Social Media = Advertising Honeypot

August 5th, 2009

Twitter and Facebook are be honeypots for brands. We reach in and pull them out when we want, but otherwise keep them at bay.

Death of the Apple Halo Effect?

August 3rd, 2009

Every iPhone and iPod Touch owner I know hates iTunes. Apple should take notice.

Augmented Reality Bites

July 30th, 2009

I have this new rule I’m working on: If it’s easier to buy your product than to engage with your marketing, you’re doing it wrong.

Twitter: 1, Robots: 0

July 29th, 2009

With the insanity around the Yahoo and Bing/Microsoft relationship, I wonder if Twitter – or an app built around it – won’t become the search and recommendation tool we all really want.

iPhone Apps are Not Banner Ads

July 27th, 2009

Installing an iPhone app is work. If you make users work, you owe them something valuable.

Is Google Ruining Mobile Advertising?

July 10th, 2009

Admittedly, my opinion is that mobile advertising should shrivel up and die. That said, if it’s going to exist, the UX should be at least tolerable and, preferably, stellar.

The Emperor’s New API

July 9th, 2009

If you’re adding a REST API to your site, you’re probably doing something wrong. Maybe.

Toward the Bare Metal: From Flash to Processing, OpenFrameworks, and Beyond

July 8th, 2009

There is a common pattern in the contemporary interactive digital art world: artists’ tools are getting more hardcore under the hood.

Mobile Designers and Empathy

July 6th, 2009

I think the growing importance of mobile devices in our everyday lives can give a new perspective on baseline users, perhaps leading to more time spent providing amazing, elegant assistive applications and reducing the importance placed on gimmicks.

Jeff Goodby on Award-Chasers and the Future of Ad-Tech

June 24th, 2009

Jeff Goodby, from Goodby, Silverstein, & Partners (one of my favorite agencies to work with BTW), wrote an article in AdAge that actually got me thinking.

Badge Blindness and iPhone Push Notifications

June 16th, 2009

Don’t flood devices with flippant text or audio push notifications. Understand the disruptive impact of those messages and avoid them unless they are absolutely necessary. And repeat this mantra: “Push notifications are rarely necessary!”

The Twitpocalypse and Unit Testing

June 13th, 2009

If ever there was a clear example of the need for unit testing during builds, it’s the integer overflow problem on Twitter – aka, the Twitpocalypse.

Preaching iPhone UX

May 19th, 2009

I have spent a fair portion of the last year preaching good UX for iPhone developers.

SproutCore Article on O’Reilly InsideRIA Blog

August 13th, 2008

I’m now blogging for InsideRIA.

DataMapper/Merb Ambiguous SQLite Error

July 27th, 2008

If you get an error such as:

near ")": syntax error

Check to see if you have any models declaring themselves as DataMapper::Resource but WITHOUT any property declarations.

Twitter-Free Fridays

July 18th, 2008

I complied with corporate mandate and wrote a post about Twitter-Free Fridays over on The Barbarian Group blog.

Business Value in rSpec Stories

July 9th, 2008

Because rSpec provides a friendly, more readable means of describing use cases/stories, I’ve taken to inserting business value statements directly into the specs. While this could get unwieldy, I think it helps keep stories focused while providing clear context and value to coders.

iPhone Unit Testing with Ruby

July 4th, 2008

Well, Dr. Nic is kicking ass again.

Though I’m a recent convert to rSpec for my Merb work, I actually prefer to unit test Objective-C with OCUnit. I think it’s just part of that prejudice that tests should be written in the language of the app. Also, the more ‘natural’ it feels to write tests, the more likely folks will do so. In my experience, a great number of Obj-C developers have no interest in writing tests in the first place…

Eagerly Awaiting Merb 1.0, DataMapper 1.0

July 2nd, 2008

I’ve been having a blast with Merb and DataMapper lately.

Like everyone else who prefers clean over clever and true pragmatism over dogma, I prefer Merb over some of the other options out there for day to day Web apps.

Unit Testing and the iPhone SDK

June 15th, 2008

If anyone sorts out how to get the SenTest framework to play nice with Cocoa Touch apps, kindly let me know.