Featured Blog Posts (422)

I took a short trip to Tokyo in October to visit family and friends. I've lived there for over eight years, so every time I go back I notice what's changed. And since I'm on the geekier side, I notice tech-related changes.

QR Codes to Search Boxes

When I moved to Tokyo in 2003 there was a trend to switch to camera phones. All the…

Do you have a smartphone?  Chances are you do.  Whether it is an iPhone, an Android phone or any one of the many other smartphones out there it is clear that the age of the feature phone (dumbphone) is past.  This year, for the first time, smartphone sales have exceeded dumbphone sales worldwide.

The explosion of smartphones is due to the steady march of technology getting better and lowering costs.  Smartphones have dropped in cost from $600+ in the early 2000’s…

Note: I write this as a fan and frequent user of Facebook. In addition to helping my family stay connected with friends around the world, the site has helped our company find new customers and team members. I wish them well. That being said, there are many areas where FB really needs to get its act together.

Our company does a fair amount of advertising…

VERSUS

Ok, ok admittedly it's not really a "shootout". We all already know SQL-based data sources are generally less performant and less scalable than their NoSQL counterparts, but they are also…

Sometimes it seems like there is a new mobile phone or device announced every day.  It’s an exciting time when the things we could only dream about 15 years ago are becoming reality. What do we have to look forward to in the next few years and beyond?

Near Field Communication (NFC)

The technology allows interaction between devices and even unpowered chips or tags.  It’s already used in a…

Could it be that we building up to a collective moment against oversharing? That social media posturing, "like"-chasing and follower-building have created a backlash and a hunger for less exposed, more targeted, and more authentic forms of connecting? Perhaps so, judging by the intense interest around apps like SnapChat, Whisper, and Avocado.

Snapchat

Fueling the popular disappearing-photo messaging…

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:…

The key to making any jQuery UI component play nice with knockout.js is to use a custom binding.  From the knockout site, this is how you add a custom binding:

ko.bindingHandlers.yourBindingName = {

Recent events like the leaking of PRISM have reinvigorated the concerns of many for their privacy online.  This is a broad subject, and I am by no means a security expert, but I would to talk about an easy way to give a little control back to your users.

It's virtually impossible these days to visit a web page without seeing several social media "share" buttons/widgets.  Making it ridiculously easy for your users to send your page to their favourite social twitbookfacegramsnapspace is…

Usually, this is a slow news period for technology. But there have been a few high profile tech news stories, from Edward Snowden turning into Carmen Sandiego to the Xbox One-Eighty DRM debacle. But one that perhaps flew under the radar was an…

I love to travel, and over time I have had the good fortune to visit a couple of dozen countries around the world. One thing I noticed from country to country was a correlation between the wealth distribution among its populace and the overall stability of the nation. It seemed the happiest and most stable countries had a relatively strong middle class, while…

You have the latest and greatest idea for a web application. You tell your friends and colleagues, and put together a small team to get the idea rolling. Your programmer, a Ruby on Rails guy, develops a prototype of the web application that works on his machine. You want access to it to show it off, and put it in front of users to get feedback.

Even though you believe in your idea, there's a part of you that's not "all in". You…