Designing the Obvious

Robert Hoekman, Jr is speaking now on Designing the Obvious, his book and philosophy:
These principles include building only what’s necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity.
I just added the book to my must read list, but what I’m hearing here sounds like instructions to [...]

The Rules, 2007

Contents:

Open Source
Built for Remixing
Well Behaved and Social

Web 2.0 has matured to the point where even those who endorse the moniker are beginning to cringe at its use. Still, it gave me pause the other day when Cliff (a sysop) began a sentence with “Web 2.0 standards require….”
Web 2.0 is now coherent enough to have standards? [...]

Speedy PHP: Intermediate Code Caching

I’ve been working on MySQL optimization for a while, and though there’s still more to done on that front, I’ve gotten to the point where the the cumulative query times make up less than half of the page generation time.
So I’m optimizing code when the solution is obvious (and I hope to rope Zach into [...]

Flickr Goes Gamma

Just when we started wondering how much longer flickr would be beta, they announced gamma.
The new design had me scratching my head for a bit, but I’m coming to like the changes. The menu/toolbar in the header has direct links to a lot more stuff, while the stuff in the footer has many fewer links. [...]

Native To Web & The Future Of Web Apps

Yahoo’s Tom Coats was of seven star speakers at Carson WorkshopsFuture of Web Apps Summit last month. As usual, Ryan Eby was pretty quick to point out his slides to me, mostly by way of pointing out Jeremy Zawodny’s translation of them.

Ryan Eby’s Pursuit of Live-Search

Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.
Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to [...]

New social web apps

Ross Mayfield’s new social software list discusses Ning, Flock, Wink, Memeorandum, Sphere, and Rollyo.
social software, web applications

Dan Grossman’s List of Top Ten Ajax Apps

Top 10 Ajax Applications at A Venture Forth.
ajax, top ten, web applications

Plan B: Remote Scripting With IFRAMEs

I have plans to apply AJAX to our library catalog but I’m running into a problem where I can’t do XMLHttpRequest events to servers other than the one I loaded the main webpage from. Mozilla calls it the “same origin policy,” everyone else calls it a cross-domain script exclusion, or something like that.
Some Mozilla folks [...]

The Coming Information Age

That headline might seem a little late among the folks reading this. But we’re all geeks, and if not geeks, then at least regular computer users. Regular computer users, however, are a minority. Worldwide, only around 500 million people have internet access, and fewer than 100 million people in the US have internet access at [...]