Tag Archives: Software Sagacity

Can User Interface Design Make the World a Better Place?

VisionaryWhen building custom software, a user interface designer will progress through several levels of skill development.  Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, each lower level must be fulfilled before a designer can progress to the next plateau.  The question is – where does the pyramid end, and where is it right to draw the line as to the responsibility of the UI designer?
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The Fallacy of Automatic User Interfaces – Why Design Matters

BowmanReading the recent TOCHI (Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction), a group of researchers developed yet another automatic user-interface generation tool, this time for the smart computing space.  Reasoning that there will soon be an explosion of software in the “Internet of things,” these brave souls ventured to create a “one size fits all” approach to the controllers, so that User Interface designers would no longer have to be a part of the development team.
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PowerShell – Will It Be The End of VBScript?

PowerShellWith the growing popularity of Microsoft PowerShell – the new batch scripting language from Microsoft, it seems that VBScript was dealt yet another blow in one of it’s last vanguards, the server admin scripting space.
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JavaScript Anonymous Functions – Blessing or a Curse?

Anonymous FunctionsThe growing popularity of AJAX and jQuery has significantly increased the use of anonymous functions in client-side JavaScript code.  Although anonymous functions provide a very convenient way to decrease the amount of code necessary in an app, their prevalence and necessity may portend to structural deficiencies in either the language or development tools.
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Four software lessons from the notorious Robert d’Artois

lionThe notoriously successful political schemer of 14th century France has, for most Americans, been reduced to the distant annals of history, visited tepidly by liberal arts grad students. Yet with the recent remake of the Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series, his vivid tale is brought back to life. In between the pages and stories of murdered kings, sex, and violence, lies a bounty of wisdom for software developers.
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