Technology

31 Aug 2010 2259H

Prototyping with Microsoft Sketchflow

Well, bosses sprung for a copy of Expression Blend on my request — our software runs on Windows, we’re a Microsoft shop, so behooves us to find efficiencies and smooth transitions in the development lifecycle in any way possible — spent a few days last week picking it up and playing around with it. The [...]

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25 May 2010 0739H

Conducted international remote usability testing the other day

Rather interesting experience. Client was in Cleveland, which is only an hour time difference, but the server was in Bangalore (India!) being run by a colleague between 11:30PM and 1AM their time. Somehow we got Microsoft Live Meeting working and were able to get them to take control of the Bangalore computer, so they could [...]

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08 Feb 2010 2330H

World’s most helpful dialog

Thank you Borland for your extremely helpful dialog from your very reliable product, CaliberRM. And here’s our winning dialog, which I am now seeing on a regular basis:

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28 Jan 2010 0022H

Another year, another Apple event

Or was it? I’ve been saying this in various places, but, I think we saw a game changer of an event today. Technologically nothing has changed. But because it addresses emerging markets and unmet user needs, the iPad will change computing as we know it, really make it part of our contemporary everyday experience, almost [...]

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25 Nov 2009 0645H

Re: Barnes & Noble’s Nook

Dear Mr. Frain: slash the price on the Nook. Give the thing away. Why? The real game is to sell books, not to sell Nooks, just like Microsoft and the other game companies. To compare with video games: if you have good product, as Nintendo planned, quite successfully, with the Wii against Microsoft’s XBox 360 [...]

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19 Nov 2009 0748H

Experiential design in video games

Great article in the New York Times about the search for a great differentiating experience in video game design: Can DIY Supplant the First Person Shooter?

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30 Oct 2009 1003H

30 second review in iTunes

Whoever designed this bit of interaction is worth their weight in gold. The feature — new to iTunes 9? — lets you reverse 30 seconds, an extremely helpful feature for audiobooks particularly. May have been one of these things you learn only by observing users.

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01 Sep 2009 1616H

So, what have you been up to?

Sit down, kiddies . . . listen to your ol’ Uncle Gene tell you a story. A little over a year ago, I stopped freelancing at Sears Online Services, where I’d been working for a beta service that Sears was looking at growing called MyGofer.com. We — meaning a team of about three IAs and [...]

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10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s [...]

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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 but [...]

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