Yostivanich

“The unem­ploy­ment rate in the US rose to 10.2% in Octo­ber, which was its high­est rate since April 1983, accord­ing to fig­ures from the US Labor Department.”

“Some large-scale com­puter sim­u­la­tions may be over­es­ti­mat­ing the impact of cli­mate change on bio­di­ver­sity in some regions, researchers have sug­gested. They said mod­els that analyse vast areas often failed to take into account local vari­a­tions, such as topog­ra­phy and micro­cli­mates. Local-scale sim­u­la­tions, which did include these fac­tors, often deliv­ered a more opti­mistic out­look, they added.”

“In part­ner­ship with the OpenOffice.org com­mu­nity, War­Mouse announced the release of the OpenOf­fice­Mouse, the first multi-button appli­ca­tion mouse designed for the world’s lead­ing open-source office pro­duc­tiv­ity suite. With a rev­o­lu­tion­ary and patented design fea­tur­ing 18 but­tons, an ana­log joy­stick, and sup­port for as many as 52 key com­mands, the OpenOf­fice­Mouse is intended to pro­vide a faster and more effi­cient user inter­face for OpenOffice.org appli­ca­tions such as Writer and Calc than the con­ven­tional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit.”

“The point is that Amer­i­can Air­lines is clearly a fail­ing com­pany. They’re los­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars every quar­ter. The expe­ri­ence of trav­el­ing on one of their flights is ter­ri­ble. Their web­site is ter­ri­ble. These facts are not unre­lated. How does this hap­pen? It hap­pens when a com­pany is run by exec­u­tives who don’t have taste and aren’t con­cerned about cus­tomer experience.”

“As you prob­a­bly already know, IE doesn’t allow you to cre­ate rounded cor­ners with­out using images or end­less hack­ing. Enter the Curvy­Corners javascript project. Curvy­Corners allows you to quickly cre­ate rounded cor­ners within Inter­net Explorer.”

Twit­ter icons.

“The best cur­rent esti­mate would be about 15 per­cent if peat degra­da­tion is included. Given the uncer­tain­ties involved one can not rely on esti­mates to the near­est 1 percent.”

“Sex­u­al­ity is con­sid­ered one of the most pow­er­ful tools of mar­ket­ing and par­tic­u­larly adver­tis­ing both online and offline. Post-advertising sales response stud­ies have shown it can be very effec­tive for attract­ing imme­di­ate inter­est, hold­ing that inter­est, and in the con­text of that inter­est, intro­duc­ing a prod­uct that some­how cor­re­lates with that inter­est.” The best trend used is great images.

“How’s this for a grip­ping cor­po­rate story line: Youth­ful founder gets booted from his com­pany in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the fol­low­ing decade sur­vives two brushes with death, one securities-law scan­dal, an also-ran prod­uct lineup, and his own often unpleas­ant demeanor to become the dom­i­nant per­son­al­ity in four dis­tinct indus­tries, a bil­lion­aire many times over, and CEO of the most valu­able com­pany in Sil­i­con Val­ley.” I would have to agree.

“The inter­net chap­ter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agree­ment, a secret copy­right treaty whose text Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion refused to dis­close due to “national secu­rity” con­cerns, has leaked. It’s bad.” Beyond bad.

“Let me remind every­one that Apple rejected a Someecards appli­ca­tion last month par­tially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mock­ing Hitler (and more specif­i­cally, the film Inglou­ri­ous Bas­terds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a cer­tain rat­ing for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, com­plete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll for­give me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.”

“Google Reader and Twit­ter are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent prod­ucts that serve fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent pur­poses, regard­less of how many dif­fer­ent uni­forms peo­ple try to squeeze Twit­ter into — but we’ll dis­re­gard all that for now and focus on why Twit­ter, in it’s cur­rent iter­a­tion and fea­ture set, sim­ply can­not func­tion as a legit­i­mate news­read­ing tool. I will do this by pro­vid­ing you with a dumb anal­ogy I came up with while load­ing some tow­els in the dryer.”

“Even though Apple rec­om­mends it, plac­ing pref­er­ences in their Settings.app is cur­rently prob­a­bly not a good idea. The list of appli­ca­tions in Settings.app quickly becomes unman­age­able, and peo­ple don’t look for set­tings in there.”

“Frut­tabuona, which is Ital­ian for Good Fruit, is our first free icons set. When I first started draw­ing the apple, which orig­i­nally was intented to be a per­sonal avatar, I knew I wanted to do some­thing glossy but not too shiny, with a heavy out­line and a strongly cir­cu­lar set up. But, once I was smit­ten with my first one icon, I’ve kept going on draw­ing and here you are Fruttabuona.”

“I used to think that John Stu­art Mill was right that when ideas were freely exchanged the mar­ket­place of ideas would even­tu­ally expose the truth and that peo­ple would come to know it for the truth. But then I started learn­ing more about the flaws and weak­nesses in human rea­son­ing and per­cep­tion. We’re extremely vul­ner­a­ble to this kind of emo­tional manip­u­la­tion, and it threat­ens to over­whelm our ratio­nal fac­ul­ties. Being true is dif­fer­ent from being con­vinc­ing. I no longer trust that the truth will win out. Talk about intel­lec­tual cow­ardice. This entire argu­ment is a bla­tant appeal to emo­tion which should be dis­pelled by stop­ping to think for 10 sec­onds. But when you’re irra­tionally ter­ri­fied, it’s hard to form ratio­nal thoughts. Too often, reli­gion uses bad log­i­cal argu­ments slipped in the ‘emo­tional’ side door to our beliefs.”

“
OK, OK, I’m exag­ger­at­ing for effect. But if the 2009 cycle is a ref­er­en­dum on either party, isn’t more of a ref­er­en­dum on the Repub­li­cans? Or per­haps, more pre­cisely, a ref­er­en­dum for Repub­li­cans about the mean­ing of Republicanism?”

“Per­son­ally, I’m all about inno­va­tion. Allow­ing an inno­va­tor to ben­e­fit from his or her inno­va­tion through patents is what makes busi­nesses inno­vate in the first place. At the same time how­ever, ges­tures are not inno­v­a­tive, nor should they be patentable. Pinch-to-zoom is just com­mon sense. How else would you do it with one motion? If Apple wants to patent some­thing, patent the tech­nol­ogy that allows the device to rec­og­nize multi touch and react to it, don’t patent the ges­tures them­selves. Ges­tures should be treated as a lan­guage, like sign lan­guage for touch devices. We need a com­mon set of ges­tures to inter­act with all touch enabled devices. I shouldn’t have to lean a dif­fer­ent lan­guage just to use a dif­fer­ent device.”

“When I first learned about this, I was hor­ri­fied. Mr. X is actu­ally a good UX designer, and his email had me think­ing there was hope for Amer­i­can Air­lines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user expe­ri­ence at the com­pany as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.”

“You don’t want every­one. You want the right some­one. Some­one who cares about what you do. Some­one who will make a con­tri­bu­tion that mat­ters. Some­one who will spread the word.”

Indeed.

“An auto­mated cen­sor­ing ser­vice has left iTunes embar­rassed after it cen­sored “doo wop” to “doo w*p”, con­fus­ing con­sumers, includ­ing Radio 2 DJ Jeremy Vine. Doo wop was orig­i­nally per­formed largely by African-Americans, but was later pop­u­larised by Italian-American artists. It’s the lat­ter eth­nic group that has borne the brunt of the racial slur in ques­tion, so in cen­sor­ing the word, iTunes is being a lit­tle over-sensitive.”