Abandoned City
Getting The Most From Design DeliverablesGoal #1: Getting Everyone on the Same Page
Goal #2: Reducing Development Costs
Goal #3: Making Edge Conditions Explicit
| Stage | Users Want | Usability Means | Developers Focus on |
| Raw Iron | The basic capability | The product works | Technical issues and delivery |
| Checklist Battles | The best set of features | Having the right functions | Adding features and fixing bugs |
| Productivity Wars | To get their work done better and faster | Easy to learn, fast, powerful | Performance support, reducing technical support costs |
| Transparency | Lowest cost | The product is invisible | Reducing costs or seeking |
Potential solution? A mostly informal, flexible base set
maintained by a standard heirarchical team rather than a
committee who are willing to patch upstream binaries in
order to maintain compatibility with pre-existing code: the
Microsoft approach
- Not as extreme, majority of software on free desktop
free software, can be upgraded for zero dollars
(automatically?) even if it's a pain for the user, so
affects breaking change cost/benefit analysis
- However, basic theory is the same: don't break
compatibility, this is more than ABI/API stability and
includes things like buggy behaviour apps depend on.
- We want to support games, these are almost always
proprietary and worse they have a max shelflife of a few
months: vendors often not interested in fixing bugs after
this date, even if people are still playing years after
release
the NeXT method is unique in offering what is known as the 'target-action paradigm', yet another reason why NS remains far and above the best. This article looks a bit into the target-action paradigm, compares it to Windows and other methods, and explains how and why the other methods fall short.
Manual básico de Economía EMVI
LA ECONOMÍA DE MERCADO
Virtudes e Inconvenientes
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The primary tool by which man has visualised ideas is through the usage of writing and, by extension, type: Writing/type is the visual manifestation of the spoken word. And words are what we communicate with. Thus it is no overstatement when we say that type is the essence of visual communication and by extension of visual communication design. Type, where it is present, is simply the single most important element that you put on a page, since it inherently carries the essence of communication and communication is what our subject of study as graphic/multimedia designers is all about. Thus, the history of visual communication, i.e. the history of the visualisation of the spoken word, will largely follow the development of typographic systems, with a special focus on the Latin typographic system, given that this is the one that we are operating under.
-Porque me mola eso de tener 4 ó 5 horas de examen y que aún te falte tiempo.
-Porque veo en 3D y en diédrico lo que otros ni ven.
- -Porque… porque…? por qué??? por quéeeeeeeee??? Eso me pregunto yo a todas horas.
- -Porque de algo hay que morir, y como no fumo…
-Porque me gusta la técnica de ensayo y error, y error, y error, y error….
SaxenOS is an easy to install, familiar to use and lightweight operating system for x86 computers. It fits complete with office, multimedia and internet applications on one CD. The hardware system requirements are quite low. Already an old Pentium 2, 350 MHz with 128 MB RAM and a 2 GB harddisk is enough.
The blog programmers didn't invent this error. Microsoft, for years and years, has been sabotaging new users with their “Save Changes?” dialog that greets the user when they attempt to close a document window. I had a friend of generally high intelligence, but new to computers, who spent eight hours creating a long and complex document, one he assumed was being continuously saved as had been done when he used a typewriter or pen and paper.
Right before he was ready to quit, he decided to make a few changes to what he had written. Then he clicked on the close box only to be asked, “...Save changes?” He considered what he had typed in the last few minutes and decided that it was better before his changes. He clicked, “No.” Instantly, his last 8 hours of work was irrevocably deleted.
- Customer priorities, as set by my group manager. It doesn't matter
what the clients who request work from my manager think their
priorities are; it matters only what my manager knows the priorities are. He sees things from a much larger perspective than any individual client.- Intra-team communications. We have a weekly meeting, which usually
only takes about 15 minutes, so that each of us is aware of what the
others are working on. While this information is usually not
immediately useful, it often becomes so after a few weeks have passed.
An example just today is a query I'd written that pertained directly to
what two of my employees were working on.- Conflicts with regular employees. It doesn't matter how many angels
surround you and your team, there will always be at least one asshole.
Watch out for this person (male or female, it can be either or both)
and try to figure out how best to address his or her needs without
upsetting the other priorities set for your team.- Excess of meetings. My own advice: dial in to every meeting to
which you're invited (assuming the meetings aren't in-person-- if they
are, you're just screwed). Give the meeting about 20% of your attention
and continue working on something else with the other 80% (with the
phone muted, of course). If your name comes up, reverse those
proportions immediately, then switch back once the conversation's done
with you. I'm not saying to only give 20% of your energy to any given
effort. I'm only suggesting that in most meetings, you can listen with
20% of your attention while continuing to get measurable work done with
the other 80%. There have been many meetings in which I never did need
to switch gears at all, for that matter.- I work for an intelligent manager (the opposite of a PHB) who has a
very clear and concise vision toward which he wants our entire group
(which comprises much more than my contract team) to work. As a result,
particularly since he is an attendee at my weekly meetings, we are
slowly but surely able to aim toward that goal.
