Archive for January 2009

20 Jan 2009 2224H

My experience working in Windows apps

Working in Windows apps is a bit different from working on the web. We deal more with modes and modelessness than the web does, and the kinds of widgets or controls we can apply is a bit more diverse, but the tools and general rules of thumb remain the same.  The details are not important [...]

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16 Jan 2009 1307H

Circuit City throws in the towel

Sad to hear. While at Sears online services, round 2, we admired the work they’d done there. They did some great things there in my opinion to try and salvage the brand: in-store pickup worked like a charm; the website user experience was top notch. In the end nothing could help solve drastic market conditions [...]

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12 Jan 2009 2317H

Notes on “Designing Design,” by Kenya Hara

Today we have absolutely no means available to realistically imagine the extent of the brutality of the cultural revolution called the Meiji restoration (1867), which managed to transform completely the purely Japanese “Edo Culture” into a Westernized one. However, people in those days probably expended a stupendous amount of energy on information gathering and study [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not [...]

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12 Jan 2009 1815H

E-commerce book wars? Hardly.

I see in today’s news that William J. Lynch, Jr has been hired away from HSN to head up Barnes and Noble’s direct commerce division, this after Borders named a new CEO. Considering that BN.com made $422.9m in 2008, and that Borders.com, in the first seven months it was open made $20.3m, and with BGP [...]

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06 Jan 2009 0839H

Why Steve Jobs is so important

They use a technique called genius design for high profile products at Apple. At Apple, that means it has attracted the attention of Steve Jobs, who pushes the design to the level of his satisfaction, which can also be a bad thing. Now with this year’s keynote disappearing, not to disparage Ives and all the [...]

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01 Jan 2009 1640H

‘Lessons which have been paid for so dearly’

The report’s goal, NASA officials said, is to provide a guideline for safety in the design of future spacecraft. In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, N. Wayne Hale, Jr., a former head of the shuttle program, said, “I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as [...]

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