It's important to make clear that this form does more things than every other form in the world that looks like it.
Also, there's a reason why "confirm password" is a standard -- unless you're sending them their password plaintext afterwards, you run the risk of locking people out due to typos.
Objections aside, though, it strikes me as elegant.
The short answer: It's not better. It's basically a clone of MS Office pre-2007, which is what everyone is using anyway. When the time comes to change, it'll be to the next version of Office, which will, by that time, be the standard, and OO.o will still not be /better/.
I'd probably browse the web and read news feeds. In addition, I'd watch video, program, play games, and use IRC.
I'd also set up scripts in the background to copy files from one HDD to another ad infinitum because I'd feel bad having all of those cores and not doing anything with them.
I know it sounds crazy, but something like *chan-style "threading" could be useful. Each post on that software has a number in its header, and saying ">>123456" provides an anchor link to the above post. Clicking on the number in the header of a post the link to it in the reply box automatically to save copy/pasting. Also, ">text" makes the text green and italic, often used to quote people.
It's simpler than blockquoting while still allowing people to be clear who they're talking to and what about.
I concur on the name being-- well, awful. The design, too, is not great. Branding overall, poor.
/Product/, though: It's wicked good. Useful, possibly profitable, easy. You could carve out a niche here. Froogle has never achieved dominance in the space, nor has any other product search. Good luck.
The visualization here is excellent, and I love watching how a link spreads through the little ecosystem of linkers of different sizes.
However, I am very concerned about the headline, which suggests that HN is the most interesting part of this. I fear that posts framed this way are the first step into the pit of self-referentiality that reddit is permanently stuck in.
It looks interesting, but it might be better to do a little more handholding on getting users started, instead of just having the list of directions. Maybe handpick a market and put it up top and ask people to predict on it, before even registering. When they want to register an opinion, let them, and then show them what they can do beyond that.
He's not wrong. Apple's garden-walling was become extensive enough that it's gone beyond ensuring a good experience for their users, and has started to damage the platform. This should have been obvious to them since jailbreaking became so common, but I guess it hasn't quite sunk in yet. Apple needs to allow people to use their platform, or it won't become as good as it deserves to be.
Why should I learn this language that I've never heard of if it can't even do math in any sensible way? Not left-to-right, not order of operations, not lisp-like prefix. Who thought that was a good idea?
Perhaps add a "lobby" room on the dashboard page with no particular topic? That'd show 'em.
Also, showing more tips hides the input box. It prevents people from being sure they're implementing tips right, and adds more complexity to saying things for new users.
I can't type a capital T in the room I'm in. Some autosuggest thing keeps trying to turn it into the same of someone in the room that starts with lowercase t. Might I suggest a more standard tab-completion system?
thesixtyone.com, a social music site, has a clever way of dealing with this: You can "bump" a song, but it costs you "points," which you see a return on if the song becomes popular. It turns upward momentum into a currency instead of something tossed around in large amounts.
It takes a very good post to make me subscribe to someone's blog, especially an Apple person's blog, but this is high-quality Tognazzini-level musing on interface design. Better, even: Modern, web-focused.
This page seems to be a discussion of the applicability of music analogies to programming. It was not a useful or insightful read, but it might be if someone were to organize their thoughts on the topic.
>Thereby making both highways have less traffic. The fact
>that people come when capacity is improved shows that you're
>lessening the load on other roads!
Yeah: on other roads whose traffic problem was not as bad as the one you just expanded.
>>Now that the Mac runs on the "x86" architecture, there is no more need to debate the price of a Mac vs. the price of an IBM, or Acer, or Dell, etc., etc. Why?
Why? Because now that they use the same hardware, you can see exactly how much the Apple industrial design is costing you. Hint: It's a lot.
The OLPC-provided Reader activity is very functional, but last I checked, it eats memory at a ridiculous rate. Someone recommended FBReader to me, which is a cross-platform reader app with a Linux version.
Schneier has purged all purely political comments, restricting the thread to discussion of security trade-offs only.
I wish that more people in charge of blogs and discussion sites maintained a focus like that: While Slashdot's anything-goes discussions have their place, so do focused conversations in which irrelevancies aren't allowed to intrude.
I'm less interested in MS press fluff than in what exactly Azure is. Is it just modified Windows Server (and if so, what version)? Does it entail using space on MS servers? Is it closer to hosting, or .NET, or Google Apps?
Here is a better analogy: You're in a crowd of people, all passing bricks, one at a time, in a general direction. If you fail to pass a brick, someone near you will get it anyway. However, as fewer people decide to pass bricks, the outcome of clearing all of the rubble will become less likely.
I love Sam "sam512" Hughes, the owner of qntm.org. I first ran into his writing on Everything2, the old-but-not-dead collaborative writing site.
His science fiction is absolutely exemplary, especially the "Ed Stories" and the "Fine Structure" series. I would suggest that you all check it out, along with some of the other essays on qntm.org.
Seriously, though: I understand that the App Store is Apple's garden to wall, but what do they gain by doing things like this? If they ban every book with swearing in it, then they're left with damn few books. People that want to sell books to read on an iPhone will do it somewhere else, like with an ebook reader app and separate book sales that Apple doesn't get a cut of. What's their game here?
I've used Drupal before (for a local political campaign) and it served me well, but we don't have a designer that can get something really nice up layout-wise, while Wordpress has more newspaper- and magazine-type themes than you can count on your fingers and toes. If there were something really nifty that built on Drupal (something similar to Plone's publication control) then I'd seriously consider using it, but for now, Wordpress is the favorite.
The author pretty much nails why we use paper and what will be needed to get rid of it.
To me, the main thing is instant-on. I want to be able to grab my reader and start jotting notes or reading a page with zero noticeable delay. Once I can do that, I'll stop buying packs of little cardboard-backed pads of paper.
The next step is adding user agent spoofing to Boxee, and I don't think that Hulu has a counter for that other that lawyers. I hope it doesn't come to that, though: I kind of want to like Hulu.
Frankly, I don't think cloud computing is the Next Big Thing people make it out to be. It's just another case of something the geeks have had for years (file servers, easy remote access to everything) being adapted to the mainstream. Sure, it's better for many, and the benefits to web and app hosting are significant, but "cloud computing" means roughly "on a server somewhere else."
Grok's main value, to me, is to interact with larger Zope applications without having to deal with all of the mental overhead that Zope entails.
You can also reap the great benefits of the ZODB very easily with Grok alone. Grok is very easy to learn, and was designed by people that really know what they are doing with regard to Python web app development.
Okay, so 'shiftiness' is independent of appearance as measured other ways, but what is it exactly? The next step is quantifying what cues people pick up on that identify trustworthiness, and that's what I'm really interested in.
This is happening anyway: The internet provides maps, contact information for businesses, user opinions on everything, and, increasingly, nifty location-awareness tech. What value does this project add to all of the tools that the market has provided?
The promise that you, too can make a web page, and it's as easy as surfing the web(!) smells really 1997. Especially considering that the content is all about programming languages and the like, I doubt anyone in the target market is intimidated by making a web page.
Also, just looking at it, what's it for? Making web pages about technology? There are lots of web pages about technology, and lots of places to host new ones.
