Design

A collection of 36 posts

Design

Freelancing for Joshua Schachter

The first person I started freelancing for is Joshua Schachter. Joshua is well known as the founder of del.icio.us, the bookmarking website which made “social filtering”, “tagging” (at the same time as Flickr) and “Web 2.0” common buzzwords. I stumbled upon his tweet one day that he

Business

Fun can change behavior

Once in a while I come across something really inspiring, and this time it was The fun theory – a “thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.” Getting people to use the staircase than the escalator Getting people to

Business

The new ION packaging

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. Today is the second birthday of our ION USB Charger and we are happy to announce that it is now available in a new and improved packaging! We needed some improvements to our packaging because: 1. Our previous

Design

I hate tabs

I hate tabs, and I like windows. Why? Switching between windows is Alt+Tab. Simple. Switching between tabs is irritating because it is a contrasting situation: 1. The keyboard shortcut is not a standard, every application does it in its own way. It could be Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn or it

Books

What product creation should be about

I just finished reading “Subject To Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world”. This book is written by Adaptive Path, the same guys who invented the words “blog” and “ajax”, as well as creators of the Aurora browser concept. It has been a revelatory book for me,

Business

Thought for the Day

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But

Design

How attractive is your website?

I was trying to analyze the feedback on my website’s new design. There seems to be a trend that relates their usage of the website with their feedback. While researching on this subject, I found a paper by three people affiliated with the University of Manchester, UK. The paper

Design

The meaning of Touch

While I was cycling today, I had an interesting thought. I always have my ol’ iPod Nano with me while I’m cycling. As usual, if I want to listen to a song again, I click the left button to repeat, if I don’t like a song, I click

Design

Web dev frameworks vs RIA

How do traditional web development frameworks cope with RIAs? By RIAs, I am referring to the Flex/Silverlight model (Ajax has a hybrid model in my view, so I’m not discussing that here since I don’t want to muddle up the question). Coming back to topic, I see

Design

Technology can be beautiful

This is a pen called “D:Scribe”, a design by Reuben Png and was featured on the Yanko Designs blog: I personally prefer to write with pen and paper. However, I end up eventually transferring it to the computer for all the goodness of digital material (rewritable, linkable, searchable, backup-able,

Design

Hack Day videos

Kamla Bhatt has been tracking the Hack Day India and posting many interviews and videos. The videos include the demos by the hackers, and here’s the video where we present (from minutes 03:10 to 05:09) : Update : And a mention in the Financial Express :)

Business

ion logo designs

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009. One of the many parts in the creation of ion was the designing of the look and feel of the product. We do very limited direct selling (we sell mostly online) and from what I’ve seen, people

Business

The ion : ipod charger, mobile charger and more

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product. Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day! I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug

Design

Moxie

Yep, Moxie. That’s the codename for the next version of Flex. And it was one of the suggestions by yours truly in the internal discussions. Why this name? My reasoning was: flex -> strength -> http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/strength -> mana, pizzazz, moxie, thew, … Ely liked the

Design

Touch of a computer

Jeff Han’s “touch-driven computer screen” is so cool. That would make things so much easier to organize my photos, heh. But I wonder how ergonomic it would be since we will have to be looking down at the screen all the time and it would not be at the

Design

Code Runway

What if there was a Project Runway or even an American Chopper show for programming… what would be the (minimal set of) qualities to judge on? * Elegance (of algorithm, of code) * Simple flow * Attention to detail (corner cases) * Efficiency * Scalability * “It Just Works” * … hmm, what else?

Design

REBIEX

Parshu (a colleague in Y! Bangalore) is presenting a session on REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining at the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, New York.

Design

Concepts

I finally got around to reading Stroustrup’s “The design of C++0x”, and was impressed by Stroustrup’s sense of language design, especially the clarity of thought with which he presents the topics. I still haven’t understood the part about “concepts” though. I wonder how it is different

Design

Logical art

* Rands in Repose has written a thoughtful article “Signs of Art” where he asks “Is software art”? I think I’ll answer “Hell yeah”. * Jason says: The most important thing in software development is motivation. Motivation is local — if you aren’t motivated by what you are working on

Books

Insightful books about Computing

Banker asked me whether “you know of any good IT bios, or books related to gaming or animation or coding that are interesting enough to a layperson”. So, I came up with: * Hackers and Painters * Sampler: Why smart people have bad ideas * Joel on Software, the book * Sampler: Hitting the

Design

Tiger Dictionary

Just discovered a new shortcut for the Dictionary in Mac OS X Tiger – Press Cmd-Ctrl-D and voila, it shows the meanings of the selected word in my browser! P.S. In case you are wondering, I’m reading the RSS feed for Sepia Mutiny. Update: The shortcut works everywhere, not

Design

SQL and XML are not that different

About a year ago, I had presented my 8th semester presentation on Xen, now called C Omega. It is a language that combines SQL, XML and OOP into one tight language. The paper that proposed this language was named Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles. The circle represents the encapsulation

Design

G4Swaroop

A close friend of mine had been to the US for work in his company’s headquarters. I had asked him to get me a laptop and I’ve been playing with it since the night before yesterday. What kind of laptop? It is a 12-inch Apple Powerbook with Mac

Design

Mark down my email

Here’s my weird-but-yet-interesting idea of the day… In most mailing lists (including non-geeky ones), HTML mail is usually discouraged but the newbies still want to make use of bold and italics and the rest. So, here’s my simple solution: Allow the user to use a rich text box

Design

The Apple bites back

The webosphere is all about design and aesthetics these days, which is of course, just what the doctor ordered and mainly thanks to Google and Apple (yes, I know you were waiting for me to say that). And when Paul Graham says we are now witnessing the return of the