design decisions

As we begin a new year, it seems appropriate that the discussion of backward compatibility has come up yet again in Drupal.

It's a perennial question, and you can tell when a new Drupal core version is ready for prime time when people start complaining about lack of backward compatibility.

It's like clockwork.

Advice I like from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (Matthew Frederick):

Being Process Oriented, not Product Driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.

Being process oriented means:

Linux Magazine's Senior Software Editor Brockmeier, talks with Ted Gould of Canonical about the upcoming release of Ubuntu Unity.

In this interview Ted touches on Unity's UI design decisions, hardware drivers and bundled software. Continue reading →

Two weeks ago we published an article calling for more transparency from gaming companies that use P2P technology to let their users distribute content.

In the days after we published the article, one of the major players in P2P game distribution responded to our concerns.

Some Linux design decisions seem like hangovers from Windows-land. But, unlike Windows, Linux does not need to be protected from itself, so why hang on to old habits?

At the recent Symfony Live conference I used the core team QA to address the audience to push for building new dedicated apps on top of general purpose frameworks like symfony and friends.

More importantly those efforts should be released as early as possible in the development process as open source to ensure that others join instead of creating their own and then eventually releasing more and more redundant solutions.

See the various symphony CMS solutions are an example of how wrong things can go.

Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon, Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words.

Cognitive Science, 1987.

The advantages of diagrams, in our view, are computational. That is diagrams can be better representations not because they contain more information, but because the indexing of this information can support extremely useful and efficient computational processes.

Recently, Google has announced a significant update to its Search function: the Options panel.

Although - for the most part - it’s only a different way to display some old features, changes such as this one can have a profound impact on the most important service on the web today.