There was a great story yesterday by “technology writer” Dan Goodinat the Associated Press, and because it was from the AP, we can readit on several sites: Washington Post: “ Macs Are Virus Targets, S
GitHub employees have gotten very good at writing irrelevant code. In my AutomatingInefficiencies screencast, I showed some goofy ways we use animated gifs, inside jokes, andhacks to make our Campfire
They say a good designer is a meticulous one. “Sweat the details” and all of that. But how well does that ethos check out when we’re passing along PSDs? Take a look at a recent comp. Layers named? Ori
By Tina Lee on May 11, 2011★ Off-Line Life
The seventh post in our series, Brief Interviews with Assiduous Mules. Read past interviews with Jessie Char, Shawna Seth, David McCreath, Nila Salinas, Paula Chang, and Stewart McCoy.
I don’t think my idea of what a good story is and how to tell it has…
Background audio in iOS is supposed to be as simple as entering a setting in your Info.plist and making sure your kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory is appropriate. This is true unless your audio is
Most people just don’t get it . What is the appeal of a nice pen? Why a fountain pen? I mean, let’s be straight here, there are a lot of reasons a cheap stick pen, mistakenly pocketed from from yo
I am taking a break from Twitter for a while, but after reading on more than a few sites about Tweetbot I purchased it and started tapping around. Of all the 1.0 Twitter apps I have purchased in the past year, this is the closest I have gotten to switching away from Twitter for iPhone.
Tapbots…
Dear Summer Interns: Your stock is up — like way up . Ten years ago when I was hiring interns at the mothership, my incredibly flawed and shortsighted policy was to hire as many as they’d let me, dole
As most of you likely have noticed by now, polymath.net has evolved into polymath.net(!), and for the record, I’m positively giddy about it. (Yes, the transition occurred a few weeks ago, but I didn’t
There have always been those few apps that insist on looking like their physical, real world, equivalent. Calculator apps, date books, calendars, note taking apps, “stickies” — you know what I am talk
Latency … is the worst. At the root of our cognitive abilities is our appreciation for cause and effect. The tighter the loop between an action we initiate and the effect we precipitate, the better we
May 15, 2011 Unsolicited Redesigns If you read design blogs, you'll sometimes see designers do unsolicited redesigns of existing products. What you usually do not see, however, is the original designe
May 13, 2011 Designers And Developers Playing Nice About The Author Cassie McDaniel is the lead UX designer (or whatever) for the Mozilla Webmaker project. Say hi to @cassiemc on Twitter or check out
The problem with the “follow your passion” chorus: We can’t all love the products we work with. Someone has to do the jobs and sell the things that don’t seem sexy but make the world go round. It’s so
The four top-grossing apps in the iPhone App Store are: Texas Poker Zynga Poker iMobsters Tap Zoo All four are free. The money they make comes from in-app purchases. In all four, those purchase aren’t
Ten years ago tonight, Michael and I went to Bottom of the Hill to see the Thinking Fellers . I’d been living in San Francisco for just a little over a month, and for too many reasons to enumerate, I
My goal with this is to see how it would replace my iPad in day-to-day use. I use my iPad as a productivity device to check email, write posts for this site, and catch up on my reading. I am not a gamer whatsoever, so I won’t comment on how Honeycomb stacks up against the iPad in the tablet gaming…
Thank goodness for bookmarklets. I have at least a dozen that I use regularly; one that lets me perform a Google search for text within the site I’m currently visiting, another to submit a publish act
I haven’t used Apple’s Core Data framework all that much, but I’m trying to dabble more in it with newer projects where I don’t rely as much on legacy data storage, or am willing to take the hit of mi
Dan Wineman answers a whine about the “high price” of the iA Writer app - a laughable $20: You can’t compare the price of Pages with that of iA Writer directly, because the two pricing strategies have
A recent visit to the Apple campus left me with many impressions. The strongest one was that Apple works hard on getting their message in . Getting the message out to consumers is something a lot of c
I’ve long argued that UI design, programming, and product strategy should be learned apprentice-style with your hands and through experience, not through school and pedagogy. That can sound anti-acade
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In 1971, Marguerite Hart, the children’s librarian of my hometown of Troy, Michigan, wrote to dozens of politicians, writers, artists and otherwise notable individuals asking them to send in a few inspirational words for the children of Troy on the opening of its first public library. When I wrote…
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecesso
I've been using Git full-time for over a year now, but I had not yet adopted Git's submodule feature for my projects. Git submodules are functionally similar to Subversion's svn:externals mechanism , but submodules do appear slightly alien and confusing at first (and second) glance. So I went deep…
The process that Pixar adopted for Toy Story , as explained by Ed Catmull , President of Pixar Animation Studios, is very similar to the process of “share early, share often” that we advocate for prot
As we await the launch of Apple’s latest attempt at creating a credible cloud computing service , an editorial at Ars Technica asks whether Apple can really succeed at this game . Writer Timothy B. Le
When you start cutting corners, customers can’t always tell. But employees usually can. And that can be just as bad. In this Mixergy interview , Jim McCarthy, the co-founder of Goldstar , talks about
iCloud looks like it will be an incredible technology for moving app data between devices. This is inherently a good thing, and it will open avenues for many new types of apps. But, there is a fundame
Matthew Bischoff