It seems that many of the apps in use today rely on or display feeds or lists of data; be that a Twitter timeline, an RSS feed or a list of history in a version control system, there’s a common trend in UI for using lists.
But displaying lists in applications can be much more than trivial, certainly for applications on …

You’ve created an awesome piece of software, which you have been working on for months. You’ve refined every aspect of it; the aesthetic qualities, the data model, the user interface and experience.
But now you need people to buy it. You release a demo version of your software which allows your potential customers to get a feel for the app and …

Attending Matt Gemmell’s workshop last week was a great exercise for thinking from the user’s perspective – something which we, as software developers, often do not usually spend enough time doing because of being wrapped up in other things.
As developers, it is hard for us to detach ourselves from what we do and cater to the user. We live on …

The other day I was using Cyberduck more heavily than I would usually, when I was doing a whole load of uploading. When I came to close the application, I was presented with this dialog:

It’s a fair enough dialog, I have been using free software which someone put their own time into and I’m appreciative, and might think of donating …

I have talked about piracy before, but I was inspired by Matt Gemmell’s take on it in Episode #9 of the MDN Show:
Piracy is pretty much an unsolvable problem. That’s a controversial thing to say, but I don’t mean it’s absolutely technically unsolvable, but it’s one of these situations where you have diminishing returns. The better your protection, the better …

After downloading the new Chrome beta for Mac OS X the first thing that struck me was how well it blended into the native Mac UI. The window takes on the standard OS X window appearance whilst working into it with the tabs which are built into the title bar. This wasn’t simply a port of the Windows version, it’s …

Reinventing the wheel – a phrase which means duplicating an existing feature from scratch – is often used in the context that it is unnecessary or inefficient.
I think that in most cases this is true, but I was hesitant to start this post by screaming to never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever reinvent the wheel, because I think that sometimes …

When starting out with Mac development, I turned to Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, and compared to other books available on the subject I was very pleased with it. One point that he made in the opening chapter has pretty much remained true whilst I’ve been developing under OS X with the Cocoa frameworks:
Most of the time, …

Cambridge was the penultimate city of the Stack Overflow DevDays world (or America and Europe) tour and was situated at Robinson College at Cambridge University. The day was a great opportunity to see introductory presentations on the hotness in the developer community, and also to meet other devs and heroes of mine. The Carsonified team (who were running the events) …

Users don’t like change. Perhaps one of the most apt demonstrations of this is with Facebook. Only today, changes were made to Facebook, basically consisting of a new setting on the front page:

Which can be changed to:

(Dependent on your level of stalkiness).
Being a moody teenager myself, I am, naturally in contact with.. A lot of moody teenagers. And there has …