Tag Archives: design

Avoid describing your code as automatically doing something. If you need to do multiple things at once, separate it out into a convenience function or method. Finally, make it easy to call each step explicitly. Please don’t put the orchestration code, that calls code that interacts with the outside world, into a constructor. This makes [...]

Biped Robots Compared

Watch Dexter, Anybots, Inc.‘s self-balancing robot. Then watch the video of Honda’s Asimo robot walking and then falling down while attempting to climb stairs (I know they’ve had successful stair-climbing demonstrations since). Quite a contrast, isn’t it? Dexter’s walk looks like a human walk, a pretty feeble human, but a human walk. The Asimo robot’s [...]

Steve Jobs on Design

Another Steve Jobs quote (via SvN): Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. I love how he uses first-person plural here (presumably by “we” he means Apple). [...]

A big leap for web apps

There’s a damn impressive demo of the next version of BackPack on Signal vs. Noise. It shows a cross-platform web application with main items draggable up and down on the page, todo items draggable within and between todo lists, and images draggable horizontally. Part of making it work well involves showing drag handles only when [...]