Tiny code is always best
“The fundamental nature of coding is that our task, as programmers, is to recognize that every decision we make is a trade-off. To be a master programmer is to understand the nature of these trade-offs, and be conscious of them in everything we write…START WITH BREVITY. Increase the other dimensions AS REQUIRED BY TESTING.”
Top ten reasons why web 2.0 sucks
“M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks…Most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won’t make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience.”
Flickr fails “The Mom Test”
“I told Mom to peruse the pictures and click Order Prints for each one she wanted on paper. Unfortunately, Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog boxes to order one print of one photo. My mom wound up spending hours on what should have been a 10-minute job.”
Fellini on freedom
“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.” -Federico Fellini
Turn off ads for repeat visitors?
“It didn’t matter how big or small the site was, how narrow focused or completely open-ended the content was. The biggest single group of visitors to these sites were people who had never seen them before and would never return again. Among my informal polling of friends and my own sites, the lowest percentage of one-time visitors was 53%. Some sites had as much as 75% of their traffic come from people that had only visited once.”
Ten Questions with Jeffrey Kalmikoff of skinnyCorp/Threadless
“Question: Does Threadless’s effort in forums, podcasting, etc really increase sales or are they just fun/cool things to do? Answer: Both, most likely. Honestly, we’ve never really measured their effects because it’d be really boring to do so. Participating in the forums, definitely helps to people understand that the owners and employees of the company really are part of the community and don’t sit up on high looking down onto our business. Most everyone who works for us was part of the Threadless community before they were employed, so it’s a pretty natural thing.”
Culture comparison between Apple and Microsoft engineers
“One software developer compared the two men’s approaches to the difference between martial marching band music and jazz. Mr. Sinofsky’s approach, he said, is meticulously planned out from the beginning, with a tight focus on meeting deadlines — a crucial objective after the delay-plagued Vista project — but with little room for flexibility. In contrast, the atmosphere inside Apple’s software engineering ranks has been much more improvisational.”
Response of Last.fm customers to acquisition by CBS shows importance of quick response
“I found it interesting that the comments were far more positive on Last.fm’s blog than on their forum. In the forum there was little presence from Last.fm staff (and even less from Last.fm’s founders), whereas on their blog the comments immediately followed a post (obviously) in which Last.fm founder Richard Jones assured people that things would stay the same. Takeaway? Users have vivid imaginations, so keep them in the loop.”
Fast Company: iPhone is not the next iPod
“The question is how many people desire these kinds of features; are there enough to propel the iPhone to the top of the heap? I kind of doubt it…Many users continue to prefer stand alone devices that perform their designated function as simply and effectively as possible, others may simply shy away from the idea of having one master device that could get lost or broken.”
Jitterbug phone sells technology to technophobes
“The configuration and programming of the phone is handled entirely through a Web-based interface and transmitted to the phone automatically. The Web interface even offers an option to do the unthinkable: disable a feature entirely. Turn it off on the Web, and the feature simply disappears from the phone. ‘We don’t want them to see a screen that they don’t want,’ Harris says. ‘If all the customer wants is the phone list—no call history, no voicemail—that’s all they see.’”
Nature colors
Butterfly-inspired color palettes with codes.
NPR’s “Fresh Air&” 20 year anniversary show
“To celebrate, our producers have picked memorable moments from the past 20 years that they want to play back for you…Plus, our producers tell you some of the stories behind the stories — how they found guests, why some interviewees are tougher to book than others, and in some cases, what happened after our interviews were broadcast.”