This is still one of my favorite quotes about soft­ware. It’s some­thing we inter­nal­ized heav­ily when build­ing Stack Over­flow. Get­ting the details right is the dif­fer­ence between some­thing that delights, and some­thing cus­tomers tolerate.

Your soft­ware, your prod­uct, is noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of tiny details. If you don’t obsess over all those details, if you think it’s OK to con­cen­trate on the “impor­tant” parts and con­tinue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny lit­tle ways your prod­uct annoys the peo­ple who use it on a daily basis – you’re not cre­at­ing great software.

I think our col­lec­tive obses­sion with try­ing to nail down “com­mon” break­points has led to a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing about the nature of respon­sive design: it’s not about what hap­pens at the break­points — it’s about what hap­pens between the breakpoints.

It’s impor­tant to under­stand that most CMSs have a bias. They’re often designed around a cer­tain “unit” of con­tent and that’s what they’re opti­mized to cre­ate. For blog appli­ca­tions, the unit is a post. For Share­point, a unit is a doc­u­ment. For most web con­tent man­age­ment tools a unit is a web­page, even though we’re more likely to be mak­ing dynamic sites that use (and reuse) con­tent in a vari­ety of configurations.

Most CMSs, but not all. There are many rea­sons to love Sym­phony CMS, but this is one of the eas­i­est for new users to grasp: there are no pre­con­ceived notions of con­tent struc­ture, and Sym­phony makes it dead sim­ple to quickly cre­ate a model to match your exact needs. If your CMS is forc­ing you to use its markup or its data model, it’s doing it wrong.

I’m fas­ci­nated by the dis­cus­sion of how Jobs devel­oped what became known as the Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field. Appar­ently Jobs had a life­long bat­tle with real­ity and won.

The Innovator’s Patent Agree­ment is a nice sen­ti­ment, but the loop­hole poten­tial is sim­ply too great, and it doesn’t (and can’t) address the fun­da­men­tal prob­lems and dys­func­tion in the patent system.

There were 3 or 4 huge steel beams on the dance floor, which could be unsafe and so the stripes served as a sort of warn­ing for patrons.

All footage taken from the original Rear Window (1954) directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

To live con­tent with small means; to seek ele­gance rather than lux­ury, and refine­ment rather than fash­ion; to be wor­thy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to lis­ten to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think qui­etly, act frankly, talk gen­tly, await occa­sions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spir­i­tual, unbid­den and uncon­scious, grow up through the com­mon — this is my symphony.

At 40, this short, plump, pink­ish, and puck­ish gen­tle­man kept books for a Chicago real­tor, and con­sid­ered him­self a fail­ure. Dur­ing the next 36 years, start­ing almost from scratch at an age when most men are per­ma­nently set in their cho­sen voca­tions, he cut 113 fonts of type, thereby cre­at­ing more usable faces than did the seven great­est inven­tors of type and books, from Guten­berg to Gara­mond. Now 76, he is the dean of twentieth-​century designers.

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by the crew of expeditions
28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October,
2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.
All credit goes to them.

We strug­gle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about design­ing and pro­to­typ­ing and mak­ing. When you sep­a­rate those, I think the final result suffers.

…free­dom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have dis­pos­able income that I’ll spend to find out how to get peo­ple more of it.

The story is almost a decade old, but unfor­tu­nately just as rel­e­vant as the day it was written.

Through my trav­els I get to speak to lots of design­ers and devel­op­ers, and am con­stantly amazed by how smart, knowl­edge­able and engaged these folks are. These peo­ple care pas­sion­ately about doing the right thing, but are thwarted time and time again. It’s not clients get­ting in the way and it’s def­i­nitely not the blog­gers and authors build­ing their influ­ence. It’s the com­pa­nies they work for actively pre­vent­ing them from doing good work.

The City of Samba is on the Vimeo Awards 2012 shortlist! We appreciate your vote! https://vimeo.com/awards/vote/lyrical

It’s just occur­ring to me now that con­tests like these are just like the design con­tests that con­sis­tently get lam­basted each and every time they crop up. I likely don’t hear any recoil about these browser secu­rity con­tests because I’m not in that com­mu­nity, but I’m curi­ous how secu­rity firms feel about things like this.

I dis­agree, how­ever, if only because one is sub­jec­tive, and one is not. Your design com­pe­ti­tion entry may or may not get picked and paid for, but if you find a legit­i­mate exploit you are going to get paid.