October 2011
2 posts
“(You gotta admit that if Facebook was an actual brand of vacuum cleaners they’d...”
– Max Voltar (Tim van Damme) is upset. (FWIW: Alan Hogan : Tim van Damme :: Tim van Damme : Mike Matas.)
RIP. →
Steve put so much of himself into Apple, it’s really no wonder we tend to conflate the two. But we should not forget that Steve was more than Apple. He was a man unsure of his future. …
August 2011
1 post
“2 layers on top of JS (coffeescript & jQuery), on CSS (Sass), on HTML...”
– A PHP programmer (name withheld to protect the ignorant).
This kind of glib comment gives PHP developers the bad reputation they have earned over the years.
CoffeeScript is a layer over JavaScript, but it does more than make code “prettier”. It can seriously reduce repetition and...
July 2011
1 post
OS X Lion's Mail.app vs. Sparrow →
A Review & Comparison with Sparrow
Just over a month ago, I reviewed Sparrow, a new Gmail- and Twitter-inspired mail app for OS X. I had a number of complaints, but also a fair amount of…
June 2011
4 posts
“Every Friday the citizens of Bil’in, Palestine, advance — without throwing...”
– Indignez-vousl
“How do you feel?” [Governor Cuomo] asked Senator James S. Alesi, a suburban...”
– NY Senate votes to allow gay marriage
GithubNotifier: Growl notifications for GitHub... →
thechangelog:
In Episode 0.3.5, Max wished for an app that would give him Growl alerts any time someone added a Homebrew formula to any Homebrew fork.
Well, Clint Shryock has created just such an app. Github Notifier is a simple menu bar application for OS X that listens for GitHub updates in any of your repos and then alerts you via Growl.
Useful!
“B&N has optimized the e-ink update method to not require the full-screen...”
– If I were to buy an e-reader today, it would be a tough call. I already own Kindle books, but I can’t believe people don’t mind this “blink”. It’s truly ugly. Quote from Marco’s Nook review.
May 2011
3 posts
Simulating the Ternary Operator
x = (falseValue, trueValue)[condition]
That’s how people simulated the ternary operator in Python 2.4 and less. It’s interesting because it uses a fairly unique feature of Python — tuples — to make up for its lack of a language construct equivalent to common C-like-languages’ ternary operator (condition ? trueValue : falseValue).
Of course, now you should never write such obtuse code, given...
“Perhaps this will be used to affix a grocery list which you will forget because...”
– A real magnet you can buy
[Tornado] ImportError: No module named ioloop
In case anyone is as dumb as I am:
If you are trying to run a Tornado server and keep getting the error ImportError: No module named ioloop, it means you shouldn’t have named your own file tornado.py. There can only be one tornado, and yours ain’t got ioloop. Rename your file to something like serve.py and get on with it.
“Now of course we’ll never achieve anything good if we simply walk around...”
– A Rough Guide to Social Skills for Awkward Smart People
April 2011
3 posts
Marco.org: Replacing the "Save" icon →
marco:
David Friedman suggests that we replace the common floppy-disk “Save” toolbar icon with a new visual metaphor: Not only don’t people use floppy disks anymore, but the options for saving are even more varied now than simple disk format. You might save to your own computer, or a drive on a…
Auto-save can even be fairly reliable in web apps, thanks to localStorage.
Tab and Indenting in Textarea Elements →
The classic problem of not being able to indent or outdent text in textarea elements on the Web has been solved by Ted Devito. Thatâs right, you can now use the Tab and Shift+Tab keys to…
March 2011
1 post
Twitter Betrays App Developers →
It’s not a surprise, but it still came as a shock. Yesterday Twitter told third-party developers not to compete against official client apps. No new “Twitter clients” will be permitted, and old…
February 2011
3 posts
“They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while...”
– Charlie Brooker is funny enough that his Apple criticisms don’t set off my Tech Blasphemy alarm.
Is this ever an attack vector?
Consider this scenario.
A trusted service provides a way for users to enter content which is then made available in a certain format to other users, perhaps via AJAX (XmlHttpRequest). The service, naturally, escapes the users’ content to prevent XSS attacks or other “hacks.”
A user enters content that looks innocent in the intended format (say, HTML) but is perhaps malicious if interpreted in...
Border-Image Polyfill: MIA
Most browsers support border-image, a potentially very useful CSS property that we’ve been talking about for at least half a decade now.
But Internet Explorer, including IE9, are lacking in support. They are really starting to hold us back from the rapid development, light markup, and serious styling capabilities border-image enables.
Amazingly no one seems to have undertaken the development...
January 2011
1 post
A Bookmarklet to Enable All Text Selection →
I have noticed at least one lyrics website has started preventing users from copying lyrics. (As if the lyrics website has a copyright on someone elseâs song lyrics!) While there are some good…
December 2010
2 posts
An open letter to RIM (regarding Kik)
To Whom it may Concern at RIM
If you are trying to get developers (of which I am one) to develop on your
platform, you need to at least treat developers and apps that compete with
RIM functionality as well as Apple does.
That means little to no ambiguity about the app approval process, etc.
And it means you must play fair with Kik. Transparently.
As a Kik user on iPhone, I am disappointed...
November 2010
7 posts
“Our North Korean allies”
– Sarah Palin on the Glenn Beck show
Applied Milgram
TSA agent: “Do people know what a Nazi is?”
German citizen in the early 1940s: “I’m not doing anything terrible. I’m just working at a train station where they’re loading passengers on these trains, bound for who knows where. I don’t hate them. I’m just doing my job. If I don’t do it, I could get in trouble. I have a family to feed. I’m serving my country.”
