Tag: design

Touch UX Trends Started by Apps

It’s interesting to watch how the accepted standard for User Experience (UX) evolves over time. It’s like there is a universal “vocabulary” of actions and gestures. We intuitively understand them and also expect them to be implemented in every app we use.

Goldilocks and the Three Functions

How much code is enough code? Does the phrase “less is more” apply here? Some people take pride in condensing their code into “one-liners,” but the reality is that makes for obtuse, unmaintainable code where defects love to hide. Sure, there are some cases where gaining performance or some other type of efficiency justifies writing code that’s a little hard to follow, but as a general rule I avoid this kind of code whenever possible.

The Danger of Building a Product on Someone Else's Service

Do Horizontal Lines Make a Good Symbol for a Button?

Recently, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of the “horizontal lines” symbol that is being used more and more frequently to indicate where to click or tap to get to a navigation menu. I really had to take some time to think about it, because I realized I don’t usually pay very close attention to the symbols used on buttons in the apps that I use.

Adaptive Gadgetry - Exposing Different Functions as a Function of User Capability

Making Better Use of Patterns

Software Patterns are very useful. They provide us with common solutions to related, but distinct, problems.

Benefits of Analogies in Software Architecture and Design

Analogies are often used when building or discussing the architecture and design of a system. I think there are two main benefits to this.

Analogies as Abstractions

Analogies are an effective way of communicating knowledge of one domain by mapping the domain’s concepts to another similar domain that is known by that person. In this way, a person can gain understanding of domain B through their existing knowledge of domain A.

Abstraction in Software Architecture

One of the important parts of the essence of software architecture is that it is an abstraction of the actual code of the software system. What’s interesting about that is that it means software architecture is an abstraction of an abstraction, since the code we write using modern programming languages is just an abstraction on top of machine code. Just how many layers of abstraction have we accrued over the years that Software Engineering has been growing up?

Recording Real Time to Failure

If the mean time to failure is an important statistic, why only measure it during development and testing? Building a small, anonymous crash reporting tool into your application can provide you with a wealth of information and can help you to improve your overall quality. Of course it would be wise to make sure the users are aware of this tool, wiser to give them the ability to enable and disable it as they see fit, and wisest to leave it disabled by default.

Caching Object Data with Time Stamps

When you build an application backed by a database, one of the things you want to minimize is the amount of data transfer between the application and the database. There are, of course, two types of data transfer: the application retrieving data from the database, and the application sending data to the database. In this post, I want to focus on the former type.