software development
I picked up a copy of The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky. It’s essentially just a collection of Joel’s favorite blog entries from the last few years. But it’s Joel, so you know they’re going to be good ones. In the
passwords
Microsoft security guru Robert Hensing hit a home run his first time at bat with his very first blog post. In it, he advocates that passwords, as we traditionally think of them, should not be used: So here’s the deal - I don’t want you to use passwords,
colorizing
Most developers, myself included, are content with syntax coloring schemes that are fairly close to Visual Studio’s default of black text on a white background. I’ll occasionally encounter developers who prefer black backgrounds. And I’ve even seen developers who prefer the white on blue scheme popularized by
led technology
I recently purchased the DGL-4300 wireless router, mainly because it includes gigabit ethernet, which is still quite rare in routers. It certainly looks cool, as routers go, with its sleek rubbery design and all-blue LEDs. But those blue LEDs – particularly a bank of them, all blinking away – are blindingly bright!
design by committee
In a recent interview, Don Norman warns of the perils of design by committee: You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see
community
Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin, which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot model: [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments. There were a couple of other features that distinguished the K5 community such as
usability
Philipp Lenssen recently conducted an interesting experiment in usability minimalism where he visually deleted all the unused elements from the web pages he visits every day. Viewing some of Philipp’s native German web pages, I was reminded how powerful conventions can be; the page layout and formatting are strong
software development concepts
Joel, on the merits of dogfooding: Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product. I had forgotten how well it worked, until a month ago, I took home a build of CityDesk (thinking
technology trends
I’ve talked about the programmer’s take on keyboard and chair, but I have yet to cover that other computing staple: the mouse. I was reminded when HMK referenced Ars Technica’s, History of the GUI: This was the mouse, invented by Douglas himself [in 1968] and built by
user experience
I was chatting with a fellow developer yesterday, who recently adopted the very cool Busy Box ASP.NET progress indicator that I recommended: We often need to provide a user message informing the user that their request is “processing.” Like the hour-glass mouse pointer lets the Windows user know the
operating systems
As I struggle to open applications on my PC, I was reminded of a few entries in Scott Hanselman’s blog: Personally I have enough crap in my start menu to fill my 1400x1060 screen... arguably only 30% of the icons represent applications, the rest are just flotsam. (May 11,
data visualization
The Edward Tufte books are well known classics now, but I distinctly remember my first encounter with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1995. At the time I was working for a market research company in Denver. I noticed the book sitting on the president’s desk while I