Software As She’s Developed

This is how the official olympics medal tally looks: It’s not only the official tally, but the one linked from google each time you type “olympics” and terms like “australia olympics”. Thus making it an absurdly popular page at this time. As you can see, the design is reedeeeculous. The thing you want to see the […]

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I used 280slides.com for a quick presentation today at the London Javascript meetup. (The usual Jobsesque slides - usually one phrase plus an optional image.) The tool is very cool, as initial reviews suggested, but most of those folks had not used it in a real world situation. The tool has it’s complications when you use […]

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Firefox 3.0 ticker tape parade Today is Firefox 3.0 landing day. Maybe tomorrow as the servers have been down for many hours now. Funny how Twitter is up, but Mozilla is down…it feels like today is the Juneth of 18. Anyway, this is great news as you could wile away a few lazy hours tweeting and […]

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Jeff Attwood encourages developers to eat their own dogfood: I’ve found that much of the best software is the best because the programmers are the users, too. It is UsWare. It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves– even if only […]

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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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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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I’m constantly amazed at the amount of documentation people are inclined to create without including a single example. Man pages that devote pages worth of command-line options, flags, grammar, caveats, historical anecdotes, and NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE. Textbooks that devote pages to a particular API, then expose it all in one monolithic program. Countless reference documentation on HTML […]

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Sound Thinking Where’s that sound coming from? An app inside my box? Is it ITunes on the desktop Or YouTube in the ‘Fox? A Skyper shouting at me? Or Pandora playing faves? Media Player come to life? Hmmm … Real with recent saves? A podcast I’m preparing? A vidcast made for nerds? Nope, it seems to be this picture, It says a thousand words! Huh? I started writing the […]

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Setting up a new Windows PC today and not loving the browser warnings. The messages, as I recall them: “You are about to submit the form. It’s dangerous.”, “You’re going to leave the page. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This page is not encrypted. It’s dangerous.”, “This is H20. It’s dangerous.” So my question […]

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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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