design
I enjoy my iPhone, but I can't quite come to terms with one aspect of its design: Apple's insistence that there can be only ever be one, and only one, button on the front of the device. I also own a completely buttonless Kindle Fire, and
css
We're currently in the midst of a CSS Zen Garden type excerise on our family of Q&A websites, which I affectionately refer to as "the Trilogy": * Server Fault * Super User * Stack Overflow * Meta Stack Overflow (In case you were wondering, yes, meta is the
microsoft
Well, you won't technically see me at MIX08 [http://visitmix.com/2008/] this year. But you will see some very cool top-secret stuff Vertigo created [http://www.vertigo.com/mix] in the keynote. [http://visitmix.com/2008/] MIX is by far my favorite Microsoft conference after attending the
typography
Over the christmas break, my wife and I visited New York City for the first time. One of the many highlights of our trip was the Museum of Modern Art, which is running a year-long special exhibit, 50 Years of Helvetica. It's a tiny exhibit tucked away in
pdfs
Adobe's Portable Document Format is so advanced it makes you wonder why anyone bothers with primitive HTML. It's a completely vector-based layout format, both display and resolution independent. With PDF, you sacrifice almost nothing compared to traditional book and magazine layouts except the obvious limitation of
design
Recently, Joseph Cooney [http://jcooney.net/] and a coworker both recommended the book Designing Interactions [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262134748/codihorr-20] to me at the same time. A strange confluence of events that's got to be some sort of sign. I immediately ordered the book.
design
Robert Cringley's 1995 documentary Triumph of the Nerds: An Irreverent History of the PC Industry features dozens of fascinating interviews with icons of the software industry. It included this brief interview segment with Steve Jobs, where he said the following: The only problem with Microsoft is they just
programming languages
A few people recently pointed out that my personal branding isn't everything that it could be. Joseph Cooney even took matters into his own hands. Well, I contacted the big man himself, Steve McConnell, and he graciously provided me a high resolution vector file of the original Coding
design
In Never design what you can steal, I praised this amusing guerilla redesign of Jakob Neilsen's useit.com-- which is widely derided by the design community for its radically bare-bones layout. Well, the design guerillas are at it again. This time, they've set their design eye
design
Which pill bottle would you rather use? The rightmost bottle was designed by Target to address the shortcomings of traditional pill bottles. And you probably decided which pill bottle you liked best within a twentieth of a second. When I suggested redesigning address input in web forms, there was some
communication
So I've been critical of other people's presentations [https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-not-to-give-a-presentation/]. Which naturally leads to a few questions: * What makes a presentation good? * Why don't you try giving a presentation? I realize that giving presentations isn't easy. But I still
fonts
You may be familiar with the font Comic Sans MS [http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/comicsns/default.htm]: Over the last 5 years, my wife and I noticed that this annoying font is inordinately popular "in the wild" -- we've seen it in the