“All web apps are trying to suck. They are trying to be bloated. They are trying to be unstructured. They are trying to be confusing. You are the stopgap. You are the one who stands between order and chaos. You are the sniper who must pick off every distraction, unneeded feature, and extra word that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. You must be a killer. You must say no. You must anger those who disagree with you. That is the only way to make something great.” — Matt Linderman (via inspireux)

Matt Linderman relates storytelling to software development, referencing a video interview with Ira Glass from This American Life. Failure is a big part of success. You don’t want to be making mediocre stuff. He says that killing is a big part of bringing something great to life. While the whole killing metaphor doesn’t resonate with me, I agree with his perspective on the process. For every great idea for every compelling story, you need to leave a huge amount of footage on the floor of the editing room. In software, we toss out ideas on the whiteboard, discuss and discard dozens of approaches, and experiment with quick prototypes, all so that we can release one great feature or workflow. The code that is left behind after the editing process will then be clean, internally consistent and enable the person using the software to achieve their goals smoothly and easily.

This short clip is worth watching:

From the perspective of someone implementing web application software, Firefox is now the dominant browser. Mozilla does an excellent job of making Mac and Windows Firefox almost identical from a programmer’s perspective and every new browser from Microsoft is like a new platform. It would be interesting if Firefox versions were broken out in the stats, but the difference between Firefox 1, 2, and 3 from a compatibility perspective is nowhere as dramatic as the differences between IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7.

Even when you aggregate the versions, Firefox is fast approaching IE…

source w3schools.com

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” – Steve Jobs

I found the origin of this quote which I saw in the slideshow below at inspireUX. Despite the soemtimes unreadable text and lack of clear attribution, I enjoyed this slideshow: