The trend in Microsoft’s products for the past 15 years or more has been toward making things easy for the people who have never used the software before. Of course, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those people. The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus: And if you’ve used previous versions […]
Tag Archives: the world-wide conversation
Can You Strike it Rich in a Startup?
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 – 9:21 pm
Startups are known for being places where people work really hard, often at unsustainable paces. “Work hard, play hard,” is the oft-invoked slogan, and there are usually foosball tables, game consoles, and other signifiers of fun lying around the office. (How often they get used is another story; the reality can easily be more like “work […]
What Are We Giving Up With E-Text?
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 – 3:19 pm
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and each technology has its advantages and drawbacks. Whenever we leave one technology behind and adopt a new one, we’re sacrificing something. We may be making a terrific trade, getting a hundred times as much cool stuff as give up — but we’re still giving up something, and we should be aware […]
How Many Identities Does a Single Person Have?
Sunday, July 17th, 2011 – 12:36 pm
(This was originally posted on Google+ itself. I’m also keeping it here, for easy reference.) A friend of mine notes that one of the problems of the current Google+ “real names policy” is that “Google is attempting to deal with (I’m assuming) manufacturing a community of 1-to-1 RL presence-to-online presence” — in particular, he says that […]
About Amy Hoy
Thursday, March 24th, 2011 – 8:07 am
When I was moving beyond self-written AJAX calls and picking up the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries, one of the best resources I could find was Amy Hoy’s Scriptaculous cheat sheet. It was hard not to find it — or her: Google searches on the things I was dealing with at the time just kept leading back […]
“Unplug From the Net to Connect With People”? Why Not Drive an SUV to Fight Global Warming?
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 – 9:13 pm
Apparently tomorrow will be the “National Day of Unplugging”, when people who are ready to “take the unplug challenge” will obey the call to “put down your cell phone, sign out of email, stop your Facebook and Twitter updates”. But this isn’t just some kind of stunt or willpower exercise; there’s a point to it. […]
Is Your Domain Name Spellable and Pronounceable?
Sunday, November 7th, 2010 – 12:41 pm
A good domain name should have the following features: When someone says it to you, you know how to spell it. This means that if my friend wants to tell me about your site at a party or a club or out on the street somewhere, she doesn’t have to spell it out for me. […]
Blame the Men Who Are Behaving Badly
Thursday, September 9th, 2010 – 6:40 pm
Let’s organize a 10K footrace. At the end of the footrace — for, say, the last kilometer — we’re going to do whatever we can to encourage the people who are wearing blue jerseys and t-shirts and athletic clothing. There will be people standing by the sidelines to hand out bottles of refreshing sports drinks, and others […]
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 […]
Facebook and Privacy
Saturday, May 15th, 2010 – 2:22 pm
Okay, so I’m a little late to the party in posting this. All the professional bloggers have already written about it, while I’ve been busy with my day job. Nonetheless, something that’s been on my mind since the beginning of the week, when it would have been timely: I think Facebook has now hit its […]