Archive for January 30, 2012

Monday, January 30, 2012

Our Engineers Are Aware of the Issue

Andy Finnell:

Word on the street (by which I mean Twitter, since we engineers certainly don’t go outside, much less into the street), is that it’s supposed to be a “polite” way of saying “we’re not going to fix it.” But I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just say “it works as intended”, which is what they used to say, or simply “it will not be fixed.”

Hibari Design Philosophy

Victoria Wang:

Because Hibari is a secondary app, I want it to fit in with the feel of the operating system as much as possible. I call Hibari “minimalist,” but it’s certainly not an instance of bare, angular, monochromatic minimalism. I’m aiming instead for a quiet, soothing, Japanese-style minimalism; one that feels natural.

I’ve been using Hibari for almost a week now, and it’s great.

Apple Post-Quartum Thoughts

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Although it now plays third fiddle to its iPhone and iPad siblings, the “historic” Macintosh looks hale: +26% in units, +22% in revenue. That’s $6.6B with an operating margin in the 25% range. Compare this to HP, the world’s largest PC maker. In its last reported quarter, HP booked about $10B of PC revenue, with a 6% margin.

Subtle UI Texture in Photoshop

Matt Gemmell:

Texture is an inherent part of any surface in the real world, and provides a cue to our brains that we’ll be able to grip or otherwise interact with that surface. Delicate use of noise can add a welcome note of reality to your interfaces, and make people want to use them.

Update (2012-02-04): Gus Mueller has posted an Acorn template.

A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB

Mathias Meyer:

My goal is not to outline the entire API and its full set of options, but to dig into the bits most interesting to me and to show some examples. A lot of the focus in other posts is on performance, scalability and operational ease. I think that’s a great feature of DynamoDB, but it’s pretty much the same with all of their Web services. So instead I’m focusing on the effects DynamoDB has on you, the user. We’ll look at API, general usage, data model and what DynamoDB’s feature generally entails.

The /bin/true Command and Copyright

John Chambers (via Uli Kusterer):

This is a “dummy” library program whose main function is to make it easy to write infinite loops (while true do …) in shells scripts. The “true” program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status. This can be done with an empty file that’s marked executable, and that’s what it was in the earliest unix system libraries. Such an empty file will be interpreted as a shell script that does nothing, and since it does this successfully, the shell exits with a zero exit status.