http://www.marktalbot.ca Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:10:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There are two major user experience problems with the way Microsoft implemented the "My Document" folder in Windows XP. The first is a problem of taxonomy and the second is a problem of collation. Taxonomy Problem: The "My Documents" folder in Windows XP provides us with an important ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/08/10/the-problem-with-my-documents-in-windows-xp/ A Mozilla UX designer talks about the the usability benefits of placing tabs at the top of the browser. http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/07/16/why-tabs-are-on-top-in-firefox-4/ The goal of television networks should be to monetize each phase of the content (i.e. television program) lifecycle. In order to accomplish this, consumers should always have a way to legally access the content throughout each phase of the lifecycle. Content vacuums--periods of times where content ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/07/08/television-programming-monetizing-the-entire-content-lifecycle/ A little off topic but Akzidenz-Grotesk is a beautiful typeface. http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/05/26/akzidenz-grotesk/ Just a quick observation... Back in the old days, computer processing was centralized in large mainframe computers. "Dumb" terminals with very little processing power were used to access the mainframe and display data to the end user. As time passed, the mainframe/terminal configuration was eventually replaced by ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/04/29/history-repeats-itself-with-chrome-os/ Adding a comment to closing div tags helps make your code easy to read and maintain. Example: <div id="sideColumn"> ... ... ... </div><!-- #sideColumn ends --> http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/03/30/tip-keeping-your-html-and-css-code-clean/ I'm always amazed by the innovative ways in which Google uses the raw data it collects. The New York Times mentioned something really interesting about how Google used recorded voices to create a better speech recognition system: In 2007... [Google] began offering 800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance service that interprets spoken ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/03/10/how-google-uses-your-voice/ ZDNet is reporting that the online-only sales model for the Nexus One may be responsible for missed targets: Goldman Sachs reduced sales estimates from 3.5 million units in 2010 to a mere 1 million, and only 2 million in 2011 if they launch a second phone, do a lot more marketing ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2010/03/09/is-the-nexus-one-online-sales-model-failing/ A burndown chart is an excellent way of tracking the project status in an iterative software development environment. Here are the steps for creating your own burndown chart: Capture user stories. Assign high-level effort estimates to the user stories. Organize and prioratize the user stories into ... http://www.marktalbot.ca/2009/11/17/how-to-create-a-burn-down-chart/ Ken Schwaber speaks about Scrum, a project management process he co-developed. http://www.marktalbot.ca/2009/09/29/google-tech-talks-scrum/