Category
General
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General
Children of a Lesser Tool?
I’ve been really enjoying the roasting that Adobe’s Flash has been getting lately at the hands of Steve Jobs and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. But Gruber extended the roasting to cross-platform toolkit Qt:
Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a [...] -
General
Tweetie’s Beautiful Scroll Bar
I dislike non-standard controls. We sometimes run into them because the application is cross-platform, and the developers are either too lazy to bother giving the controls a native UI, or their cross-platform tool prevents them from doing so. That’s why I’ve never even downloaded an Adobe Air application. Yuck.
Other times, the developer gets creative with [...] -
General
Contacting the White House
I had an idea regarding health care reforms. So I went to whitehouse.gov and clicked on the Contact Us link. As I was typing away, I realized that the reCAPTCHA words that I had to type were… “the mobsters“!
You just can’t make this stuff up. -
Design, General, User Experience
Colts vs. who?! Or Watching For Your Biases
Gotta admit, I know nothing about football. Our family’s sports fanatic is Robert, my brother-in-law. As I arrived at his place, my first question was “who’s playing”. Yeah, that’s how knowledgeable I am. It turns out that sometimes ignorance is, indeed, bliss.
When the score became 24-17 in the Saints favor, I told [...] -
General
In Praise of… Commuting?
When we moved from Phoenix to San Pedro several years ago, I reminded my wife all the time how my commute became longer, all of 2 miles instead of 1.5.
We moved again a couple of months ago and my commute is now a whopping 11 miles, driving under blue skies on a scenic coastal road, [...] -
General
Close All Windows
On her way out of the house in the morning, my wife said: “Please remember to close all the windows. The gardener is coming today.”
“Yes honey.”
“I just cleaned the house. If you forget, the house will be full of grass dust when I come back.”
“I won’t forget.”
“Please write a note to remind yourself.”
I [...] -
General, Software Development
The Outrage of Air France 447 Crash
06.17.09 | Permalink | 6 CommentsWhen Air France flight 447 was reported missing, news reports blamed storms over the Atlantic. As a frequent traveler, this didn’t make sense to me. Then reports started coming out blaming the pitot tubes that measure an airplane’s speed. It turns out that both Airbus and Air France already knew of problems [...]
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General
Verizon MiFi: a Review
I was very excited when I read David Pogue’s May 6 review in the New York Times about a new “personal, portable [...] wireless hot spot” that I could take with me anywhere. The Verizon MiFi was released about 10 days later. With three planned trips coming up and hotels charging $10 to $15 a [...]
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General
Happy 25th Birthday, Mac!
Yes, I know. I know. The original Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984. Which, by the way, happens to be one day after this immigrant landed at JFK. I have always wondered how Steve knew about it and very much appreciate that he waited for my arrival. Very sweet! [...]
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Cedrus, General, Software Development
Featuritis: Worse Than You Think
I just finished reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. The book describes Mitch Kapor’s valiant effort at creating Chandler, a software product that was supposed to be the mother of all PIMs. Scott was there from the start and describes the various mistakes made, such as not having a finalized user interface [...]
about me
My name is Hisham Abboud. Curious Chap is my blog about hardware design, user interfaces, and other related topics. During daytime, I play at Cedrus. I still haven't decided what I want to do when I grow up.
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