Posts

• Jul 26, 2012

  John Siracusa Reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

  John Siracusa writing for Ars Technica:

  Mountain Lion is not the Mac OS of the past, but it also sets a course to a destination that is quite distinct from iOS. Despite the oft-cited prediction that the Mac will eventually be subsumed by iOS, that’s not what’s happening here. Apple is determined to bring the benefits of iOS to the Mac, but it’s equally determined to do so in a way that preserves the strengths of the Mac platform.

  …

  Apple’s online platform is the unifying force in its product line, not any one OS. Think of Mountain Lion as the best desktop iCloud client Apple knows how to make.

  Over the past decade, Mac users made it through the most dramatic, unlikely, and successful operating system transition in the history of the industry. Last year, I noted that despite its king-of-the-jungle name, Lion was not the endpoint of a decade of Mac OS X development; it was the start of a new journey. Mountain Lion makes the eventual destination a bit more clear. Just hold on, my fellow Mac devotees, and we’ll make it there together.

  The review is 24 pages long and covers most things that Apple’s marketing pages fail to mention. If you’re a developer or a power user, this will interest you.

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• Jul 25, 2012

  Good design is invisible

  The Verge:

  Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making.

  I think that sums it all. There are other interesting pieces of information in the interview about design in general, Apple, iA Writer, and Microsoft.

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• Jul 19, 2012

  Secure Password Reset Implementation

  Troy Hunt:

  I wanted to point them to a canonical resource on the ins and outs of securely implementing a reset function. Problem is though, there isn’t one, at least not covering everything I believe is important. So here it is.

  Troy’s article is comprehensive and covers most of the important aspects of password resets.

  Even though resets aren’t difficult, they’re often implemented poorly.

  While there are many sites that implement password resets insecurely, please don’t be one of them. Read the post and adopt the best practices; respect your user’s trust.

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• Jul 18, 2012

  The Value of Time

  Jack Groetzinger on the value of time:

  The rate at which you value your time value your time is not static; it’s constantly changing. If I’m stuck on a plane with no internet, the rate at which I’m creating value for SeatGeek is low. On the other hand, suppose it’s 3am in the morning and I’m feverishly working on a presentation for a massive client. The presentation will take place in five hours. Here, the rate at which I’m creating value quite high. If two hours magically disappeared from the clock, it could destroy a meaningful amount of SeatGeek’s enterprise value. So I feel justified in, say, asking my girlfriend to get me a Diet Coke so that I don’t have to break my concentration (thankfully she’s an economics student, so she understands).

  However, there’s another important note:

  The rate at which someone creates value for a company (and thus should value their time, from the perspective of the company) isn’t the same as their wage. In theory, calculating the value of someone’s time is simple: if Bob went into a trance and didn’t work for an hour, how would the company’s DCF of earnings change? The drivers for wage are more complex, but are nicely captured by VORP. In baseball, VORP is a statistic that identifies the incremental value Player A creates vis-à-vis the player that would replace him in the lineup if Player A got injured. If a Player A has low VORP then his team is close to indifferent about keeping him around; he will be paid a relatively low wage.

  There are people who create tremendous value but have low VORP.

  Sometimes, mindless penny-pinching isn’t always the most efficient and economical use of time.

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