ignore the code » Modes, Quasimodes and the iPhone

Not all icons in the Finder are created equal. There are the normal file and folder icons. Then there are disk icons, which appear in the same context as normal icons, but behave differently. Then there are the proxy icons in window title bars. Th...

If we want mobile applications to stay around as a sustainable business, we need to be more honest about the strengths and weaknesses of a touchscreen UI, rather than salivating about an imaginary realm of unnamed possibilities.

R. Clayton Miller's 10/GUI is probably one of the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface I’ve seen in a long time. This concept proposes a multitouch interaction system that does not require a multitouch screen (and thus does n...

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails' ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails' standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-serv...

Code coverage is the ratio of code lines kissed by a test vs. the total number of lines in your source files. This sounds meaningful, but isn't.

Total coverage additionally ignores whitespace and comments when computing the coverage ratio, wh...

While injecting the dependency appeared to make the classes more tightly coupled, it simply revealed the coupling that already existed. A was already tightly coupled to B and B to C. When we tried to inject the dependency, we made that coupling mo...

UML is applying an abstraction at the wrong end of the problem. It is primarily used to sketch object models for inferior languages.

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. “system tray”), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification...

Recently, we had an interesting lunch-break with the rails 3.1. asset-pipeline in production mode. Daniel Zahn made a blogpost about our journey, precompiling assets, fingerprinting, Haml, Sass & Compass and what he calls "the dark heinous hutch".