When a company says “we can’t afford a QA department”, what they’re really saying is, “we accept that our software will be infested with bugs, and quality is not important to us.” When they compound this basic error by saying, “the developers will just have to do their own QA”, they prove that they have [...]
Tag Archives: bad ideas
Motion Distraction — Worse Than the <Blink> Tag
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 – 8:46 pm
Once upon a time, Netscape invented the <blink> tag. And people saw the <blink> tag, and put it on their web pages, and thought it was good. And the rest of us saw the <blink> tags on those pages, and screamed, “No, you morons, it is bad! It distracteth the user mightily, for lo, our [...]
What Does “Don’t Be Evil” Mean Now?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 – 1:08 pm
It’s awfully convenient for Google that their famed corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”, doesn’t actually specify or define what counts as “evil”. And without any definition, they’re pretty much free to do anything they want, and just declare it not-evil. Now, some of the things they’ve done have just been misguided. For example, I really, [...]
How Many “Years Of Experience” Do You Have?
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 – 2:41 pm
In my ongoing job search, I’m sometimes asked by recruiters: “How many years of experience do you have with [name of some technology or skill]?” It’s a somewhat reasonable question when the item involved is a programming language or technique that I use every day, or at least every week. But there are far too [...]
Apple: More Anticompetitive Than Microsoft
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 – 2:10 pm
Just under a month ago, an iPhone developer from Australia — one who’s previously defended Apple’s approval process — had his own app suddenly dis-approved by Apple. According to his blog post about the sudden revocation of approval, “I had convinced my company to take a gamble and make some apps for Apple’s Store. Tennis Stats had [...]
Common Flash UI Mistakes
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 – 8:42 am
One of the biggest problems with Flash isn’t Flash itself. It’s Flash designers. More particularly, it’s Flash designers’ basic failure to understand why certain UI elements are the way they are. This leads to one of the most common Flash designer diseases: The drive to reinvent basic UI elements. Poorly. Page Transitions When a user [...]
Silly Coding Tricks: “Inverted” String Match
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 – 4:20 pm
First things first: Never actually do this. This is just a fun curiosity, for amusement value only. Because of the way JavaScript’s search() method works, you can do: var my_url = 'http://kai.mactane.org'; if (! my_url.search(/http:\/\/kai.mactane.org/)) { alert("Your URL is http://kai.mactane.org"); } else { alert("Nope, your URL isn't http://kai.mactane.org"); } Try running this, and it will [...]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 – 1:25 pm
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread [...]
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 11:42 am
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm [...]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Friday, August 14th, 2009 – 12:48 pm
So, Palm was recently caught spying on its users. Major kudos, by the way, to Joey Hess, who initially broke this story. For those who haven’t kept up, various other news outlets and blogs have also been reporting on it. Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak: Palm takes privacy [...]