for the heads-up. Reminds me of the presentation on user attention at Interact 2001, where the laptop suddenly interrupted proceedings with that legendary message, “You’re computer is now fully charged”. And, by way of contrast, how to write good error messages: tell the user what happened, explain the consequences if it’s not obvious, […]

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Agile is a big theme these days. Not surprising that it should be a big part of “Web 2.0″, since Web 1.0 is often attributed as an inspiration. Paul Scrivens reminds us of 37Signals’ association with agile principles. Similarly, the agile manifesto was mentioned in a Web Essentials talk last week (I think Kelly Goto’s […]

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Dave Crane looks into some Scriptaculous code. The main point is that Scriptaculous is easy for novice JS programmers to use, but the source code would be difficult, for novices at least, to understand. Which raises these questions: So, going back to the bigger picture, here’s something for the authors of JavaScript libraries to […]

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