From Apple’s point of view, iPhone OS and web technologies share equal footing. When you visit their developer site, the Safari Dev Center is prominently displayed. The iPhone gets all the press, but when you click on Safari Dev Center, there’s a ton of great information that explains how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on an iPhone.
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One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.
Summary: Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.
via Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.
Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.
via Whitespace.
Tags: digression
AskTog, Spring 2010
Mac & the iPad, History Repeats Itself
For those of us around Apple for the launch of the 1984 Mac, things are awfully familiar.
via Mac & the iPad.
Tags: development, hardware
Having returned from an archeological dig into the dark history of Mac OS X, I’ve unearthed a feature that could change the way you interact with your applications, enabling you to focus on one or two more easily than in the past.
via TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Revealing Mac OS X’s Hidden Single-Application Mode.
With a high volume of data, this sounds like a table partitioned on day boundaries (in MySQL 5.1). See Sarah’s blog and her links for a quick ramp-up on time-based table partitioning (http://everythingmysql.ning.com/profiles/blogs/partitioning-by-dates-the). One great benefit of table partitioning is that you can drop a partition to lose millions of rows in one quick statement, much faster than deleting millions of rows. Sort of like a partial TRUNCATE TABLE.
via Glynn’s Thoughts on Databases: Rolling Time-based Partitions.
Tags: temporal
Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if you use multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, and it’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, and all you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, each taking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write the body of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritence from different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM.
Tags: Practice
Database archiving is becoming an important new topic for data managers. The need for this function has surfaced at most IT organizations, and the problems it addresses are only getting bigger and bigger. These problems include challenges with data retention requirements, application renovations and e-discovery. Most IT data managers recognize the problems but many do not associate database archiving as a solution. This will change as the technology matures and spreads.
Tags: performance, Practice
In a story just dripping with irony, e-mail security vendor, McAfee, has accidentally sent the contact details of more than 1400 conference attendees in a spreadsheet attached to a thank you message.
Tags: security