There has been a lot of public introspection by programmers recently. One fascinating thread was kicked off by Ed Finkler, who wrote “The Developer’s Dystopian Future”. This resonated with Marco Arment, and Matt Gemmel followed up both pieces with “Confessions of An Ex-Developer”. All three are accomplished developers and successful writers. As a (cough) veteran programmer there […]

Earlier this month Brent Simmons wrote about the advantages of using standard instead of custom controls in Mac and iOS apps. He points to the cost of developing custom controls and questions their benefit. Standard controls, on the other hand, have features like accessibility built in. This makes a lot of sense. Just take a […]

I was very excited when I read Satya Nadella’s recent public email message about his direction for Microsoft. I left the company in early 2010, frustrated with its direction. The email seemed to confirm what I had hoped about his appointment as CEO. Then I saw Jean-Louis Gassée’s critique of the message and realized that I had read Satya’s […]

Whenever I see punditry about web versus app, or worse, web versus mobile, I see a graph in my mind’s eye. It is inspired by disruption theory, but I’m not a deep student of Christensen’s work so please don’t read his implicit support into anything I’m writing here. Skipping to the punchline, here’s that graph. […]

Tweetstorms have been around for a while, but have recently gone meta with a lot of discussion about their problems and merits. Including, of course, tweetstorms about tweetstorms. Some folks have presented solutions for making their creation easier (e.g. Dave Winer’s Little Pork Chop), but the problem is much more about their consumption. Although people […]