disobey.com

The alpha test of the next AMPHETADESK is going real well. Much more powerful and flexible than before. Sigh. I just can't wait to release the damn thing. It's gonna rock.

I'm really really hoping to get an alpha version of the new AMPHETADESK by the end of this week. The new code is just so much better and simpler that it makes me giddy to get it finished, so I can move on to some new features. I worked for seven hours last night, hope to work another seven tonight and tomorrow, and then wrap it up on Friday. Wish me luck. (Want to be an alpha tester? Email me and let me know.

Jakob's GUIDELINES FOR HOMEPAGE USABILITY:

The homepage is the most important page on most websites, and gets more page views than any other page. Of course, users don't always enter a website from the homepage. A website is like a house in which every window is also a door: People can follow links from search engines and other websites that reach deep inside your site. However, one of the first things these users do after arriving at a new site is go to the homepage. Deep linking is very useful, but it doesn't give users the site overview a homepage offers -- if the homepage design follows strong usability guidelines, that is. Following are ten things you can do to increase the usability of your homepage and thus enhance your website's business value.

The nice thing is that I do most all his bullets on the main page of GAMEGRENE.COM. The front page of DISOBEY, on the other hand, hasn't had any structural or design updates in a long long time.

MmmM. Jelly doughnut.

It smells like a PR spam, but TEN TIPS FOR DEPLOYING A SUCCESSFUL VIRTUAL ASSISTANT does have a remotely applicable set of points. A blurbage from one of those magical surveys (the results of which are always in favor of the business reporting them):

Its results clearly indicate that while accuracy and relevance of response are the most important factors in winning over customers - site visitors will not continue to use a virtual assistant that fails to deliver a satisfactory answer after three tries at rephrasing - implementation factors play a large role in whether customers enjoy the experience or merely tolerate it.

Sheesh. DNN is becoming kinda techie lately, eh? Ah, well. Here's an article from Salon.com on A UNIFIED THEORY OF SOFTWARE EVOLUTION. It's nothing I really haven't seen before, but does have some historical bits I wasn't aware of.

Software evolution, i.e. the process by which programs change shape, adapt to the marketplace and inherit characteristics from preexisting programs, has become a subject of serious academic study in recent years. Partial thanks for this goes to Lehman and other pioneering researchers. Major thanks, however, goes to the increasing strategic value of software itself. As large-scale programs such as Windows and Solaris expand well into the range of 30 to 50 million lines of code, successful project managers have learned to devote as much time to combing the tangles out of legacy code as to adding new code. Simply put, in a decade that saw the average PC microchip performance increase a hundredfold, software's inability to scale at even linear rates has gone from dirty little secret to industry-wide embarrassment.

A long article entitled SEEING AROUND CORNERS over at The Atlantic:

The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail

Following the first five Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X articles, Kevin Hemenway (aka Morbus Iff) returns with a "put your legs up" sixth tutorial. This time he walks you through the various Apache modules that come with your Mac OS X installation and shows you what they can do.

I bet you're realizing that I'm finally catching up on my reading. Here's another article from my "read these" bookmarks: Clay Shirky's COMMUNITIES, AUDIENCES, AND SCALE:

Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media -- telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide, by providing a single medium that could be used to address either communities or audiences. Email can be used for conversations or broadcast, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the broadcast of common documents, and so on. Most recently the rise of software for "The Writable Web", principally weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web's largely one-way publishing model.

With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" The answer seems to be "No."

A decent article entitled ANTI-SIMPLIFICATION - HOW TO MAKE LIFE HARDER FOR USERS from the SAP DESIGN TIDBITS, another excellent site I'll be checking daily.

User interface designers strive to make applications simpler and easier to use. Simplification is a big issue these days, and feature growth is one of the challenges user interface designers have to fight against. So, why should I ask how we can make life harder for users - does that make any sense? Yes, I think it does. If we find out, which factors make applications more complex, we can learn - especially through bad examples that already exist - which pitfalls to avoid. In this article, I present such factors and illustrate them with examples. Most of the examples refer to business software, but many of them apply to form-based Web pages as well.