Daily Archives: December 7, 2004

Now that you have read Coder to Developer…what’s next?

Community Cheerleading

This guy is way too prolific – lucky for us. Mike Gunderloy continues to share the lessons he has learned in over 25 years of software programming. Mike’s next books is Developer to Designer.

designed to help you and other experienced developers build GUIs for your programs that are simple to learn, easy to use, and painless to maintain, even though you’re not user interface experts. Inside, the focus is on the essentials of Windows and web GUI design: simple ideas that require modest

So if you listened to Kate Gregory on DotNetRocks, you know this is a book for her! She said that all of her forms look like a programmer wrote them. And we laughed ’cause we knew exactly what she meant!

So this book not about becoming a Hi-Res* web designer, but about taking pity on the poor end users who have to work with your programs day in and day out. You know where to send a review copy! I wonder if he wrote this book on a Tablet PC? (snigger)

*Hi-Res is a design company who’s site I was pointed to a number of years ago. They are always experimenting. They are brilliant and have always pushed the envelope with their design. I have watched over the years as they have acquired bigger and bigger and more high profile projects. If you want to be inspired to think out of the grey box of database forms – this is the fix I always recommend!!



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Pass-WORDs vs Pass-Phrases

Just Rambling

Craig Andera gave new life to a 5 month old post that I had not seen before! It was the first blog post by Robert Hensig from the PSS Security incident response team at Microsoft. The original post is about using phrases rather than single words for a password. I have forwarded this already to the sysadmin’s responsible for my biggest client’s network. I see a few other people are now linking to this post today – which is good. This helps blogging not be linear. He has many other posts since then on the topic.

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Mike Gunderloy yawns over tablet pcs

Tablet

Geeze Mike, don’t you read my blog?

Ahh  I’m kidding. I know you do. But, dude, when you yawn about tablets because all you are seeing is

  • Drawing programs
  • Programs that let you annotate existing content in other file formats
  • Programs that let you fill in forms

    …it makes me wonder if you have seen my many posts about the tablet applications that help me think out of the box – the box you have just drawn.

    Applications like XThink (for grown ups), MathPractice (for kids), the Circuit App that Loren  Heiny is working on. Why not peruse through the different software on TabletPCPost and check out some of the things that go beyond the box.

    Not one of these is a killer app, either. There are definitely a lot of vertical market uses for a tablet. That’s the biggest chunk of the current market. The next is those who want the coolness factor. Someday tablets will be a fact of life. For now, people do need a real reason to get one.

    Regarding ArtRage – someone like me has no use for that, but it’s definitely more than vertical market. The vertical market would be the graphics designers who are doing amazing things with it.

    btw – thanks Don Kiely, for pointing out Mike’s new blog.



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