20 years old today, but Photoshop didn’t have layers until 1994… how did anyone manage without them?
At the time its toolset was pretty limited and the application wasn’t capable of much. A second version, featuring paths followed later in the year, but it wasn’t until 1994 that version 3 with a new feature called [...]

The ability to change the score required to win a game replay was one ploy adopted by pinball machine manufacturers in an effort to compete with the ever increasing challenge offered by video games.
All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired [...]

Comparing the task of a software developer (or another developer or designer for that matter), with that of an architect commissioned to design the perfect home.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our [...]

Hmm, producing “unmaintainable code” is apparently one way of retaining your job… if you subscribe to the line of thinking that no manager in their right mind would wish your code upon anyone else.
To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to [...]

Why take software or online applications into full release when they could stay in beta and be tweaked to perfection?
Take offerings from Google, such as Mail, Docs and Calendar; Gmail, for instance, has been around for more than five years, but is still in beta despite being relied upon by over 113 million users – [...]

Since when has distributing software free of charge, or freeware, amounted to forfeiting the copyright of said freeware? When it’s open source?
Because the code was given away for free, thorny questions emerge when a violation has been discovered and someone is found to have shoved the code into their own for-profit products without giving anything [...]

15 ways in which the usability of free software can be improved.
The easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers. So it’s in Free Software that we see volunteer [...]

Friday 1 August is Usability Challenge 2008 day. Because the world needs a usability shake-up. And more emphasis on end user and customer testing before web or software applications are launched.
Or the layout of the cheese display is finalised at the supermarket, for that matter.
I’m talking about poor information architecture in the gourmet cheese [...]

This week’s “say what” moment is courtesy of Microsoft marketing executive, Brad Brooks, speaking about an advertising campaign intended to restore consumer confidence in the Windows Vista operating system, who is quoted as saying “software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.”
“We’ve got a pretty noisy competitor out there,” Brooks said [...]

Annoying software: a rogues’ gallery
From Apple’s auto updates that clandestinely attempt to install new software, to the erratically performing Windows Vista in general, to the 80 megabyte Adobe reader “updates”, software upgrades increasingly seem to be designed to hog system resources and infuriate computer users.
What does Adobe Reader do? Displays PDF pages. How does it [...]