Featured Blog Posts – August 2013 Archive (7)

Just tried to explain what the floppy disk icon is for saving a doc to an 8 year old. Looked at me like I’m nuts. — Facebook friend…

There is no doubt that all of us have heard about the security breaches of numerous Fortune 500 companies.  From credit card information hijacks to content defilement, there is no shortage of news reports detailing the exploits of uber-hackers or hacker groups.  The companies that were aggrieved were so, in part, due to their size.  The acclaim for a hacker penetrating Wal-Mart or Citibank will be far greater than that achieved by taking down Joe's Pool & Spa.  But the havoc wreaked on…

My friend Ken Berkun recently sent me a link to a NYT article that was more amusing than anything I've seen in The Onion. Mr. Glanz inquires, "…

I came across an article on the New York Post via Hacker News: My Hell as a 911 Operator.  Following an overhaul of the NYC 911 computer system, the article describes the chaos stemming from the system’s inability to handle high call volumes and frequent…

On various occasions in various settings I’ve been asked for my opinion on PHP as a web development platform. It is one of the most popular choices today, yet it is also one of the most criticized by experts. I personally have not touched the language for over a decade but it was once one of my favorite tools.

I remember doing professional web development during the first Internet boom in CGI scripts written with Perl. It was quite cryptic compared to the Java I was learning in school…

HiPPOs -- the Highest Paid Person's Opinions -- are a well-known pitfall and obstacle to creating a great web site or mobile app. Features or designs aren't chosen because they're what users need, but because they're what the HiPPO wants.

Well, another common pitfall is something worse than digital design by HiPPO -- digital design by a herd of HiPPOs. Usually, the powerful heads of several departments all want their desires represented. If they all got their way, the new site or app…

I work on Enterprise iOS applications for a large energy company and do not have access to an MDM, but I recently had a requirement to provide an in-app way to notify users when an update is available and a way to update it immediately if they choose to. Another requirement was that it must be completely managed within the company's network, so systems like TestFlightApp were not an option.  So I created a custom UpdateManager class that I reference in my AppDelegate as such:…