Coding Horror: This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details →

Jeff Atwood on cat feeders and great design. Also: Cat videos! :D

User experience is a strategic framework, a mindset for approaching product and service challenges. In that regard, it is akin to Six Sigma or Total Quality Management.

It’s only once we recognize UX as “an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes” (to borrow Wikipedia’s definition of Total Quality Management ) that we appreciate it’s truly massive scale, and how limiting it is for UX to be solely associated with specific (and usually screen-based) design practices.

— Peter Merholz – User experience is strategy, not design

A Super Mario Summary - by Johan Peitz →

Super Mario Bros remade in a wonderful Sword & Sworcery-esque pixel art style, with each level summarized in one screen.

One of the key insights from psychology and one of the most practically applicable findings (particularly in clinical work) is that people’s explanations for why they do something are not necessarily a reliable guide to what influences their behaviour.

— Vaughan Bell – I only read it for the articles

Misogyny - Matt Gemmell →

Great piece about the hatred of women in both technology and in society at large.

William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - The Street Corner

An hour of pure joy.

(Source: vimeo.com)

I could see a 100 ms touch latency becoming a problem on a larger touchscreen (such as Microsoft Surface), but I could only barely notice it on my 3.5 inch iPhone 4 screen. It’s a bit more  noticeable on my iPad. It’s not bothering me, but I guess it could be like with the Retina display; Once you experienced the superior technology, you never want to go back to what you previously thought acceptable or even very good.

Thank you for listening, Microsoft

Some months ago, I wrote an angry rant about the Microsoft Silverlight upgrade page. 

Today, I was faced with the page again, but it seems that since last time someone at Microsoft felt my rage and kind of fixed it!

It’s not perfect, but it’s a great improvement. Here is a before and after side-by-side comparisson:

Now we get clear (but weird looking) install links and we don’t have to care about version numbers. My only gripe is that they added an unnecessary “Direct Download Links” heading that on top of it all looks like a link.

But still: Thanks Silverlight team!

PS. I still don’t understand the installation has to be a 6 or so steps process.

Caught-Up with 20 Years of UI Criticism →

James Hague really has a lot of nuggets on his blog, Programming in the 21st Century!

Who wins, the person who has been slamming Java online for ten years or the author of Minecraft who just used the language and made tens of millions of dollars?

— James Hague - Recovering From a Computer Science Education