code zen

After another fairly annoying morning with my printer, I was reminded of this satirical post that the Onion ran on Tim Cook and Printers. The premise of this was basically that printers were as dull as a topic anyone could think of (basically emphasizing the difference between the creative Steve Jobs and the very operationally [...]

The recent explosion of “game based” apps out has led me to read quite a bit about the topic. Here are some notes on books, articles and presentations I have been reading: Some Rules for Game-Based Systems (from the book Game Based Marketing): Favor long term loyalty not short term competitions Dont offer direct prizes, offer [...]

In any client-side application of reasonable complexity there is a lot going on. There are numerous moments during its lifespan where it might want to communicate to the user of different events: errors, underlying data changes, etc etc. While coding an application, its very convenient to just use the native “Alert” implementation to inform the [...]

Techcrunch has a pretty fantastic interview with Mark Zukerberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Facebook. While the whole interview is definitely worth the read, the following part resonated strongly with me: One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies [...]

Great talk by Don Norman, a founder of The Cognitive Science Society, and widely considered to be the first to apply advanced human factors to design via cognitive design on The three ways that good design makes you happy: The three ways he talks about are: Visceral: How pleasant things seem to work better. Behavioral: How good [...]

A rather interesting post by Rob Foster where he observes that no one seems to know how to use the file system, besides the Documents folder and the Desktop, and so arguably, the elimination of the visual file system in favor of “apps and their stuff” in the iPhone/iPad was a good thing (link via [...]

There is an interesting discussion brewing over a couple of blogs. Part of it began when PPK wrote a rather strongly worded post titled “Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid” where he accused some of the developers jumping into the whole native app for the iphone of not really considering the advantages of [...]