Full Radio Silence on the Mac

I was just listening to the most recent Security Now Podcast episode 83 wherein Steve Gibson goes to pains to describe what it takes on Windows to turn off your wireless hardware. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript: STEVE: Believe or not, yes. We’ve basically snuck in an entire show on maintaining full radio silence on […]

On Infrastructure

The following quote is from a long article on Toyota in the New York Times: Improving efficiency in the factory, though, doesn’t necessarily lead to greater profits. Savings on the assembly line can mean a nicer dashboard without making the customer pay more for it. “If you’re efficient in the things the customer doesn’t see, […]

Impatience and Design by Counter Example

“Don’t worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you’re ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken, IBM Engineer This is my favorite quote for the day. Innovation, with all the ideas and execution that it requires, fails to happen for so many reasons, but most common […]

Joel on His MacBook

Joel Spolsky talks about his Mac at home experience: I have a few complaints though: OS X antialiasing, especially, it seems, with the monospaced fonts, just isn’t as good as Windows ClearType. Apple has some room to improve in this area; the fonts were blurry on the edges. Also, I don’t understand all these people […]

In hope of an iPhone…

Here is a phone from Synaptics. The coolest part about the phone? It has no keys, just one big touch screen canvas. I guess, if you are going to remove stuff in a drive for simplification, removing the key pad is about as far as you can go. On the other hand, this just puts […]

The General Purpose Thing

Recently John Gruber wrote about the The Mac OS X Tipping Point and finished with this sumation: You can’t appeal to all people all the time, but Mac OS X comes remarkably close. The old Mac OS, as insanely great as it was, did not. I think what is so quickly forgotten about the transition […]

Words Matter

When I wrote the title for this post, it seemed almost trite. I don’t mean it to be. The words we have at our disposal define the thoughts we are able to think. If you’ve learned another language and become fluent enough to think in that language, you know what I mean. I spent two […]

Interface Guidelines

Here’s a fun comparison: Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines Windows XP – Guidelines for Applications Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines Apple Human Interface Guidelines Read them if you’d like, but for now, just consider the main page of each guide. Who do you think will be most successful at getting their developers to really […]