Posts from February 2009
Scaling Rails with Gregg Pollack
Man, how did I miss this before? New Relic is having Gregg Pollack, of Rails Envy fame, do screencasts on scaling Rails. There’s some really great stuff in here, and I definitely need to reserve some time to go through each of them myself.
Orange You Sorry About Tropicana?
Khoi Vinh wrote a great piece about Tropicana’s redesign and their subsequent reversal. What I particularly liked was how he pointed out how the usability of the design went significantly down, as I mentioned before.
Tropicana reverts to old packaging
After coming out with a completely new packaging design, Tropicana is changing it back. I really don’t understand why the new design was ever carried out, not because it looked all that bad, but because it was so different from the previous design, making it near impossible to find Tropicana when going to the store, and the differentiation between different flavors was really small as well.
Icicle outside my window
Took this from right outside my window a couple weeks back at home before leaving for Germany.
Untitled Document Syndrome
Great post by John Gruber on how effective applications can be when they don’t require the author to ever “save” anything. For instance, he refers to iMovie, where the user never has to deal with saving a file somewhere–the application just figures it behind the scenes. Also check out Chris Clark’s response “By Proxy, By Proxy, By Proxy”, where he talks about how download windows could be helped by the very same idea.