Technology

04 May 2008 2014H

Calendaring apps

It occurs to me that we spend far too little time actually tackling industry-standard problems in school and that is, of course, what we look for when we interview people: has the candidate actually done work that looks like a professional problem, with the inputs and limitations placed upon us by resources available?
If I were [...]

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14 Apr 2008 0611H

Things that impact user experience outside our domain

Just heard a story on NPR about TurboTax (which I just used for the 10th year in a row last night). Last year they didn’t anticipate the hit their servers would take. The cost? 10 million in refunds issued to angry users that needed to be assuaged. They’re not the only site: think about all [...]

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29 Mar 2008 1804H

Earth Hour is nothing, NOTHING

A pause here in the normal flow for this important message.
After all, it is in keeping with Papanek’s imperative that design, being a human activity, serve humanity by helping us survive as a species. You know. Kind of important.
Darren Yates, a contributing editor to Australian PC User magazine, says we should think about all the [...]

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22 Mar 2008 1434H

AJAX polling techniques

To sum it up, AJAX is dependent on a kind of client-side data request method called polling. The browser opens a connection and constantly asks the server at a fixed interval, “do you have updates for this data?” To which the server is forced to reply, “yes, here it is” or “no” and closes the [...]

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18 Mar 2008 1945H

A season of usability!

Every season is usability season, we might protest. True, though frankly I can’t find a better way for a budding interactionist to get into the discipline than by providing usability services for open source software. Ellen Reitmayr is running the show: 9 students will get to participate on some very sexy high visibility projects. Check it out. 

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16 Feb 2008 2232H

Overheard: Amazon’s Kindle rocks

I had originally passed on Amazon’s Kindle e-book appliance, but overheard a conversation among techies over the cubicle wall the other day that it is quite the must-have nerd-toy. Not just an e-book reader with an e-paper screen, it also provides one-handed access to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and even podcasts; apparently it is wireless-enabled and [...]

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10 Feb 2008 1913H

Apple laptops & OS X Leopard

Went to the Apple Store this weekend after cutting my way through the snow and ice that had accumulated in the driveway while I had been away; the store seemed busier than ever before, and the weather seemed to be cooperating. I played around with an iMac, a Macbook, and a Macbook Pro, and came [...]

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03 Feb 2008 0924H

Motorola may get out of cellphone biz

Read this in the Trib the other day. Given how hard this stuff is to do, it isn’t surprising that they lost their way. I was cautiously optimistic when their ex-CEO Ed Zander said the way forward was more RAZRs, but, because their culture is both behind and unlike Apple’s, Motorola failed to fix existing [...]

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01 Feb 2008 0636H

Observations on working with stakeholders

Sorry, been busy ramping up at my new gig, but, I was recently reminded of something a pretty smart guy, Ahmed Sako, once told me when I was working in New York: we are all eventually going to be technologists, someday. And he was right: in our line of work, any business is inevitably going [...]

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24 Jan 2008 1232H

Apple Airport Extreme Base Station

I picked up this wifi base station at the Fry’s the other day while shopping for some networking parts for my dad, and the big difference switching to 802.11n, I think, is the amount of capacity that I can now put through the network. I have connected my media drive to the USB port, which [...]

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