The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability.
Resumen de las líneas maestras sobre la regulación de las redes de nueva generación
La CMT apuesta por FTTH (fibra hasta el hogar) lo cual es un gran
acierto ya esta tecnología está ofreciendo
magníficos resultados en otros países de Europa
más avanzados.
Asimismo, el regulador propone que
haya varias redes compitiendo además del operador incumbente, en
este caso Telefónica. De este modo se fomentaría la
competencia y el usuario final dispondría de diferentes
alternativas a diferente precio.
Fig. 1: A typical separation of standard and advanced search (Yahoo!). The design discourages use of advanced search.
As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.
NX technology is a computer program that makes fast, secure, remote X Window System connections to enable users to access remote Linux and Unix desktop sessions, and is fast enough even over a low bandwidth and high latency data link such as provided by a modem. It is developed by Gian Filippo Pinzari at the Italian software company NoMachine.
Este diccionario inglés-español constituye una herramienta de consulta práctica y confiable para todo tipo de inversores.
La obra reúne gran cantidad de términos relacionados con acciones, bonos, divisas, derivados, bancos y otras instituciones financieras, y mucho más.
This is the first in a series of posts listing common problems you’ll face with an unorganized supervisor and some suggestions on how to best deal with them.
This is where I see most people fail. Here are some of the things
employees are likely to say and what their boss is going to actually
hear:
Notice that each of these items focus on the advantages for the
employee. No matter how nice, your boss doesn’t really care if working
from home would be convenient for you. You are working for money–not
for your convenience. If you want your boss to get on board, you need
to address issues that your boss is actually concerned about. Here are
a couple things that might concern your boss:
1. Have all our projects and tasks stored in an external system (out of our heads), such as a to-do list or lists.
2. Pick the tasks and projects that are most important to work on.
3. Overcome the resistance to actually doing those important tasks.
However,
the natural state of the app is one that's devoid of data. When someone
signs up, they start with a blank slate. Much like a weblog, it's up to
them to populate it — the overall look and feel doesn't take shape
until people enter their data: posts, links, comments, hours, sidebar
info, or whatever.
Unfortunately, the customer decides if an application is worthy at this
blank slate stage — the stage when there's the least amount of
information, design, and content on which to judge the overall
usefulness of the application. When you fail to design an adequate
blank slate, people don't know what they are missing because everything
is missing.
As an example, here is the KMix main window on my laptop on the
first start (rm ~/.kde/share/config/kmixrc to check how it looks on
your machine):
Not really handy, is it?
After fiddling a bit with the code, here is it what I got:
Music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches. Forget labels building new brands and encouraging early artists to succeed - they’ll bleed existing big names for all they are worth and work hard to keep anything new - labels, artists, and songwriters - out of the market. New entrants just means more competition for a static amount of money. Collusion by existing players will run rampant.
Several
observations can be made regarding the examined font types. First, no
significant differences in reading efficiency were detected between the
font types at any size. There were, however, significant differences in
reading time. Generally, Times and
Arial were read faster than Courier, Schoolbook, and
Georgia. Fonts at the 12-point size were read faster than fonts at the
10-point size. In addition, a font type x size interaction
was found for the perception of font legibility. In
general, however, Arial, Courier, and Georgia were perceived as the
most legible.
For
font attractiveness, Georgia was perceived as being
more attractive than Arial, Courier, and Comic, while Times was perceived as more attractive than Courier. This contrasts
with participants' general preference for a particular font type. Overall, Verdana
was the most preferred font, while Times was the least preferred. Thus it
seems that the Georgia and Times serif fonts are considered more
attractive, but they are generally less preferred. Of the fonts studied,
Verdana appears to be the best overall font choice. Besides being the most
preferred, it was read fairly quickly and was perceived as being
legible.
As
with all studies that examine reading performance, caution should be
made in generalizing these outcomes to other font types. Many factors
should be taken into account, such as individual text characteristics,
the text size, the line and character spacing, the computer settings,
as well as the user characteristics.
Note: A discussion of our font
studies, as well as other studies related to online text can be found at http://www.optimalweb.org
La particularidad de este nuevo invento es que no sigue las
tendencias habituales de los gadgets de última
generación. Estamos acostumbrados a ver como aparecen nuevos
aparatos donde la arrogancia tecnológica y el derroche de
prestaciones se presentan como el máximo atractivo e incentivo
de compra, el "Chumby" sin embargo es una cosita modesta que solamente
pretende que le hagas un pequeño espacio en tu escritorio o en
tu mesita de noche y le permitas que te anime las horas con sus alegres
y simpáticas aplicaciones.
"Chumby" es una especie de "minimonitor"
del tamaño aproximado de un mini-despertador y que está
dotado con dos puertos USB 2.0, 64 MB de SDRAM, altavoces
estéreo, acceso WiFi y pantalla táctil
de 3,5 pulgadas y 320 x 240 píxeles de resolución.
Está conectado 24 horas al día y desde Internet
podrás descargarte los widgets que desees que muestre el aparatito.
