Alan Cooper and the Goal Directed Design Process The heart of the problem, he concludes, is that the people responsible for developing software products don’t know precisely what constitutes a good product. It follows that they also do not know what processes lead to a good product. In short, they are operating by trial and error, with outcomes like customer satisfaction achieved by little more than blind luck. By Hugh Dubberly, first published AIGA GAIN Journal, 2001
posted by infini
on Dec 13, 2012 -
28 comments
"We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had
built."
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Nov 16, 2012 -
30 comments
Have you ever wanted to sort a particular Amazon's reviewer's reviews by their number of stars? Amazon has never added this feature to its user profile pages, but here's a
workaround. Or perhaps you need a tool that lets you see ratings, dates of reviews, helpful and unhelpful votes, and number of comments, all in a helpful sortable list. Maybe you need to download and install the
Amazon Reviewer Analysis Tool.
posted by shivohum
on Aug 6, 2012 -
9 comments
Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. ... How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning? [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Jul 26, 2012 -
124 comments
The US
has lost a quarter of its high-tech jobs since 2000, the number declining by 687,000. A veteran headhunter
opines on the causes:
The technical jobs in Silicon Valley are hard to fill with Americans...I get email every day from new grads, asking for help finding jobs, but honestly, most are Indian or Chinese, not many Americans. He cites a
NYT article which claims that the reason iPhone manufacturing doesn't happen in the US is that
Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
posted by shivohum
on Jun 2, 2012 -
107 comments
Editor wars are some of the most divisive debates among programmers and writers. These days, the battles are between proponents of IDEs like
NetBeans,
Eclipse, and
the like as often as they are between proponents of
vi and
Emacs, the traditional battlegrounds. That fight hasn't ended, of course. The support of the vi camp has largely solidified behind
Vim, the largest and most feature rich (or bloated, if you like
nvi) variant, and
GNU Emacs has essentially vanquished its internecine
rival. Are you a traditionalist? You can find an
argument if you really want to.
Of course, a lot of people
now vote for third parties. There are candidates for the
ignorant, for the
masochistic, and the
insane. Some people are more comfortable
with familiar interfaces. Still
others are
obsessed. [
Previously]
posted by sonic meat machine
on Dec 22, 2007 -
98 comments
The John Markoff of the New York Times
[registration required] reports that Google plans to roll-out a
text and file search tool code-named Puffin for finding information stored on PCs. The move is seen as a defensive one; Microsoft plans to include PC searching in its new operating system, scheduled to be released in 2006 (at the earliest).
posted by tranquileye
on May 19, 2004 -
7 comments
What software version numbers really mean. Not sure who started the latest trend of dropping version numbers from software. We could always blame Microsoft with Windows
ME . But Macromedia is at fault too with the whole
MX thing. And MX doesn't even stand for anything. Now Adobe is getting into the mix. There will be no Photoshop 8 or Illustrator 11. Just
CS . So is this a good thing? Version numbers may not be exciting but it sure did make it easy to keep track of the latest upgrade.
posted by jeremias
on Sep 29, 2003 -
42 comments
Denim "A team at the University of California at Berkeley has developed a software sketching tool that helps designers create fully interactive websites using just a graphics tablet or mouse...
Developed by the Group for User Interface Research at UC Berkeley, Denim allows designers to play around with different ideas with the speed and ease of drawing on paper. Even better, sketches can be hyperlinked, allowing a series of rough drawings to become a fully interactive site.
'We're trying to replicate the way designers have traditionally worked in the early stages of design, which is with pen and paper,' said the project's lead, James Landay, an associate professor at the university."
(Quote above is from this
Wired News article.)
posted by eyebeam
on May 12, 2003 -
17 comments
The Self-Healing Minefield From the current Village Voice: "Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and 'healing' software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics."
