Let me start by saying up front that I am a fan of the iPhone. The mobile phone market is a sad, pathetic wasteland in desperate need of improvement. I'm hoping iPhone will the collective kick in the pants the smartphone market needs to finally stop making user
One of my most eye-opening early experiences was a tour of a local manufacturing plant during high school. One of our tour guides was a MIT trained engineer who accompanied us, explaining how everything worked. At the end of the tour, he gave each of us a picture of a
As part of my new advertising initiative, Microsoft and I are teaming up to donate $10,000 in support of open source .NET projects. Why am I focusing on .NET open source projects? In short, because open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem. Many highly
I was saddened to read this blurb from danah boyd's outstanding "MyFriends, MySpace" presentation at Harvard: My activist self wanted to believe that the users are aware of [ads], but sadly, that's not the case. To them, seeing ads means that the service is
If you've used a computer for any length of time, you've probably clicked through hundreds of End User License Agreement (EULA) dialogs. And if you're like me, you haven't read a single word of any of them. Who can blame you? They&
In How to Clean Up a Windows Spyware Infestation, I documented how spyware can do a drive-by infection of your machine through your web browser. To be absolutely clear, I never clicked on any advertisements, or downloaded and executed any files. All I did was open a GameCopyWorld web page
Is software development an activity preferred by anti-social, misanthropic individuals who'd rather deal with computers than other people? If so, does it then follow that all software projects are best performed by a single person, working alone? The answer to the first question may be a reluctant yes,
I find it helpful to revisit Steve McConnell's list of classic development process mistakes [http://www.stevemcconnell.com/rdenum.htm], and the accompanying case study [http://www.stevemcconnell.com/rdmistak.htm], at least once every year. Stop me if you've heard this one before: > "
I recently upgraded my dedicated racing simulation PC, so I was forced to re-install Windows XP SP2, along with all the games. As I was downloading the no-cd patches for the various racing sims I own, I was suddenly and inexplicably deluged with popups, icons, and unwanted software installations. I
I'm a big fan of incremental search. But incremental search isn't just for navigating large text documents. As applications get larger and more complicated, incremental search is also useful for navigating the sea of features that modern applications offer. Office 2007's design overhaul is
In a recent post, Dave Shea documented his love/hate relationship with the pixel grid [http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2007/06/12/a_subpixel_s/]: > Here's the caveat though -- high resolution displays. At 100dpi, ClearType wins out, but we're not going to be stuck
I've finally determined What's Wrong With Apple's Font Rendering. As it turns out, there actually wasn't anything wrong with Apple's font rendering, per se. Apple simply chose a different font rendering philosophy, as Joel Spolsky explains: Apple generally believes that