user experience

The PC is Over

mobile devices

The PC is Over

MG Siegler writes: The PC is over. It will linger, but increasingly as a relic. I now dread using my computer. I want to use a tablet most of the time. And increasingly, I can. I want to use a smartphone all the rest of the time. And I do.

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Betting the Company on Windows 8

operating systems

Betting the Company on Windows 8

I’d argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we’ve seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows – at its core, you’ve got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The Eternal Lorem Ipsum

programming languages

The Eternal Lorem Ipsum

If you’ve studied design at all, you’ve probably encountered Lorem Ipsum placeholder text at some point. Anywhere there is text, but the meaning of that text isn’t particularly important, you might see Lorem Ipsum. Most people recognize it as Latin. And it is. But it is arbitrarily

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Please Don’t Learn to Code

programming languages

Please Don’t Learn to Code

The whole “everyone should learn programming” meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs

By Jeff Atwood ·
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This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

software development concepts

This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I’m also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don’t blame you. I don’

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Geekatoo, the Geek Bat-Signal

technology trends

Geekatoo, the Geek Bat-Signal

To understand this story, you need to understand that grandchildren are like crack cocaine to grandparents. I’m convinced that if our parents could somehow snort our children up their noses to get a bigger fix, they would. And when your parents live out of state, like ours do, access

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Will Apps Kill Websites?

mobile apps

Will Apps Kill Websites?

I’ve been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and everything to customers. If you’

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Books: Bits vs. Atoms

software development

Books: Bits vs. Atoms

I adore words, but let’s face it: books suck. More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways: * They are heavy. * They take up too much space. * They have to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Visualizing Code to Fail Faster

programming languages

Visualizing Code to Fail Faster

In What You Can’t See You Can’t Get I mentioned in passing how frustrated I was that the state of the art in code editors and IDE has advanced so little since 2003. A number of commenters pointed out the amazing Bret Victor talk Inventing on Principle. I

By Jeff Atwood ·
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The End of Pagination

pagination

The End of Pagination

What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally. There are plenty of other real world examples in this 2007 article, but I wouldn’t bother. If you’ve seen one pagination

By Jeff Atwood ·
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What You Can’t See You Can’t Get

programming languages

What You Can’t See You Can’t Get

I suppose What You See Is What You Get has its place, but as an OCD addled programmer, I have a problem with WYSIWYG as a one size fits all solution. Whether it’s invisible white space, or invisible formatting tags, it’s been my experience that forcing people to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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Rubber Duck Problem Solving

programming concepts

Rubber Duck Problem Solving

At Stack Exchange, we insist that people who ask questions put some effort into their question, and we’re kind of strict about it. That is, when you set out to ask a question, you should… * Describe what’s happening in sufficient detail that we can follow along. Provide the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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