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.
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.
Beautiful Buttons for Twitter Bootstrappers
This is an extension to the Twitter Bootstrap framework. It makes creating pretty buttons easy. (Send improvements to @charliepark .)
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…
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…
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.
Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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…
Splash screens == sloth
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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…
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.
GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
It looks like Google has finally pulled the plug on the old GMail UI. There’s no more “revert to the old look temporarily” button, so I guess they’re finally forcing us lagg…