Archive for Category: App Design
jQuery wins
Cameron Moll mentions today that Javascripting is now a required skill for any front end web designer worth his salt. I’m inclined to agree, as Javascript has made its way from the rainbow-coloring of text in the mid-nineties to a mainstay of the most used websites in the world (I’m thinking of Yahoo and YUI, […]
Gmail 2.0 - wave of the future?
A few days ago, Google rolled out a new version of Gmail that offers a few interface enhancements. One thing I immediately noticed was that the “Loading…” warning that appears when you first request the page has changed from Times New Roman to Arial, and it’s margin has increased. Aside from that though, the changes […]
Getting people to change
The fellows at ParticleTree have posted another fine summary, this time on the challenges of getting people to use the software you’ve created. It’ll make you feel like you’re back in Economics 201, trying to understand how economists can complicate and twist something so obvious into an idea you have to study to understand. The […]
Information overload
I ran across a post in Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog today describing an experiment performed at Harvard in the 80s (that there was no link to, so I have no way of verifying if I actually agree with Jonah’s paraphrasing of its results) that explored information access among groups of people, and how […]
Please, no more usernames
A modest suggestion: if you’re building a web application, don’t make people choose usernames. E-mail addresses are guaranteed unique, and can be used for login purposes. For display on the application itself, show the person’s real name. The internet is a public place; if a person is worried about having something associated with their real […]
Software Metaphors
We have a Mac Mini, which is a delight to look at and use, and it really seems to embody Apple’s corporate philosophy of producing simple, elegant products that make computing easier. Hence, it was a big surprise when we plugged in a flash card of photos, the bundled iPhoto program launched and we were […]
Object Relational Mappers
I’ve always been a bit skeptical about Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools in PHP. Why provide an object wrapper around a database if you have to know all the details of your database schema to start with? Isn’t the point of objects to hide complexity? To my eyes, using an ORM to save a 1:* […]
Application Performance: it’s important!
Optimal performance in web applications isn’t just for programmers to fantasize about. It’s a fundamental need for a service to be able to handle success and maximize its resources.
