Microsoft released version 4 of Windows Live Local yesterday, which includes the very Sim City-esque 3D maps feature. San Jose Mercury News covered this, and includes a link to a super-high quality screenshot of the service in action: Microsoft up...
Joel Spolsky and Jakob Nielsen are both big believers in conducting usability tests with no more than five people. Jakob has a few fantastic insights into this domain: The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights. T...
CodeGuru has a great article on Winforms tricks that will improve the fit and finish of your application, such as optimizing databinding and using the built-in PropertyGrid control in .NET FX 2.0. It’s short, but you might learn something that wil...
The people on Zune get it, too. It’s about the fun, stupid. Check out this Zune ad up on YouTube, entitled The Ballad of Lion and Gazelle.
Back in July, I talked about the important role that fun plays in great user experiences. A sense of fun, playfulness, or adventurousness goes a long way towards making your software or website more inviting to current or potential customers. Of c...
David Pogue has an article in the NY Times today about some of the technological highlights of the year. I find it interesting how much he hates Windows and Windows Mobile, as shown here: The turkeys of the year: Microsoft’s Ultra Mobile PC comput...
It seems almost painfully obvious, in a way, but some people don’t actually want more features, doodads, gizmos, or gewgaws sticking out of their phone (admittedly, I’m not one of them: I still want GPS, 3G data, Wi-Fi, and a qwerty keyboard on my...
Steven Levy has one of the most sycophantic and interesting articles about the iPod I’ve ever read up on Wired this month. The article sheds light on a number of interesting and new-to-me aspects of the iPod’s creation, like this anecdote about po...
You're trying to put words in my mouth just the way you put artificial facts in your head. Crooks and Liars has the Letterman interview of Bill O’Reilly up. Good stuff.
Apparently, the W3C just isn’t getting enough uptake on XHTML, because it’s simply too hard to shove people in the right direction: The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags a...