November 2009
3 posts
2 tags
The merciless task manager: What if every computer...
One of the unexpected pleasures of the iPhone (UPDATE 1/27/10: and now the iPad) is that you rarely have to restart it to improve performance no matter how many apps you have. This is because (much to the ire of app makers) only Apple’s native applications (mail, iPod, phone, etc) can run in the background. The third party apps can only run when they’re open.
As I write this blog post...
“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and...”
– Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco (he wasn’t defending Twitter lists specifically, but he might as well have been)
3 tags
Do it like Facebook
When I was building my first business in the late-90s, a friend who I was working with on a large project gave me some sage advice: Do it like Amazon.
He explained that for any kind of decision on functionality or user interface, the default answer should be Amazon’s answer. In our case we were asking: Should we have people make usernames or just register/login with their email addresses?...