An Apple employee will probably get fired for this series of Slashdot posts on future Apple technology. But thanks – it all sounds very amazing! First post, Second post, Third post. Follow future posts at this link.
April 3, 2005
The tough sell of honesty
Good post from Jeffrey Veen on his design process. Rather than figure out how to design for your audience, design for yourself after becoming like your audience. At that point, I find, snap decisions become good decisions. The problem, of course, is doing this commercially – doing it on cue. How do you write a […]
March 30, 2005
Welcome EVDB
Brian Dear, a former regular on The Well has launched EVDB, the events and venues database. EVDB, Inc. helps people find relevant events and share their discoveries with others. We’re building a worldwide repository of event and venue data that the whole world can use. Our goal is to help people discover all kinds of […]
March 30, 2005
Sloppy work
This is why people distrust Quark XPress on Mac OSX (via Macintouch): [Kalani Patterson] Our tech dept has verified the following: Installing Quark 6.1 on a 10.3.x system (I can’t speak for other versions) results in thousands of changed permissions. We captured a logfile from such a repair, which weighed in as a whopping 9.9MB […]
March 29, 2005
The Supremes: MGM vs. Grokster
In the next 24 hours, there will be a lot of press coverage about today’s argument at the US Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case. Let’s just see if any corporate or commercial or mainstream media coverage is as good as this blog entry. For some reason, I doubt that “objective” journalism will […]
March 21, 2005
Seasonality
Here is yet another fantastic software application from a small (one-person) firm. Seasonality from Gaucho Software is a $25 desktop weather application. Who cares, you say. After all, weather.com does that for free. But weather.com is slow, and filled with annoying chartjunk and ads. You have to load lots of pages (read, advertisements) to get […]
March 8, 2005
Why Feel Righteous About All The Bad In The World?
I heard someone was annoyed that tsunami relief collection boxes were being taken down too soon. And I thought of a product opportunity! We should make a big electronic wall-sized display of the Top 100 “current disasters.” It can be ranked by number dead, with arrows up and down for increasing or decreasing trends (like […]
February 25, 2005
Ev surfaces
Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, today resurfaces with Odeo. [NY Times profile. Odeo blog.] Product will be introduced later this morning at the TED conference. Because of founder celebrity, and meme-full intersection with “podcasting,” expect blogosphere cacophony. Tech note: Odeo is built using Ruby on Rails, previously mentioned on this very weblog. Did I say […]
February 25, 2005
Ajax web applications
Jesse James Garrett explains how Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (“Ajax”) is changing the face of web-based user-interaction design. Canonical example: Google Maps. Web applications are changing rapidly for the better.
January 14, 2005
Future Of Apple
Well, with all the discussion about the Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle, iLife ’05, iWork, and other miscellaneous Apple-related announcements, you may be interested in this intelligence from DigiTimes. Taiwan contract manufacturers for Apple Product Contract maker Estimated shipment volumes for 2005 Delivery date iPod shuffle Asustek 400k-500k/month Available now iPod/iPod Photo/iPod Mini Inventec Appliances […]
January 6, 2005
Avoiding Software Fear
We had a social lunch today, seven people, all involved with web or application development. At one point, someone asked something along the lines of, “What is your obligation to customers to use ‘standard’ technology that will be around when they need to update their app?” Another person mentioned the ease of getting Java programmers; […]
January 6, 2005
Your Brain Wants To Participate
It’s all about the conversation! Fantastic post on writing style and reader engagement by the authors of the “Head First” series of books. Great stuff!
January 5, 2005
Four Hot Applications
It’s too late to say anything cogent about folksonomies, but this paper does pretty well. Check out the following four web applications and look at how they’re allowing users to tag and browse content. It’s a wonderful new wave of innovation. del.icio.us – Social bookmarks. flickr – Social photo sharing. Books We Like (Howard Rheingold […]
December 30, 2004
Revolution In The Valley
I had intended to read The Wisdom of Crowds, but I woke up with a severely frozen neck and upper shoulders, which was pretty bad for concentration. I cannot look up, and my left to right mobility is about 10 degrees, max. It’s hard to tell how this happened, since I have exerted approximately zero […]
December 28, 2004
Moveable Type 3.1.4 — How?
Would it be too much trouble for Six Apart to include a “readme” file describing how to upgrade their software? Apparently so. Here’s what I see when I download the new release: What am I supposed to do with this? Ironically, I open up the “docs” folder, and there isn’t even an “index” page? Where […]
December 11, 2004
Digital Innovation Continues Apace
Totally hot new service offering: Amabuddy. (“Don’t buy not knowing.”) You are in a bookshop or a record shop. You found something that interests you.You can’t decide whether to buy it now or later online. What you need is a price check and a quick review, perhaps some ideas of something similar that others might […]
November 29, 2004
Customer-Made
Customer-centric development is the most important product trend in a long time. The Trendwatching folks present a great write-up summarizing the issues and opportunities. Product development today is all about listening to feedback loops. The broadcast mentality of “message, message, message” is dying. [Doc Searls: “There is no demand for messages.“] Instead, product developers will […]
November 23, 2004
Jetta GLI Snow Tires
If you own a 2004 1/2 VW Jetta GLI with the stock 18″ BBS wheels and you have to drive in the snow you’ll want to read this post to learn what steel wheels will fit on your car for snow tires. Everyone else can read along to learn about how complex products requiring complex […]
November 21, 2004
Iterative Development
New Dog Old Trick has an interesting post called The Train is Leaving the Station about date-driven vs. content-driven software releases. Actually, the New Dog’s post points to and is titled the same as Ed Sim’s post on the same topic. Excerpt from Ed: There are a couple of different ways to manage engineering releases.
November 11, 2004
Viruses could be good
Computer viruses are bad. There’s all manner of havoc they can wreak on unsuspecting users. Spyware, adware, popups, data loss, drones, hidden ftp sites, etc. etc. etc. And the talent required to write some of these viruses is astounding. Yes, there are some “script kiddies” who just cut and paste, but original virus authors are […]