usability
Jakob Nielsen’s new book, Prioritizing Web Usability, is a worthy companion to the previous two. Now it’s a trilogy: 1. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000) 2. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (2002) 3. Prioritizing Web Usability (2006) You can tell Jakob and his co-authors are
software development
Electronic Arts is a lumbering corporate megalith today, pumping out yearly game franchise after yearly game franchise. It’s easy to forget that EA was present at the very beginning of the computer game industry, innovating and blazing a trail for everyone to follow. Gamasutra’s article We See Farther:
programming languages
I occasionally get emails from people asking how to prepare for a career in software development. Some are students wondering what classes they should take; others have been bitten by the programming bug and are considering their next steps. I always answer with the same advice. There’s no substitute
keyboard shortcuts
One of the quickest ways to increase your productivity on the computer is to go commando: stop using the mouse. When you stop relying on the mouse for everything, you’re forced to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Jeremy Miller calls this the first step to coding faster. I agree. Keyboard
user experience
We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it’s yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak. Consider the default 404 page under IIS:
web development
Torrent, my favorite BitTorrent client, now offers a web UI. See if you can spot the differences between the Web UI and the Windows UI: After spending about a year interacting with Torrent exclusively through Remote Desktop, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how good the web UI is. It
internationalization
Internationalization of software is incredibly challenging. Consider this Wikipedia sandbox page in Arabic, which is a right-to-left (RTL) language: Compare that layout with the Wikipedia page on internationalization and localization in English. Now consider how you’d implement switching between English and Arabic in MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia:
windows vista
Now that Windows Vista has been available for almost a month, the comparative performance benchmarks are in. * Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown (Tom’s Hardware) * Windows Vista Performance Guide (Anandtech) It’s about what I expected; rough parity with the performance of Windows XP. Vista’s a bit
software development concepts
I remember when Microsoft announced that Windows 4.0 would be known as Windows 95. At the time, it seemed like a radical, unnecessary change – naming software with years instead of version numbers? Inconceivable! How will users of Windows 3.1 possibly know what software version they should upgrade to?
macos
It’s common knowledge that Mac users prefer Safari to Firefox. It is the browser bundled with the OS – and we know how that generally works out. But it’s not just a monopoly play; there are legitimate reasons for Mac users to choose Safari: Mac users favor [Safari] for
software development
Raymond Chen notes that, in his personal experience, users don’t read dialogs: How do I make this error message go away? It appears every time I start the computer. RC: What does this error message say? User: It says, ‘Updates are ready to install.’ I’ve just been clicking
usability testing
Pop quiz, hotshot. How do you know if your application works? Sure, maybe your app compiles. Maybe it passes all the unit tests. Maybe it ran the QA gauntlet successfully. Maybe it was successfully deployed to the production server, or packaged into an installer. Maybe your beta testers even signed