It may be intemperate of me, but why do geeks respond in such a…Pavlovian way when given the opportunity to assume another person’s stupidity? The latest exhibit is Gizmodo, claiming that the New York Times has implemented their paywall poorly. ..
There are two kinds of social graphs in the world, explicit and implicit. The explicit ones are the most rare and give their owners disproportionate market values. ..
It seems to me the companies with the greatest customer loyalty are those where design has a strong presence in the corporate culture. I don’t mean this in a touchy-feely way. I mean that customer loyalty is worth billions of dollars, and most companies see fit to leave that on the table. ..
…can be entirely described in these four dimensions: Cache: The browser is a cache for a web page, whose canonical version lives on a server. A web page is a cache for structured data, whose canonical version lives in (say) SQL. Structured data is a cache for bits that live on a spinning piece of rust. The questions for the programmer are, how similar is a piece of data to its canonical source, and how similar does it have to be? Abstractions: You’ve hidden some words behind a smaller number of words. What words are you really saying, when you say DoThing()? It’s turtles all the way down. Scope: What does this variable (symbol) mean at this moment? Will it mean the same thing a moment later, after we’ve gone off and done other stuff? There is a symbol over there which seems to be the same guy. Is it? And if I change it here, what happens elsewhere? Delimiters: Aka encoding. Nothing is understandable without rules describing where meaning begins and ends. White space is a delimiter between commands in your programs. Slashes are delimiters in URLs. HTML, JSON, GZIP: defined by delimiters and encoding. Every bug fix is an exercise in asking one of these questions until the answer is satisfactory. ..
You may notice in some situations, when using jQuery’s slideDown(), that the last little bit of the animation “jumps”. It feel un-smooth and frustrates those who like to dot our i’s. (Here an explanation.) ..
The headline say most of it. Google’s Chrome browser popped up over 10% market share for January. Modern browsers* are creeping up to around 80% market share, which means the user experience of the web is moving forward. ..
I am quite partial to ASP.net MVC and C#. I’ve played with other platforms, esp Ruby, which have appeal as well. ..
Gogo, which offers in-flight Wi-fi on a bunch of airlines, is now offering Facebook at no charge — but access to other sites will cost $$. ..
Computer screens have not changed much over the last 20 years, relative to other technologies like processing power and bandwidth. Yes, panels are better in many ways in terms of color accuracy and “resolution”. But most applications are designed around an assumption of 72 or 96 pixels per inch. ..
There are some stories making the rounds that “the Internet” is a public commons built on private property. This is wrong. ..