The Insider News

Matt Gemmell[^]:

For most of my life, I’ve struggled to quantify what constitutes an enticing interface. There are certain basic aims from which you can take your pick - intuitiveness, attractiveness, clarity, simplicity, consistency, and more - but those are general guidelines. With the arrival of the iPad, however, I’ve noticed an increasingly-prevalent UX aesthetic that I think gets close to the natural role of these devices in our lives.

The Angry .Net Developer[^]:

In spite of the fact that I’m a pretty high end .Net guy, I would caution new startups that are considering using .Net. I think .Net is awesome, and I use it for my own startup HireFlo. However there's one big landmine that could handicap your startup before it even gets going, webforms. You see, ASP.Net development is divided into 2 camps, and there are major architectural differences, and cultural differences between them.

Phil Haack[^]:

8 years ago I wrote about a period of debilitating pain I went through when coding. Too many long hours at the keyboard took their toll on me so that even placing my fingers on the keyboard would cause me pain. I experienced numbness in my fingers, pain in my wrists, back and shoulders, and lots of headaches. In short, I was a mess.

American Scientist[^]:

For ethnologists, linguistic diversity is a cultural resource to be nurtured and preserved, much like biodiversity. All human languages are valuable; the more the better. That attitude of detached reverence is harder to sustain when it comes to computer languages, which are products of design or engineering rather than evolution. The creators of a new programming language are not just adding variety for its own sake; they are trying to make something demonstrably better.

Develop[^]:

Initially heralded as the future of browser gaming and the next step beyond the monopolised world of Flash, HTML5 has since faced criticism for being tough to code with and possessing a string of broken features.

Baby Steps[^]:

For a long time, it was considered fairly obvious, I think, that syntax didn’t really matter. It was just the surface skin over the underlying ideas. In recent times, though, the prevailing wisdom has reversed, and it is now quite common to hear people talk about how “syntax matters”.

TIME[^]:

Apple’s system has sometimes been called the first personal computer; it wasn’t, unless you use a definition designed to let it claim that honor. It may not even have been the best-selling machine in the early days. It was, however, easily the most visionary of the early personal computers.

UX Magazine[^]:

It’s been seven years since I took my first step into Information Architecture and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving.

gwern.net[^]:

Brain emulation requires enormous computing power. Enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore's law. Further Moore's law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in chip fabs. Chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable. Therefore, the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by attacks on chip fabs.

Revert to Saved[^]:

As of Lion, Apple introduced a full-screen mode for apps. I wasn’t entirely convinced by this new feature, not least due to having a 27-inch iMac, which made many apps in full-screen mode look ridiculous. But the sense of focus was useful, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience. And then I got sick.