"Refactoring (as I'll refer to the book from here on in) is a heavy and beautifully produced 418 page hardback book. The author is a UK-based independent consultant who has worked on many large systems and has written several other books including UML-Distilled. Refactoring is a self-help book in the tradition of Code Complete by Steve McConnell. It defines its audience clearly as working programmers and provides a set of problems, a practical and easily followed set of remedies and a rationale for applying those techniques."
So, if accidental complexity
is not measured during a development trajectory, it might become a
substantial part of the application without the application's owners
realizing it. Accidental complexity is an unwanted by-product of the
development of new functionality.
Complexity Map allows accidental complexity to be
measured and managed, just as the development of new features is managed. The result is a nearly debt-free codebase and
a sustainable development process, which allows the organization to quickly release new features.
The start of a new year is traditionally the time to think about change. If a jump to freelancing is on your agenda, then read on for seven things you can do today to get your freelance career started.
Note that unless you’re superhuman, you probably can’t do all seven of these in one day, but you can certainly get started on them!
Putting it to use
Any given web page is composed of many distinct elements. Navigation
menus (possibly several layers deep), contact information, search
boxes, site identifiers, and shopping carts are just a few. The visual
organization of a web page can communicate valuable information about
the similarities and differences between elements and their relative
importance. Once your audience understands the significance of your
page elements, they can apply that knowledge to the rest of the site.
There must be an existing metaphor for objects that sense, analyze, communicate and act.
Yes, 'magic', meaning enchanted objects. "I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices,", says Kuniavsky.
| Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way |
According
to Gene Bedell, there are three “laws of persuasion.”
He’s not talking physics, but there is a certain Newtonian aspect
to them:
A startup business plan is always a good piece of fiction filled with great ideas. No one really believes what he reads in them. What venture capitalists look for before they make an investment is a proven product with strong market demand and an experienced management team. And angel investors usually invest in vision and enthusiasm.
Countdown to Product Launch (Part II)
A business model is the nuts and bolts of how a business generates revenue and profits. When preparing a business model, there are seven basics you should consider: 1. Reaching customers. How are you going to find customers or have them find you? 2. Differentiating your product. What makes you better than everyone else? 3. Pricing. What can you charge that will bring profit to you and value to the customer? 4. Selling. Learn to sell for survival and develop a sales process. 5. Distribution strategy. How will you deliver the goods? 6. Support. What does the customer do if your product breaks? 7. Customer satisfaction. How are you going to turn customers into loyal fans?
For End Users: Services
There are a growing number of sites and services that support APML
in one way or another.
- Workgroup
Refer to The APML Workgroup for a list of companies helping to define and manage the spec.
- Coming Support
Refer to the
Services Indicating Future Support Page in the Google Group for a list of services that have announced intention to support APML.
- Current Support
Refer to the
Services Page in the Google Group for a list of services that support APML.
* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS).
Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic
won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new
ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.
“The biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.”
- Michael Marshall Smith
Jared Spool has watched users struggle with online accounts and sign-in procedures. From his observations, he has compiled a list of 8 common design mistakes:1. Requiring users to crate an account when it really isn't necessary (e.g. when buying a product or downloading a white paper)
2. Requiring users to sign in before they are ready to do so (e.g. before they can see the products they can buy)
3. Not stating the benefits to creating an account (such as the option to change flight reservations after they are made)
4. Hiding the sign-in button
5. Not making "Create New Account" or "Forgot Your Password" a button or link
6.
Not providing sign-in opportunities when people need them (e.g. at the
checkout where it can save people for re-entering their billing
information)7. Asking for too much information when registering
8. Not telling users how their information will be used (e.g. not giving a reason for asking people for their phone number)
Towards a model of innovation
Hugh Dubberly
Hugh Dubberly's Innovation Model
Monday Inspiration: Innovative Designs and Devices
It’s been nearly a decade since I first started trying to simplify my life, and in those years I’ve struggled with clutter, I’ve had surges and ebbs of complications and simplicity, I’ve tried dozens of methods of simplifying from as many sources.
I’ve boiled it down to a simple method of Four Laws of Simplicity ... that you can use on any area of your life, and in fact on your life as a whole:1. Collect everything in one place.
2. Choose the essential.
3. Eliminate the rest.
4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.
In this tutorial I will show you some very easy techniques, using gradients and layer styles, that we can use to produce nice subtle 3D effects in our web designs.
WYM Style CSS Framework - The aim of this project is to provide a set of well-tested modular CSS files, that can be used for fast design of web sites
PUBLIC DEMOS(last updated October 2, 2007) | |
|
The voters of Alsbach-Hähnlein, Bad Soden, Lampertheim, Langen, Niedernhausen, Niestetal, Obertshausen and Viernheim being forced to entrust their votes to the questionable computers.
"There is a growing resistance stirring among the population against the use of the NEDAP voting computer, known to be vulnerable to manipulation", said CCC spokesman Dirk Engling. "After a virtually identical voting machine from the same manufacturer was recently completely rejected in the Netherlands, more and more concerned citizens have turned to the CCC.
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