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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Design

  Misunderstanding about Android UI design

A few days ago I wrote a post trying to correct a lot of the inaccurate statements I have seen repeatedly mentioned about how graphics on Android works. This resulted in a lot of nice discussion, but unfortunately has also lead some people to come up with new, novel, and often technically inaccurate complaints about how Android works.These new topics have been more about some fundamental design decisions in Android, and why they are wrong. I’d like to help people better understand ...

   Android,UI,Priority,Background job,Smooth     2011-12-09 02:30:25

  I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

There’s no denying it. I’m just to damn lazy to be an HTML developer. This really sunk in when I looked at a tutorial for doing a jQuery Lightbox – for a client project. The tutorial was titled “Super Simple Lightbox with CSS and jQuery” but after reading it over I thought a better title would be “A really freaking hard tutorial on the inane intricacies of doing something that looks simple but in reality is a skein of HTML, Javascript and CSS that no...

   Web design,HTML,JavaScript,Complexity,Messy     2011-12-18 10:42:45

  One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got

Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Oriented" was in its infancy as a "hot" item. High paid consultants. Lots of people laying claim to what this new object religion was all about. This was 5 years before Alan Kay would make the statement "I invented the term 'Object Oriented Programming' and this {Java and C++} is not what I had in mind."Shortly after hooking up with this whacky group with t...

   Programming advice,OOP,Smalltalk,Better design     2011-11-28 03:14:25

  Learning Python as your first programming language

Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than would be possible in languages such as C. Python now becomes more and more popular and is now being used the first teaching language in some universities. Why would you like to learn Python as your first programming language? Below are the reasons. Python is a high-level language with dynami...

   Python,Advantage     2014-04-07 05:36:04

  A list of different CAPTCHA designs

Here is a list of website CAPTCHA designs which demonstrate all kinds of weird verification methods. By looking at these designs, as a website designer, you should distinguish which design is accessible and which is not.Is this human readable?What characters are in the picture?One moreWe will be crazy if we see theseOMG,What's the answer?IQ Test?Are you a normal person?You know how blind people read?ASCII PictureAre you an adult?3D verification codereCaptchaIt increase a new feature recently. It...

   CAPTCHA,Website design     2012-07-19 11:51:06

  Why using anchors as buttons sucks

So let's say you're an awesome web developer making an awesome web app. One day, you add a link in the web app that has an event handler instead of an href. Testing it, you realize that your cursor doesn't change when hovering over it, unlike a normal link. You think for a minute and then give it a cursor:pointer style, which fixes the issue. You are happy.The next day, QA informs you that the link cannot be tabbed to. Confused, you do some research and find a solution to the problem: Sim...

   Anchor,Button,Link,Sucks     2012-02-05 07:22:39

  The 15 Golden Rules of UI design and flow.

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being...

   UI design,Game design,Feature     2012-04-05 12:20:18

  "Programmer" is an Overgeneralization

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth Earlier today, I came across a post during a google-fu session that claimed that no one should use the C++ standard library function make_heap, because almost nobody uses it correctly. I immediately started mentally ranting about how utterly ridiculous this claim is, because anyone whose gone to a basic algorithm class would know how to properly use make_heap. Then I started thinking about all the ...

   Programmer,Overgeneration,Overload     2012-03-13 08:13:16

  How do Silicon Valley companies recruit

There are a lot of friends asking me about the basic flow of how Silicon Valley companies recruit engineers. As a candidate, I tried Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and I received offer from all these companies. As an interviewer, I have interviewed no less than 300 people and I know about the process of recruitment. I write this article with the hope of inspiring people who want to go to Silicon Valley or who are preparing for interviews or who are in the design of the recruiting process...

   Facebook,Interview,Experience,Silicon Valley     2012-05-15 06:36:52

  All Programmers Are Self-Taught

When I was a teenager I played high caliber baseball. I’m competitive to a fault and when I decide I want to be good at something, results usually follow. Now I’m a third year undergrad studying computer science. There’s something critically different between programming and sports though: A pitching coach teaches you how to pitch, but a CS professor doesn’t teach you how to code. I was surprised that neither my TAs nor professors critiqued my code during my firs...

   Programming,Style,Habit,Self learning     2011-12-21 10:25:50

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