Art vs. Design
Posted on August 24th, 2010
Art challenges…design solves
Matt Conway, email, 19 August 2010
Tags: design
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Hacker mind
Posted on August 12th, 2010
Paul Graham has posted his thoughts on what went wrong at Yahoo. As always, his thoughts are cogent and presented as a dense but accessible story. One of his statements, though, deserves some inspection:
At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code.
One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren’t very good.
I expect Paul meant this as a condemnation of the waterfall, specify-and-build process, but it sounds like an attack on product managers and designers. Perhaps it is, as he thinks very highly of programmers and I wouldn’t be surprised if the designers at Yahoo were… yahoos.
But I do wish he’d be more explicit, here, because in some places, everyone’s a hacker, even if they don’t write code.
Tags: code, design
Filed under: work | View Comments
Wait and see
Posted on April 5th, 2010
Microsoft has said they are not developing Office for the iPad.
They seem to have forgotten their own history. The GUI Office apps and Windows itself were highly informed by developing for Macintosh. Today’s Microsoft is large and rich enough that they shouldn’t need Apple to teach them anything, but what better way for them to establish expertise in touch-driven casual computing than to assign teams to dive into the leading platform?
Microsoft now has a more isolationist approach to R&D investment, preferring work that supports already-successful lines of business and working closely only with allies or “partners” that they can control. But they established those dominant business lines by keeping their enemies even closer. Not only with Windows (twice, considering OS/2) and Office, but SQL Server also began as a partnership with Sybase.
Sun Tzu would not be impressed by this shift in strategy.
Filed under: business | View Comments
Progressive charts
Posted on April 12th, 2009
Back in 2001 Tantek Çelik dreamt up a little polygonal CSS hack, using the bevels of borders to create angles in-browser. Eventually, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen made the technique accessible. Back then, I was thinking about CSS and wanted to try my hand at unobtrusive DHTML.
So I was inspired to implement simple rendering of HTML lists as area charts. Naturally, once it mostly worked I lost interest, and let it rest assuming someone would have the same idea and take it much farther.
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Keep Digging
Posted on April 11th, 2009
John Gruber has called attention to Digg’s shameful revival of site framing, and I share his disgust. Though I’ve no expectation of Digg traffic to my little blog, on principle I feel compelled to participate and block the DiggBarr from obscuring my URLs.
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Tags: code
Filed under: web | View Comments