Bonus ubertasteless Flash animation courtesy of DARPA
here. Color me fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.
posted by Armitage Shanks
on Nov 27, 2002 -
40 comments
On flight simulators, Tetris, and the CIA The Sunday Times Mag has a feature on Gilman Louie, popularizer of Tetris who was recruited by the CIA in 1998. " Louie's marching orders were to provide venture capital for data-mining technologies that would allow the C.I.A. to monitor and profile potential terrorists as closely and carefully as Amazon monitors and profiles potential customers."
posted by brookish
on Apr 12, 2002 -
13 comments
[re]distributions is a collection of art software and essays centering on PDAs and information appliances. Glad I cleaned out my Jornada at work today. Most of the artists have various other projects at their own sites, if you follow their links.
posted by Su
on Dec 12, 2001 -
1 comment
WE ARE WATCHING YOU. "The FBI added that its research is 'always mindful of constitutional, privacy and commercial equities,' and that its use of new technology can be challenged in court and in Congress." No really, go ahead, try and stop us if you don't like it. That's your (snicker, snicker) right.
posted by rushmc
on Nov 24, 2001 -
12 comments
The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to
have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted by cCranium
on Oct 2, 2001 -
8 comments
Anti-rip CD system bypassed. heh. nice try, boyos. i've never understood how people can believe something digitized can possibly be protected in such a manner as to be foolproof. what one process can scramble, another can undo. [via
/.]
posted by fuzzygeek
on Aug 1, 2001 -
5 comments
I usually just ignore Jakob - he has his right to his opinions, tho' I seldom agree with him - but I draw the line at
misrepresenting a technology so egregiously... Acrobat's not that hard to understand; I can't believe it's possible for Neilsen to not know that the features he berates Acrobat for
missing are, in actuality, right there to be used.
posted by m.polo
on Jun 17, 2001 -
37 comments
Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.
i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:
``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."
Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted by tatochip
on Mar 14, 2001 -
5 comments
jon kats on "geek profiling": "W.A.V.E joins new sofware "security" programs ... being tested in public schools in America to compile and computerize information on students believed to be dangerous or potentially violent. This new rat-on-kids industry is an offshoot of the Geek Profiling anti-Net hysteria that broke out all across the United States after the Columbine High School killings, whose first anniversary is fast approaching. Despite the fact that horrific incidents like Columbine are extremely rare, and that the FBI and Justice Department have both reported that youth violence has dropped to its lowest levels in more than half a century, the belief persists in much of America that technologies like the Internet (and activities like computer gaming) are turning otherwise healthy school children into mass murderers."
posted by palegirl
on Mar 29, 2000 -
7 comments
Cat Detecto Software? It's software that detects cat-typing then blocks keyboard input while emitting "a sound that annoys cats." I wonder if this could be modified to prevent co-workers from using my computer to browse porn while I'm at lunch...
posted by CrazyUncleJoe
on Mar 4, 2000 -
1 comment
Web-related software patents are starting to look like the new cyber-squatting equivalent. People are patenting all sorts of mundane things like "electronic shopping carts" and "making secure purchases via the internet." My guess is in 3 or 4 years, after many of these silly patents have been awarded, we'll see a restructuring of the US patent system.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 22, 2000 -
2 comments
I often forget that there's still a community of visual basic developers out there building all sorts of goofy apps for windows.
This site has a whole bunch of useful utilities, including
Gribouille, a program that lets you draw all over your desktop,
Pubcruncher, an app that kills popup windows, and my favorite: "
Nap and Coffee", a fake app that lets you walk away from your computer and make it appear that you're copying large files, scanning for viruses, or setting up a program.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 6, 2000 -
1 comment
Odigo 2.0 is now out, and it
fully integrates with ICQ. I just installed it, and it imported a bit too much. All the ICQ users on my ignore list showed up in Odigo, and my renamed friends showed up as their original ICQ names. The status indicators seem to be broken too, but it's beta so I guess that's alright. Of course, nobody uses it, so I don't see any other people when I'm surfing even the most popular sites, but if everyone starts using this new release, perhaps that will change.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 24, 2000 -
0 comments
Ever noticed that the also-rans who have yet to be acquired by one of their peers seem to glom together like cornmeal in water?
Take a look at who Be is partnering with for their Stinger internet appliance software:
Bitstream - clearly a runner-up to Adobe in the typeface technology department; and
Opera - who are trying desperately to be the alternative browser of choice. Who's next? Corel, and their latest BeOS port of WordPerfect?
posted by grant
on Dec 9, 1999 -
0 comments
