Scarcity in Design

Great interview of Fred Brooks in the August 2010 Wired magazine (sorry, no link at this time).

The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you think that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scare; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what the scarce resource you’re optimizing.

Tags: design

"Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button, nothing else."

— Gary Tan

Tags: Business

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Tags: life

We all underestimate our ability to massively change our life when it’s gone off track.

Tags: life

Reading PDF eBooks on an iPad

The recent update to iBooks added PDF support. Unfortunately, the reading experience is no where near as good as the epub experience.

This was a bummer for me since I own quite a few eBooks in PDF format (and converting them to epub does not yield better results).

Thankfully, a tweet from John Grubber lead me to SimplyPDF which makes the PDF experience much more tolerable by allowing you to focus on a particular area of the page.

Here are too screen shots to compare:

The Default View in SimplyPDF

Default PDF View

The Focused View in SimplyPDF

Focused PDF View

While it is no way near as good as a epub in iBooks or mobi in the Kindle app, it does get the job done for now.

A really interesting look at the design decisions in FireFox 4 for moving tabs to the top of the main window.

Tags: ux design firefox

You are as Dumb as You Ever Will Be

A great line from Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen in talking about You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI):

Barring a sharp blow to the head, as you stand here today you are as dumb as you ever will be.

You get smarter every day. Your users (generally) understand your app and their needs better every day. Unnecessarily trying to solve future problems is really just guessing, so why do it if you do not have to?

Tags: ruby software

Steak at a dollar store. Could this happen anywhere but in the US?

Steak at a dollar store. Could this happen anywhere but in the US?

It’s my attempt at fixing the process of discovering and maintaining knowledge and references relating to development topics I’m/you’re interested in.

In short, you tell Coder.io what you are interested in and it filters through the content and presents you with a list of fresh content.

Great video by Gary Vaynerchuk at RailsConf about actually giving a damn.

Think for a second if you would have made that last tweet or posted a very negative blog rant if your grandchildren might someday read it?

People are increasingly understanding once something gets published online, it is impossible for it to be removed. However, I don’t think people are completely grasping the historical perspective of information in general.

Tags: business