iPad Application Design

Matt Gemmell – iPad Application Design:

"Most users need only a small set of features, and software is better when it’s focused. A nice side-effect of focused software is that the UI is easier to design and comprehend (because there’s less of it, and it’s more obvious why each thing is there). The trick is to figure out which small set of features are actually important, and implement only those.

[…] Be focused, targeted and comprehensible. You can add things later when it becomes clear what’s important, but you’ll never recover from a confusing first impression."

Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers

Dave Rodenbaugh – Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers:

"Experienced software developers smell crap a mile away.  […]  They won’t put up with managers asking them to work 80 hours a week because the customer wants the software next month and they already told you it will take 3 more months to complete with the features agreed upon.

Younger developers haven’t been in those situations as frequently and therefore, have less resistance to bad management practices.  The only desirable trait management wants here is naivete.  If you want a great team and great products coming out of it, having people that can call you out on bad decisions will save your bacon again and again."

Giving Up On Patents

Tim Bray – Giving Up On Patents:

"The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out.

[…] And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You’re actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do."

An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

Morgan Adams at RoughlyDrafted Magazine – An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash:

"I’m a full-time Flash developer and I’d love to get paid to make Flash sites for iPad. I want that to make sense—but it doesn’t. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen—and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about:

Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.

That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem."

(Via Ajaxian.)

Quote: The thing [our clients] bring to the table

Ryan Singer cites Eric Evans' Putting the model to work presentation at Signal vs. Noise – Quote: The thing [our clients] bring to the table:

"We need to be good enough to know how to do the implementation. But the thing that we bring that’s really critical to the process is we think sharply. We are able to abstract and we are able to define things crisply."

Quicksand

Headcount

Joel Spolsky – Headcount:

"If everybody in the world knew about your software and was encouraged to evaluate it, the number that would buy it would be (Earth population) x Quality.

[…] Double the quality, and the same sales effort yields double the revenue.

[…] The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed."

The Listening Engine

Tim Bray – The Listening Engine:

"I’ve come to expect, of my technical and business peers, that they will be well-informed to an extent that would have been very rare even a couple of decades ago. Can you skip this and still make a difference in the world? I don’t know, but it does seem that we are sorting ourselves into tribes based on the intensity of our listening."

Plupload

Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix

Shalin Shekhar Mangar – Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix:

"According to a blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and CTO, FAST Bjørn Olstad, the 2010 products will be the last to have a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

Being involved in Apache Solr and the newly formed Lucene Connectors Framework (LCF) project, I’m very interested in the implications."

Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots

Matt Linderman on the Apple iPad at Signal vs. Noise – Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots:

"For those of us surrounded by the minutiae of computers all day, it’s easy to forget there’s a world of people out there who just don’t get it. And it’s not their fault. It’s ours.

Apple has decided it’s worth throwing out advanced features in order to get these people onboard. Anyone who builds apps would be wise to consider taking a similar path."

It's not a promise, it's a guess

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – It's not a promise, it's a guess:

"Since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with shanty or no tests.

Rushing to meet your estimate promise once or twice might be bearable, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. Software development is inherently unpredictable. There are just too many moving parts and ice tips that turn out to be icebergs."

The iPad is real-life social

Edd Dumbill at O'Reilly Radar - The iPad is real-life social:

"After reading one such blog post saying that the iPad was antisocial, because it didn't have SMS or the ability to run IM in the background, it struck me this was a restricted view of what it means to be social.

The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren't. You really can just hand it to someone to show them what you mean: share photos, videos, writing with real people right next to you."

The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed

Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo – The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed:

"The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple's caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don't get them get iPod Touches.

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don't read our rants. They can't even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That's a future iPad user if I ever saw one."

iPad About

Stephen Fry – iPad About:

"Like iPhone 1.0 […] iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company.

[…] And being Apple it hasn’t been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. “Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.” How many other CEOs say until their employees want to murder them? That’s the difference."

The 6 hidden costs of running a DAM system

TWEAK Digital – The 6 hidden costs of running a DAM system:

"For some reason, desktop applications are just accepted as-is. DAM software is expected to do everything imaginable and be easily customizable."

Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic

Joel Johnson at Gizmodo – Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic:

"Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We've seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.

I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age."

You can always do less

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – You can always do less:

 "Most software has a tiny essence that justifies its existence, everything after that is wants and desires mistaken for needs and necessities.

The easiest way to force the insight of what can be lived without is by playing a game of constraints: You have to ship on Friday, you can’t add more people, you can’t work nights. […] It’s amazing how creative the cuts and sharp the sacrifices become when you’re backed into a corner."

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

Chris Dixon – The next big thing will start out looking like a toy:

"To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful are external forces: microchips getting cheaper, bandwidth becoming ubiquitous, mobile devices getting smarter, etc. For a product to be disruptive it needs to be designed to ride these changes up the utility curve.

Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions."

(Via Digital Asset Management.)

Doing It Wrong

Tim Bray – Doing It Wrong:

"What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

[…] The point is that that kind of thing simply cannot be built if you start with large formal specifications and fixed-price contracts and change-control procedures and so on. So if your enterprise wants the sort of outcomes we’re seeing on the Web (and a lot more should), you’re going to have to adopt some of the cultures and technologies that got them built."