Jinn of Quality and Risk

At the bottom of every press release that Apple Computer sends out today is the sentence Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Powerful words to be sure; all the more telling because they are true. [O'Reilly Network] Nice summary of Apple's history (part one). 

What is Meerkat? 

Discount usability techniques can be used to test a site's users without setting up a state-of-art usability lab. This article is inspired by the self-styled usability guru and comes from India. Note that (cheap) offshore development is incompatible with user-centred design, and "discount" usability is equivalent to shorting the end-user. Further, we're not testing the users (see the quote above) — what we want is to test the usability of the system to support users in their tasks and enhance their experience. Finally, to those who think it's about "validating" the system as it is so you don't need to re-design anything: you're wrong, sadly wrong. (Yes, there are such people in the IT industry.) 

Featuritis sells products, but choices reduce usability. The really great designs are the ones that appear to eliminate a choice. You know you're doing your job as a designer when you figure out a way to take a complicated feature and make it simpler. 

The dawn of the Web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type. 

I've been in the public eye for more than 18 years, in Europe and the US. I've enjoyed fame and recognition, which comes at a price. That price isn't privacy, as many would have you believe, the price is [truth]. I've been interviewed hundreds of times. By broadcasters, publications, newspapers, magazines, school papers. You name them, they've interviewed me. Not once, ever, has the result been factually correct. [Adam Curry]

Adam says media reports about recently murdered Pim Fortuyn are mostly lies. This man was a populist and opposed to muslim fundamentalism, yes — but contrary to what we are told he was neither racist nor "far-right extremist." The Dutch authorities refused to provide him with bodyguards. The murderer is a left-wing, environmentalist, animal-lover madman. 

In L'Amour's moral universe, the good people confront terrific challenges and make hard choices between right and wrong. The bad ones are forces of nature who must be reckoned with. ... He dropped out of school in the 10th grade and spent the next three decades traversing the West as an itinerant laborer and circling the world as a merchant seaman. He was a miner, a rancher, a lumberman, a cattle skinner and even a circus-elephant handler. I should read his works. I know a bishop who does. 

When you read the latest book about [software development] you see a lot of claims about how to do [it], but you hardly ever see any mention of what kind of development they're talking about, which is unfortunate, because sometimes you need to do things differently in different worlds: shrinkwrap, internal, embedded, games, and throw-away software. Different rules apply to different worlds. [Joel on Software]