This is an aspect of personalization which we don;t really cover in our product – personalizing to the user’s abilities.
Looks like a good article, even if I distrust bald statements such as
Supple can reduce the performance gap between people with disabilities and those users who don’t have any by 62 percent.
Wired Campus: Every User Deserves a Personalized Interface – Chronicle.com
An article drawing an analogy between the architecture of software systems and the structure of businesses. Might be useful, but the commenters hanve a lot of reservations.
InfoQ: Thoughts On Software Architecture and Corporate Structure
Clearly expressed, to the point. I can’t argue with it.
Agility Means Simple Things Done Well, Not Complex Things Done Fast | The Practice of Leadership
An average article about the nature of the mobile market to teenagers. Do read some of the pro/anti iPhone comments, though!
For teens, the future is mobile | News – Digital Media – CNET News.com
This project is a great idea: an open-source alternative to Amazon’s proprietary EC2 “elastic cloud” product. I can’t help it though. Every time I see the name I think of a discussion along the lines of:
Person X: I’m worried. This Amazon EC2 sounds like a great solution, but there’s only a single supplier. If they go bust, we’d be up a gum tree.
Person Y: No worries, mate. We’ll just build another gum tree, a Eucalyptus.
Person X: Bonzer!
Read more sensible stuff at Eucalyptus
This is really intriguing. Traditionally an orchestra with its ranks of musicians and single conductor has been the epitome of central control. However, it seems that an “agile” self-organizing, leaderless orchestra can and does flourish.
I would much prefer not to have tro support the strange and broken behaviour of IE6, but so far our customers insist that we support it. SHould we push back and just say no?
This article certainly echoes some things which I have observed. It’s hard to gain the full power of an agile approach, if the agile teams don’t have the ability to address issues across the whole solution. However tempting it may seem to solve the problem of team size by splitting teams across architectural boundaries, this is rarely a good way to solve big problems in a smart way.
Splitting teams by task or feature, and letting each team solve their task or feature in a way which is optimal in the context of the whole system, will almost always result in a more effective solution, and often a solution which is actually much simpler/cheaper than the way it might have been achieved if each team only considered one part of the system.
InfoQ: Choose Feature Teams over Component Teams for Agility
I’ve not watched this presentation yet, so no pithy comments, I’m afraid. I’m adding this here so I can refer back to it if I need to bring a new project-manager up to speed sometime.
InfoQ: Introduction to Agile for Traditional Project Managers
An important part of my work is producing web and mobile user interfaces. Both cases have traditionally had trade-offs: A modern desktop or laptop computer web browser is so powerful and potentially has so much screen space to play with that deciding how best to make use of all that resource is a daunting task. Typical lowest-common-denominator mobile devices, on the other hand have so little power, flexibility and screen territory that getting enough information and interactivity on any single screen-full is a struggle.
In this arena, the success of the iPhone is especially interesting. For many application developers, the iPhone has already gained enough market presence to be worth re-building mobile and web applications to suit the particular blend of size and features offered by the device. This in turn has led to some surprisingly usable condensed applications.
Slipstream – On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff – NYTimes.com
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
