Those pesky 7%. Download Squad:
According to the study, 94 percent of US computer users have never tried a web based productivity suite. More than 20 percent say they’ve at least heard of Google Docs or other suites, but have still never tried them. And only 0.5 percent of users say they’ve replaced Microsoft Office with an online office suite.
Now before you rush to conclusions, here’s a quote from Steve Case, 1995:
I don’t see any evidence to suggest that this is what the 93 percent wants … I think a subset of the 7 percent wants that. The people I talk to who don’t yet use online services don’t use them because they are still a little scared of them.
PXSL. Stands for Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language, which, if you only read the first few examples, looks like yet another bracket-less syntax for XML. It’s the shorthands that make all the difference, and you’ll find them in the advanced section:
template /
for-each /foo@href
value-of .
text <<,>>
BTW the / is XPath not a PXSL symbol, and this example requires that you have some XSLT comprehension skills.
A/B testing. Michael Kölling on what needs to be done to get closures in Java:
We should take a prototype and get real, average users to work with it for six months, and have a proper evaluation to see what happens. We can find out whether people can really master it. And whether they find it useful. Not the experts, average users.
But you know, I could be wrong. Maybe there’s a way to build closures into the Java language in a way that’ll add power smoothly with no real downside. If that’s true, we need to discover it and prove it, and the JCP isn’t about discovering things; it’s about the worst possible place to approach this problem. Now that Java is Open-Source, anyone can go cook up whatever loony closure facility they want, and if it’s good enough, people will start using it whether the binary build has “Java” stamped on the outside or not, and then start shouting that it should be in the standard distro, and only then should the JCP consider going near this tar-pit.
I’m also a JCC (Java Closures Contrarian), but I’ll flip-flop when I see developers jumping up and down with joy after getting to experience closures first hand. So how hard would it be to put a closure on this theoretical debate and just test it in practice?
Focus! Interesting point from Corticon’s David Straus:
Business rules, like tasks in processes and lines of code in functional programs come out of the discussion of decisions to be understood and eventually automated. So when I hear people ask about capabilities to manage a rule I ask myself, when was the last time I heard anyone talking about independently managing a line-of-code. The result of this history is that this thinking has added far too much complexity to the task we have given our business rules customers. Instead of thinking about discovering, modeling and automating the top 250 decisions within their organization, they worry about the 10,000 or more rules that exist to implement these decisions. That becomes a daunting task.
Trap door. Jakob Nielsen on the dangers of blindly copying the Web 2.0 meme du jour without paying attention to the context of your application:
The bottom line? While a modest 2.0 infusion can be beneficial, advanced features are rarely the most important contributor to good user experience or profitable websites. If you get caught up in the hype, you divert attention and resources from the simpler things that really matter. This opportunity cost is the real reason to take it easy on Web 2.0.
Neal Gafter