Jonathan Deutsch's weblog covering mac app development, engineering management, running a startup, HTML5, and all things Apple.
Naming new products is hard! It isn t clear to me how much a bad name can break a product, but personally I d give your product every chance in this world to succeed by bestowing it as good of a name as possible. I ve seen my share of bad names, so I thought a list that [ ]
Much has been said about macOS 13 Ventura’s upcoming System Preferences Settings redesign. Quality of work aside, this release represents the most drastic change System Preferences has seen since the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. Yet it appears to be mostly re-arrangement, converting meticulously-laid-out controls to long scrolling lists. I liken the visual [ ]
From The Economist s 'The case for eating steak and cream': Work by Keys and others propelled the American government’s first set of dietary guidelines, in 1980. Cut back on red meat, whole milk and other sources of saturated fat. The few sceptics of this theory were, for decades, marginalised. I believe the word the author [ ]
Marco Arment says: If Apple wants to offer 4G in MacBooks, they can start whenever they want. Doing it properly will just take a bit more effort than adding a modem. They can t do it whenever they want. It requires new regulatory approvals as well as the much harder testing and certification with carriers (domestic [ ]
When Google s Project Glass was first unveiled ten months ago, they wrapped up the announcement post asking the community, What would you like to see from Project Glass? Today revealed more about the unreleased product and continue the thread by begging for community involvement: Using Google+ or Twitter, tell us what you would do if [ ]
Make your own luck is a great philosophy to have on the world. It emphasizes a forest-scoped perspective for being at the right time and places conducive to exciting new opportunities. I ve recently considered the less optimistic flip-side. If you said, accidents happen, a counter would be, not if you are careful. In other words, [ ]
CSS Filter Effects are the new hotness in Safari 6 and iOS 6, and have been around since Chrome 18. The blurs, shadows, brightness/contrast, hue shifts, and saturation shifting will add a new dimension of visual oomph to sites. However, one aspect to be aware of is they do not render consistently across different browsers. [ ]
I recently gave a short talk at HTML5DevConf called Best Practices for Building Tools that Output to the Web. The session covered some of the assumptions you can t make if the output of your tool is going to be used as part of a larger site. I also dived into some concrete decisions and implementations [ ]
Automation is a bedrock of software engineering. Tools, scripts, tests, and even reports are vital glue that keep projects progressing forward. Because time spent on automation generally detracts from product work, it is considered an investment. Sadly, more often than not I see an erroneous equation applied to determine whether the investment will be worthwhile: [ ]
Programming is not mindlessly implementing specs nor is it determining the best big-O algorithm for a mathematical problem. Programming is art; turning raw code into an implementation of your ideas. Programming is what you do. Software Engineering is what your company does. Software Engineering figures out the most efficient and profitable way to develop a [ ]