“A great leap in the dark” — Thomas Hobbs
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Mac OS 3 UX Simulator Updated!
A modal About the Finder dialog box appears! Click here to see if you can figure out how to make it appear.
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True Working-ness
Last week I presented to my team at Lime Wire Agile and Scrum in all it’s most excellent glory. Jason Herskowitz, Lime Wire’s VP of Product Management, and I ran though all the major Agile elements and vocabulary words. The best part of the presentation was questions asked by developers, testers, system admins, product managers,…
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Mac OS 3: User Center Design Exemplar
I nearly lost all my data a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I was in no danger at all of losing my data but the terribad UI of Apple’s Time Machine and Time Capsule made me think I did! Apple’s backup solution is like a good looking school yard bully with a hidden inferiority complex.…
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The Name of the Game is Change
The second principle from the Agile Manifesto is “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.” I call this the Product Manager’s dream principle: “I get to change the requirements, even after development has started! Woot!” First let’s break this principle down and see what it really…
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Our Highest Priority
The first principle of the Agile Manifesto is “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” Easier said than done 🙂 This principle is deceptively simple and simply radical. I don’t believe it’s an accident that it’s the first principle and it’s first 3 words ensure that…
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Circular Logic in Project Management
Listening to one of my favorite public radio programs (The World) while carting the kids around this weekend I heard about an interesting study by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. A team of biocyberneticists wanted to find out how well people navigated. They hired a bunch of hikers, gave them each a GPS,…
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Worst Ever Paragraph in a Technical Doc
I’m working on my Flash game framework. Progress, which I admit is slow, requires a good understanding of the Flash CS4 Component model. I embarked on this project a few weeks ago without realizing 3 things: The CS4 Component Model is very different from the CS3 model. There is very little good documentation for CS4…
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Nope: I Haven’t Stopped Reading
Steve Jobs is a man we all admire and respect. Even when he says something, well, dumb. Back in January of 2008 Steve told a NY Times reporter that “… American’s have stopped reading.” Steve cited this as the reason the Amazon Kindle would fail. In the past year and half the Kindle has been…
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Not So S.M.A.R.T
The original requirement for S.M.A.R.T. objectives I’ve been managing technical people since 1989 (currently at Conductor). It’s surprising how challenging and entertaining it remains. You would think by now I had it all figured out. After 20 years I should have written a book on the subject with a catchy title like “Who Moved My…
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Always Start with Da Face!
The hardest part of creating a Flash game, after figuring out the idea behind it, is to figure out what it will look like. Once you have those two tasks out of the way the actual coding is easy: The design tells you what to code. But first -> Inspiration! Since this game will feature…
Got any book recommendations?