Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO: Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration. (via 37signals)
An interesting factoid from this recording of a Kathy Sierra talk: Computer game designers have long known that levels are essential to keep players motivated. Reaching the next level is the player’s reward for all his hard work. But while boys are motivated by the simple fact of having reached the next level, girls ask: [...]
The folks at the Simile project always seem to have a cool project or two up their sleeves. Have a look of this three-minute screencast of Sifter, a Firefox extension built by David Huynh. It’s kind of hard to explain what it does (that’s why David made the screencast), but it’s quite fascinating. According to common [...]
SourceForge site status: On 2006-03-30 the developer CVS server had a hardware issue that required us to take the service offline. We are actively working on this problem and hope to have it back up soon. There is not a current estimate for the duration of this outage, but when we get one, it [...]
Bill Siggelkow: I was trying to figure out how to automate, in some fashion, the creation of release notes. My project is using CVS so I could get a dump of commit messages using cvs log. But the CVS log output is extremely verbose and certainly not suitable for management or other non-technical parties. Enter [...]
Semapedia looks pretty cool. The idea is to attach Wikipedia “links†to real-world objects, e.g. famous buildings. At the web site, you can print out a sheet of paper with a barcode-like encoding of a Wikipedia link which you can then attach to the real-world object. Other folks can then point their mobile phone camera to [...]
There’s a cool video tutorial for Core Data at Apple’s developer site. Core Data is a part of the Apple technology toolbox that lets developers define an application data model without writing code. Basically, all they have to do is define an entity/relationship diagram in Xcode (Apple’s “Eclipse for Objective-Câ€), and they get an object model, [...]
This just in: My mom asked me, “What’s this RSS thing I keep hearing about?â€
Google Circles is the latest beta service to come out of Google Labs. It shows what people in certain geographic locations and in certain organizations are searching for. Is there anything interesting to learn from this? Well, folks at google.com search for “GOOG†and “investment bankersâ€, employees at apple.com search for “cheap cell phone components†(so [...]