Software
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My Critique of the RGT Start Up Sound
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1 min read
In this video I listen to the sound as it’s used in real life, talk about what the sound is intended to accomplish, and then give it a sound score. And then I try to improve on it. RGT is a great, freemium service that’s fun for cycling indoors. It connects to your bike and…
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Learning JavaScript, Day 4
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2 min read
I recently decided to re-learn programming. Because I already know HTML and CSS the web is a fast prototyping environment for me, so JavaScript is the logical language for me to learn. Besides, JavaScript has stood the test of time and the community has improved it a lot It’s now on the backend too There’s…
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2014 is the Year I Learn JavaScript
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3 min read
I’m at the point in my project where I need to prototype some software ideas. Doing it on the web is cheaper, simpler, and faster than prototyping a mobile app. And everything I need to do can be done on the front-end, for now. So I’m probably looking at JavaScript or Ruby on Rails, though…
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Play Literacy
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2 min read
…yes, that term sounds a little dumb, but it’s an idea I think will be important in the future. A deliberate spin on computer literacy, I think play will not only be important to designers to support creativity and innovation, it will be important simply to get along in an electronic world. In the past…
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IDEO’s Open Dev of the BugBase Hardware/Software UI
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1 min read
Concept 1 – Electronic Ink over Tactile Switches. Source: IDEO It’s not often we get to peek inside anyone’s concept design process, so this blog from IDEO has me starting up my reverse-engineering machine…. An open project between BugLabs and IDEO, this deep-dive exploration of the BUGbase UI is focused on re-envisioning the BUGbase interface…
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Webinar with Bill Scott of Netflix, Yahoo + 20% Off
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1 min read
Bill Scott of Netflix, formerly of Yahoo, will be hosting the Future Practice webinar tomorrow, helping web designers learn how to create designs that are easier to implement by illustrating the UI engineer’s point of view. And you, my dear readers, get 20% if you enter the code VTWBNR when signing up. I recorded a…
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When Engineering Defines the Limits of Design
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2 min read
I’ll get the plug part of this post out of the way right here: I worked on a preview of Bill Scott’s upcoming webinar on What Every Designer Should Know about Interface Engineering and I think it’s both very good and very important, and what’s more it’s a topic that I’ve never seen addressed outside…
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Protoscript: AJAX for the Rest of Us
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2 min read
In the evolution of programming languages, we’ve been moving to higher and higher levels of abstraction, for example from binary to assembly to C to scripting. Writing code gets easier, but the more generalized functions are balanced with less flexibility, which limits how much abstraction is practical. Bill Scott’s Protoscript is a small but significant…
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John Backus, RIP
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1 min read
While we associate the older programming languages — and business models — with the old economy, John Soat writing in InformationWeek reminds us everything old is new again… John Backus died. Backus, 82, was the originator of the Fortran computer programming language. Generally considered the first high-level language, Fortran was a lot easier to use…
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Do Publishers Underestimate Techies?
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1 min read
Headline: Killing Page View is Suicide Publishing experts have proclaimed that the death of the ‘page view’ is near. This consensus is heated by the adoption of a new Web development technique called AJAX, but AJAX holds hidden dangers for publishers. Or, we could just use mod_rewrite to create unique URLs for each AJAX page.…
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The Social Media Bandwagon
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1 min read
So big companies are adopting social media. As they take a shortcut by buying software from BigCo-friendly vendors like Pluck, one has to wonder how long it’ll take before customers experience social media fatigue. And, in the rush to install the software, I wonder if they even think about being in competition with Blogger, Flickr,…
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In the past I’ve observed that as processor speed increases, software replaces dedicated hardware. For example, in music or video production programs like GarageBand and Final Cut Pro and a stock Macintosh can replace dedicated rack systems and DSP chips. Now with Web 2.0-ish advances on the Internet, we can go further and say as…
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Programming language design
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2 min read
For some reason I’m fascinated by programming language design. One reason is that innovation can happen at the tools level, and the tools that fuel software are undeniably important. In the hands of a great author, writing on this topic weaves together the technical, the social and the personal forces at work. One of my…
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WWW Code
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0 min read
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Lanier Interview
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2 min read
Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier …if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn’t be any evolution or life. There’s something about…