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
documentation
Nicholas Zakas enumerates the number one reason why good JavaScript libraries fail: Lack of documentation. No matter how wonderful your library is and how intelligent its design, if you’re the only one who understands it, it doesn’t do any good. Documentation means not just autogenerated API references, but
identicons
Don Park invented Identicons last week. An Identicon is a small, anonymized visual glyph that represents your IP address. Don explains it better than I do: I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can
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 a brief interview segment with Steve Jobs, where he said the following: The only problem with Microsoft is they just have
user experience
In Typing Trumps Pointing, I extolled the virtues of the full-text search included in Vista’s new Start Menu. As many commenters pointed out, the feature itself is nothing new: I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you don’
search
Windows Vista gets criticized a lot in the press, mostly for not being OS X. Some of the criticisms are valid. It is terribly late. And the feature list has grown less and less impressive as the development process has worn on over the years. But Vista has one killer