terrbear.org

Last year, when the original iPhone was released, I bought a 4gig model on the first day. I actually didn’t even purchase it; my step mother waited in line at a store when it was released (at 6 in the evening) and she picked one up and met us at Serrano’s.

I went home that night and activated it. I was amazed. Everything seemed so well thought out. Everything activated easy peasy. I had my contacts all set up within an hour, tried out movies, music, web browsing, YouTube. Things worked so seamlessly. I have lots of fond memories of my … Continue Reading

So you’ll get some crazy errors if you’re using the theme support plugin w/ the patch explained here. You’ll need to change your render_file method to look like this (thanks to Nate’s comment for making the code work for everybody):
def render_file(template_path, use_full_path = false, local_assigns = {})
search_path = [
“#{RAILS_ROOT}/themes/#{controller.current_theme}/views”, # for components
“#{RAILS_ROOT}/themes/#{controller.current_theme}”, # for layouts
]

@finder.prepend_view_path(search_path)
local_assigns[’active_theme’] = get_current_theme(local_assigns)
theme_support_old_render_file(template_path, use_full_path, local_assigns)

end
And boom, works.

In December of last year, Jeremiah and I started a company, Navoty. We’ve learned a ton since then. Here’s a few items:

Time is valuable 

Neither of us realized this at first, and were putting in 30-50 hours on top of our full time jobs to power Navoty. This leads to a few things: burnout (who can sustain 70-90 hour weeks?), angry families (wives and kids need attention!), and unrealistic expectations. We were doing lots of work and getting paid for it, but the short term income boost was met with the realization that we were fairly strapped and … Continue Reading

“In many societies, whenever a new building is constructed, it was thought only prudent to pacify the local deities by burying children beneath the foundations (this is how faith sometimes operates in a world without structural engineers).” - Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

I came across this bit and thought about software. I’d be lying if I said I’d never put out anything and looked for random signs that things were going to be ok. Odds are, you’ve done it too. If only I’d had a few children (not my own, obviously) to bury beneath the servers!

I don’t think that highly usable products were put together like legos. It’s not, “put a button here, a tab strip here, a knob here.” I think, instead, you’re presented with a problem and several known solutions, and then you start eliminating the bad ones.

It ought to be a an entirely thought out, approach, too. If A solves one problem, and B solves another, but A and B don’t work together well, then obviously that doesn’t come out to be usable.

You don’t need to be a software developer or ux designer to figure out if something’s usable. You just need … Continue Reading