Category: Product Design
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Is It 1998 Again?
Set the Dial to 1998 Let’s power up the time machine and take a quick trip back to the wide world of tech around 1998. Microsoft was the Khaleesi of software and controlled a vast empire through Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft marched its conquering army of apps over the desktop and through the…
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Surface Pro 3: Patience is Rewarded
I recently acquired a Surface Pro 3 during a Black Friday sale from a local Microsoft Store. I knew I was in for a challenge but I was up for it. I’m from the generation that witnessed the rise of personal computing in the late 20th century from clunky calculator-like boxes with tiny displays and…
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HyperCard: What Made it Leet
I posted a blog entry on HyperCard yesterday on The Huffington Post: HyperCard: The Original Bridge Over the Digital Divide. From the comments and tweets that I got it was pretty clear that us older hackers have fond memories of HyperCard. But there’s the rub–Us older hacker. Kids today, i.e., people in their twenties, missed…
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Dungeonators Battle UI Redesign
There is nothing quite like real user feedback. The Dungeonators game that I started coding about a year ago has been through several design iterations. Before I wrote a line of code I mocked up the whole UI and tested that on my friends and kids (paper prototype, an honorable UI design tradition). And with…
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When Dogfooding Fails
For over 20 years we’ve been eating our own dog food in the software industry and it’s not working. For the uninitiated dogfooding means to actually use the product you’re developing. It started out as a radical idea at Microsoft and spread as a way to get developers to experience their customer’s pain. On the…