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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
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Design Tip: Never Use Black
One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.
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Beautiful Buttons for Twitter Bootstrappers
This is an extension to the Twitter Bootstrap framework. It makes creating pretty buttons easy. (Send improvements to @charliepark .)
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Please Steal These webOS Features
When Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010, I bought one immediately. I didn't know what I'd use it for, but I was sure that I would find some use for it. I never did. I played around with it, wrote some code for it, but eventually stopped using it. I would pick it up from time to time to read something or watch a…
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Customize Twitter Bootstrap To Not Look Bootstrap-y
PLEASE, if you do use Bootstrap for just about everything be courteous to your audience and change up some of the basic variables so it doesn’t look all…
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Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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The Sparrow Problem
We’ve all read stories about and been enthralled by the idea of App Store millionaires. As the story goes… individual app developers are making money hand over fist in the App Store! And if you can just come up with a great app idea, you’ll be a millionaire in no time!
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Gnome: Staring into the abyss
I suppose I can't just leave my last post standing there as-is. I'll start by listing a bunch of things I consider facts about the GNOME project. I don't want to talk about solutions here, I just want to list them, because I don't think they are common knowledge. People certainly don't seem to talk...
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Great design from Apple on an interaction with Siri
Great design from Apple on this interaction with Siri. It was a bit after midnight (which was technically October 21), but since it was so close to the previous day, Siri wanted me to clarify which “tomorrow” 9am I really meant… 9am on the 21st (which was technically wrong, but it…
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Google+ gets a redesign
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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About those vector icons
Why can’t we just use vector-based icons in our application? This question, in a variety of reinterpretations, keeps on resurfacing in various forums, blogs and articles. It is asked in the context of desktop applications where the same icon is used in different ways, starting from very small 16*16 icons in file…
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ITunes 11 and Colors
iTunes 11 is a radical departure from previous versions and nothing illustrates this more than the new album display mode. The headlining feature of this display is the new view style that visually matches the track listing to the album’s cover art. The result is an attractive display of textual information that…
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Splash screens == sloth
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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Am I An Outlier, Or Are Apple Products No Longer Easy To Use?
I’ve been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year – almost 30 years ago – I was on an IBM PC…
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On the Usability of Codecademy
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.