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Book Review: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Sketching User Experiences:  Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies), by Bill Buxton, is an excellent read on the scope, purpose, and implementation techniques for designing good user experiences.  Buxton's narrative style is easy, warm, and conveys his rich experience and passion for the subject.  He includes a rich set of stories and case studies that demonstrate the importance of design and techniques for doing it.

Google Aquires Jotspot

Checkout the JotSpot acquisition FAQ.

Renaming Projects with the Perforce Plug-in for Eclipse

If you you’re a Perforce customer and an Eclipse user, you should use the Perforce plugin for Eclipse. It makes the job managing check-ins and check-outs easy, allowing you to stay nearly fulltime in your environment. Unfortunately, renaming an Eclipse plugin project isn’t supported very nicely.

The Present Failure of Tagging

This is in response to Rashmi Sinha's write-up: A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging.  She makes a distinction between categorization and tagging to describe why tagging is a better approach.  Categorization, she says, is an extra step in the mental process of relating a concept to other concept(s) we already know about.

CASPR: Category-Specific RSS

In cased you missed it, this site now sports CASPR [1].  Other than "All Posts," each feed URL under the "Feeds" list can be used to get blogs only on that topic.  It's similar to blog aggregator that offer feeds for the individual bloggers.  Now there's a name for it.

Romantic Keyboards

Advanced users need toolbars like Lance Armstrong needs training wheels.  As application designers and programmers we must pay attention to how user needs change as they progress towards advanced user status.  And, in doing so, we must help them to learn and maximize the right tool for the job.

Google's Invisible Hand

"So far they have only demonstrated excellent intentions, but the invisible hand of the market is quite a thing, and you often find it stuck right up your ass, or in your pocket looking for your wallet"

- Paul Ford, about the Semantic Web, Google and their increasing control over the dissemination of internet data.

It makes me wonder: will Google's dominance inevitably become a dangerous thing?  Or will the invisible hand eventually demand safer alternatives as well?

Paul Ford is a riot.  Check out ftrain.com if you've never been.

It Must Be Official

Consider tagging officially on the business radar.  CNN is even reporting it.

Opting for Opt-in

"News and updates" pollute our mailboxes every day.  They're not always the infamous kind of spam we all know and hate; now they're 'newsvertisements,' sent to you because of that little, afterthought-checkbox at the bottom of on-line account sign-up forms.  They're usually checked by default.  At the rate new web apps are created, this is an increasingly common occurrence.

Keeping it Fresh

"Selling web-based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines"

- Paul Graham, in Hackers and Painters, Big Ideas From the Computer Age.

He makes a good case for owning the hardware as well as the software.  From a startup perspective, I can see how it would be tempting to do otherwise and consider outsourcing this.