“I’m just following orders”...
2 tags
The longest running UI bug I know
is in Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie). Swiping a tweet reveals an action menu. But if the menu closes — perhaps because you used an option, such as replying, retweeting, or favoriting — then you won’t be able to swipe on that tweet until you first swipe any other tweet. This has been a bug for as long as I can remember. Certainly over a year, maybe 2 or 3.
It matters, too, because...
“Anonymous 3:22: it probably seemed excessive for Rosa Parks to risk arrest over...”
– Response to an anonymous commentator who described refusal to go through the TSA’s new pornotrons or be felt up (“opt out and opt in to a groping”), at risk of being hassled and missing a flight, as “excessive.”
“We don’t use Ruby on Rails, or Node.js, or any other trendy language/tool. We...”
– Gazehawk switches to Git
October 2010
12 posts
“I laughed and said “apparently some people still don’t know how to get to the...”
– I have definitely done this.
andre.io: GrubHub Nails Customer Retention →
I read GitHub at first. Nope, _Grub_Hub. Check this out, though — what an idea:
andre3k1:
Last night I went to order some dinner off of the food delivery search engine GrubHub.
I was blown away by a UX feature that they utilize. Here it is:
I was asked to login in order to complete my order. Not sure of whether or not I had created a GrubHub account in the past I inputed an…
“My budget doesn’t care about user experience.”
– (via clientsfromhell)
I have worked with a few clients who would never say this in so many words, but meant each of them.
I have worked with perhaps one client whose attitude was the opposite. Now that’s a smart investment, and an awesome client.
When a feature omission becomes a UX problem
Simplifying software and interfaces is a great goal. It can go too far.
Consider a room full of iPhone users. One of them receives an SMS message. There is a great chance that someone else has the same alert noise as the recipient, and may pull their own phone out of their pocket to check for messages.
This is not ideal, but is to be expected given the limits of typical consumer devices. ...
tel: with fallback
I think it’s nice to support the tel: protocol when possible. But in a lot of (especially desktop) browsers, nothing will happen.
Here’s a thought: In theory, if you handled the click event on the immediate parent of the tel link, wouldn’t you only get the click event if the browser did not correctly use the protocol when the user clicked the tel link? You could display the number, prompt to...
Not Really →
Insightful contrast of the advertising for Windows Phone 7 and the likely reality.
PHP + MySQL + Unicode = ugh
Last night I spent two hours trying to get a PHP + MySQL stack to correctly match exactly strings with accented characters (e.g. handling a URL like /résumé which is of course percent-encoded by the browser to /r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9).
It never quite worked.
Oh, I could urldecode() the request string (not sure why that doesn’t happen automatically for me, but hey), and my database is supposedly...
“As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t...”
– Sarah Palin, interview with CNBC’s ‘Kudlow & Co’, July 2008
(Never forget how close we came to having someone so ignorant in such an important office.)
The AP’s new pure web stack-powered reading... →
I really think they did a fantastic job here. Consider all the ways they made the best of the medium:
They used a narrow column for text.
Given that they write for actual newspapers, they write for this format — this is part of why you often see one-sentence paragraphs.
The narrow column makes it easier to quickly read and skim.
This frees up a lot of space for a photo, much bigger than...
A phone application that threatens security
London: A cheap mobile phone application that can track the precise location of passenger buses on the road can be a serious terrorist threat, security experts have claimed and called for its immediate ban.
The Bus Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android, allows users to point their phone at the road and see the direction, speed, and...
“Something else I noticed what I was looking at [CDN-hosted jQuery] before is...”
– Andrew Mattie
7 tags
IE9, XP, and Apple
Here’s the thing.
I just took a look at the back of the box my iPhone 4 came in.
Do you know what operating systems Apple lists as minimum system requirements? XP, Vista, Windows 7, or OS X 10.5.8 or newer.
Whoa.
That means that while Apple is supporting Windows XP (a 2001-era OS), they require their own customers to have an up-to-date copy of 2008’s Leopard or newer.
Does this...
August 2010
3 posts
The FDA, sucralose, and “artificial flavors”
FDA,
I recently purchased a beverage produced by Neurobrands of California.
On the bottle, it prominently displays: “NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS OR FLAVORS.”
(In the ingredient list, “crystalline fructose” is listed, making me believe this was the only sweetener present.)
I purchased the drink and thought, “this tastes weird and very sweet for how many calories it contains.” ...
The Proposition 8 Ruling (in simple language)
squashed:
On August 4, 2010, Federal Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which prohibits California from recognizing same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. The ruling was stayed pending appeal—which means that nothing will happen until a Federal Appeals court reviews it. As you might imagine, it will be appealed. The ruling itself is 138 pages long. I’ll...
July 2010
1 post
GitHub Notifications
☆
I get many notifications on GitHub that I care very little about, but some of them I care very much about and want to hang onto.
So I currently have two practical options.
Migrate the important ones to other to-do managers or otherwise track them, and use “Mark All as Read” often.
Delete unimportant notifications and keep the ones I care about.
Neither is a perfect solution, as #1...
June 2010
8 posts
love, freckles.: On being normal →
Lately, I have all of these random ideas popping up in my head of things to do that would instantly change peoples’ impressions of me and possibly make them think I was insane.
I mean, what would happen if, instead of folding that shirt at work like I was supposed to, I took a pair of scissors…
This reminds me of a Bill Burr sketch: Drive straight, go to the office party… ten degrees to...
“Dear Sharpie,
I would like to make a simple plea: Sharpie pens in gray,...”
– I spelled grey “gray” once for search index mojo.
