Ian J. Wessman's

Five ¢ents

A tumblog on advertising, design, business, innovation, and technology. Adjusted for inflation.
  • July 9th
    Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces

    Jeff Hawkins realized is that the human skull contains an organ called a “brain,” which has spent several million years learning to use tools. Therefore, if you are building a control interface, ie a tool, the prudent way to proceed is to (a) assume your users will need to learn to use your tool, (b) make it as easy as possible to learn the tool, and (c) make the tool as effective as possible once it is learned.

    Michael Tsai

    #permalink
  • Hologram-effect displays with custom-cut projection surfaces
    #permalink
  • It’s not enough for Microsoft to simply prove that Windows is better than OS X, Linux and other operating systems. The company increasingly has to convince customers that they need an operating system at all.
    —Saul Hansell
    #permalink
  • July 8th
    Why Hulu Succeeded As Other Video Sites Failed

    I’ll admit, I was wrong on Hulu, too. In the last few years, they’ve put together something polished and exceptional.

    Not only did Hulu have something people wanted, it had a brand promise that was clear and distinctive: Hulu is where you go for network TV. That’s different from YouTube, which is where you go to watch the biggest collection of video that isn’t on TV. Hulu, in effect, is Amazon.com to YouTube’s eBay.

    #permalink
  • July 7th
    Mobile Web Application Best Practices

    This W3C working draft is full of essential best practices for desktop and mobile web development, all in one document.

    Those new to real web optimization will be better for reading it, and even old hands can benefit.

    #permalink
  • July 4th
    We are becoming irrelevant award-chasers.
    —Jeff Goodby
    #permalink
  • Once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
    —Matthew Thomas, Why Free Software usability tends to suck Matt Asay
    #permalink
  • June 21st
    The smartest your organization can be is the net sum of its perceptions.
    —Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM’s Entity Analytics group Tim O’Reilly
    #permalink
  • June 3rd
    This massive stimulus plan will spend over 3 percent of China’s 2008 gross domestic product annually in 2009 and 2010 on green investments—more than six times America’s green stimulus spending as a percentage of our respective economies. This is about $12.6 million every hour over the next two years.
    —The Center for American Progress [Emphasis mine] Al Gore
    #permalink
  • May 20th
    Yahoo cans BlackBerry app to focus on iPhone, browser software
    #permalink
Older » Archive