Author Archive

It is my sad duty to announce that the time has come for Devshop to bid farewell. Devshop has operated for nearly 5 years. The company has had the wonderful support of many smart & talented people over the journey, including advisors, supporters, investors and fans who all believed there was a better way. Timing [...]

I don’t usually forward along anything that smells-like-petition, but everyone in the Web development community should be aware of this. Microsoft has publicly confirmed that they are using a rendering engine (from MS-Word), dating back to before the year 2000, in their upcoming Outlook 2010 product. Have a look at the difference between how Outlook [...]

I’ve heard and read a lot more references to A/B testing lately. For those of you that don’t know, A/B testing is a process where you pit 2 designs against each other to see which works better. For example, you have 2 home page designs and you want to know which one converts more users, [...]

Wow. This article on the measurable benefits of aesthetics in user interface design is brilliant. We’ve all participated in debates about form follows function and vice versa. I have never heard such a well reasoned and scientific (i.e. observed, measurable & repeatable) perspective on the subject before. This is a must-read for anyone embarking on [...]

I wonder how many startups will announce large VC rounds tomorrow, April 1st? I predict reading about that at least 4 times tomorrow, just in the blogs I follow .

Excellent post on paying down technical debt. This is an excellent analogy for something many of us have known in our guts for some time, but have trouble articulating so clearly. I can think of several occasions where I’ve had to explain this concept to a big boss. I’ll keep this article handy now for [...]

Wow. I was just reading up on what’s packed in to the new Safari Beta (v4). Not only does it have the usual “it’s now the fastest browser” stuff, because they all leap frog each other with speed anyway, but some impressive “net new” capabilities: Dramatic UI improvements like cover flow and something kind of [...]

In the last 4 months, I’ve had conversations with 5 different US-based VC’s who’ve approached Devshop about growth capital. It’s wonderful to know that Devshop is popping up on people’s radars, particularly among large VC firms. Some of this is due to the Red Herring press this past Fall. With each of these conversations, it [...]

Jeff Atwood editorializes the Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design, illustrating the point that mindlessly porting desktop conventions in UI to the Web may not be the best approach. Read the full post. I’ve always liked web-apps that port the “power” of the desktop (i.e. fast responsiveness, not necessarily a page load each action, etc.), [...]