Brilliance in simplicity. Either Apple royally messed up on the supply side, or people really like it. The MacBook Air is selling well. Anecdotal, but judging by the number of people who smile, approach and ask to have a closer look, I’m not surprised.
Everything old is fixed again. Still confused what Web 2.0 is all about? This might help to clarify:
He pointed out how ironic it was to be discussing an application about — of all things — e-mail technology at a conference devoted to the future of software.
Some up, some down, some cruising along just fine. I’m unconvinced book sales are a good approximation for anything I should care about (other than book sales), but if you’re into these metrics, the O’Reilly report is a feel good read. Most likely your [insert favorite language] is either the dominating, uprising, holding strong, a promising underdog, or just doesn’t need that much deadtree to be useful.
I shall call you mini-me. What is “linking RIAs to SOA”, “supporting both REST and SOAP”, and “provid[ing] components for building enterprise applications that use Web services and an XML document model to support SOA”? That would be curl. No, not this curl, but this curl.
Un(info)rmed. At its core usability is very simple. You watch what people do and how they react, and optimize for that. Observations first, invented metaphors later. I have a folder full of reference material: specs, APIs, cheat sheets, etc. The ones I use the most and keep around for longer are single page documents. Navigation is nice, but anything I can quickly scroll through or search-in-page is just that more effective. Firefox handles is nicely, so do PDF, and there’s always good old man. Unfortunately, help files on both Windows and OS/X get it wrong (OS/X help is all kinds of wrong). As does the dreaded info.
Above, so many gorgeous themes, so little time to try them all.