I’ve a lot of fond memories from my youth that revolve around the Mac: getting invited over to a girl’s house in the second grade… to play Dark Castle on an early-model Mac; retrofitting my 3rd grade teacher’s Lisa to be Mac-compatible; getting pulled out of classes later on in elementary school to help the […]
Craftmanship in Software
I find in Google’s search engine significant irony. Let me explain. Have you considered how they can possibly index so much of the web so often and make it available coherently to the entire world and deliver individual results quickly and consistently? The Google engineering team deserves our immense respect for such an accomplishment. It […]
Apple Strikes Back: iPhone Fail
Clearly Apple’s PR Skynet saw my recent whining about the MacBook Pro and engage in virtual retribution, because now my iPhone is failing. I used Apple’s excellent data migraiton program to copy my data from my old MacBook Pro to the new one. After the transfer, the first time I tried to sync with iTunes […]
New Apple MacBook Pro: Fail
I’ve been using Mac laptops as my primary machine for a few years now, going through 5 notebooks since 2004. Each time I upgraded, from PowerBook G4s to various MacBook Pros, I’ve always felt like I was making a step forward, gaining speed, useful new features, and so forth. This week, I “upgraded” from a […]
The Bespin Pie
I’d like to give an update on an interface concept we’re exploring for Bespin. We call it “The Pie”. We’re hoping the Pie solves a couple of problems for us. Let me take a couple of steps back. Currently, Bespin has two screens, a “dashboard” and the editor itself. We’ve not been happy with this […]
The Color Mystery Deepens
Yesterday, I posted some of my frustrations with how color display behavior got a bit wacky when I hooked up a non-Apple external monitor to my MacBook Pro. Responses varied from, “I’ve seen this too and I feel your pain” to “Hey noob, don’t expect different monitors to display colors the same.” Thanks to all […]
Dell and Apple’s Color Confusion
If the two images above look exactly the same to you, move along; this blog post doesn’t apply to you. Note: I posted a follow-up to this going into a bit more detail on one angle of this. For much of my workdays, I’m using a Dell 24″ monitor to do most of my work, […]
Usability Hall of Shame: OpenID and Web 2.0 Expo
Recently Dion and I gave a talk at O’Reilly’s well-produced Web 2.0 Expo conference. We messed up. Let me explain. Last fall, on a lark, we wrote a quick program that would buzz at random intervals. We finished it right before walking on-stage to give a keynote at The Ajax Experience and ran it with […]
Developer Tools Presentation and Open Session
Tomorrow, Dion and I are giving a talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Center: “Web Developer Tools: How to Be Productive Building for the Web” (Wed. Apr 1, 10:50 am). While normally Web 2.0 Expo costs money to attend, our session is free; all you need do is […]
A New Memory Tool for the Web
They say Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and co-author of the Mosaic browser, once said: [An operating system] is just a bag of drivers. People have been fantasizing about the web as application platform for as long as we’ve had it. Nearly a decade later, we’re really just getting started at realizing this vision–of truly […]
Ben Galbraith 