Interactive marketing, building great dev teams, and having fun along the way.

06 July 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Software patents: chilling effects are holding back innovation

My hands-on experience with software patents has been limited to ooh-ing and aah-ing over the black obelisks that Microsoft gives to employees who build patent-worthy features. Some people there had a whole platoon of these polished black chunks of granite. I was never involved with a patent filing at Microsoft, although I really envied those [...]

11 May 2010 ~ 0 Comments

iPad usability study reveals need for consistency, discoverability

Jakob Nielsen’s team ran a usability study on several iPad applications, and published their preliminary results.
Their user base was a group of 7 experienced iPhone users who were new to the iPad. In other words, 99% of the current iPad install base. They tested an interesting cross-section of iPad apps, including heavy hitters like ABC [...]

09 May 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Using jQuery & JSONP for cross-domain AJAX with WCF services

I’m working on a Virtual Earth application that uses AJAX to retrieve points of interest and plot them on the map. The long term direction for this application is to move the data source into the cloud, while the front-end web page is hosted onto a customer site.
For the front-end, I’ve been using jQuery, which [...]

02 May 2009 ~ 1 Comment

Improve your offshore code quality: Use static analysis tools

Static analysis is a technique that analyzes the source code (or compiled object code) of your software. Static analysis tools can help you improve your code quality by alerting you to design issues, performance problems, and maintainability constraints.
These tools are designed to be integrated into the development process, and we have baked it into ours.  [...]