Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set ou...

Social games have been a big trend in recent years. Zynga struck it big and now everyone else is trying to emulate them. Unfortunately, the first thing that pops into anyones head when a Zynga game is mentioned is Facebook. Facebook is the platform upon which their success stories like FarmVille were built, but it’s not the reason for their success.Zyngas games work because they are fun. The social connectivity is merely a mechanism to share your enjoyment of the game with others. It becomes utterly useless if there is no enjoyment to share.Sadly, many focus on socia...

Like so many of you, I’ve been indulging in the amateur analyses all over the web about why Steve Jobs, p.b.o.h., was so great. The recurring message is pithily summarized by Mathew Ingram: “Technology is the least important thing about Apple products”.Bullshit. The reason why Apple manages to build such magnificent products is because design and usability drive the engineering, yet the technology behind their products is by no means trivial. Apple cares a lot about engineering, more than Dell and Samsung and RIM.It takes one designer to decide that ...

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (ok, maybe twice, invariably, on every third usage the sorter would jam and that would be really reall...

Update: At the bottom of this post, I've linked to two large and quite different discussions of this post, both of which are worth reading... Update 2: If the contents of this post make you angry, okay. It was written somewhat brashly. But, if the title alone makes you angry, and you decide this is an article about "Why Testing Code Sucks" without having read it, you've missed the point. Or I explained it badly :-)Some things programmers say can be massive red flags. When I hear someone start advocating Test-Driven Development as the One True Programming Methodology, that's...

Mobile phones have come a long way since the unsightly bricks of the 1980s. The sleek handsets of today are a fraction the size of their ancestors, yet exponentially more powerful. While the implications for communication have been profound, there have been many other applications for this technology. Modern devices are capable of supporting increasingly complex software, innovative interfaces and networking capabilities, and the gaming sector has been one of the biggest benefactors of this.Much has changed since the monochrome titles of early Nokia models. One only need look at some...

Hi People,I should rather call you photoshop lovers, right ? We are going to create a very simply yet eye catching but sober buttons in photoshop. They are simple light in weight and can be used the way you want. You can also add some glossy look if you wish to. But these days not many people like website with those glossy looks. Here is the final output which you will get after reading this tutorial.However many web-developers, webmasters, designers do not like to use images as buttons, but these can be used if you design them wisely on a website, for eg. embedding them on a image-sheet or sp...

These days glass buttons seem to be very popular. You can find glass buttons in Windows Vista and all around the Web. Other popular buttons are metallic and plastic buttons. All these buttons have one thing in common: They are all shiny. Some people call these kinds of buttons Web 2.0 buttons. Here I cover the creation of two different glass buttons in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Both glass buttons utilize the same principles. Once you have completed this tutorial you should be able to apply the same principles and create many different kind of glass buttons. In this tutorial I give you the...