Shane Ahern’s Weblog

Here’s an example of how push notifications are possible with the new iPhone:

Here’s an example of how push notifications are possible with the new iPhone:

Google is actively developing new SMS apps for developing world countries where low-end phones without data plans are most common:

I decided to do a little market research. I scraped the top 150 most recent tweets on Twitter for the query “X language” where X was one of {COBOL, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, Haskell, Lisp, C}.

Then I asked three people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify that the tweet was on the topic. If so, I asked if the tweet seemed positive, negative or neutral.

1) Test your question
2) Demand a High Approval Rating and Pay Well
3) Build a reputation and set a tone for your tolerance of what is acceptable work
4) Submit work during the Daytime hours in the U.S.

Employer! Consider loosening the programming language requirements on your software development job posting. Learning a programming language is easy. Good software development is hard. If you are an employer or a human resources professional hiring software developers, you need to read this article.

This article explores the consequences of the uncertainty introduced into the system-development life cycle by a prototyping approach and the practical strategies employed by developers in prototyping projects. Drawing on various strands of the sociology of technology, the article discusses findings from a multidisciplinary research project, which investigated the use of prototyping in commercial information systems development in the United Kingdom during the period 1995 to 1998. Qualitative semistructured interviews with commercial practitioners were followed by a series of mini case studies. We draw on interview and participant observation material and the practitioner literature on Rapid Application Development… Prototyping is more akin to trying to stabilize a network of evolving prototypes, user expectations, requirements, and working practices than meeting a fixed specification.

The HCI discipline has long promoted the communication and collaboration between usability experts and intended users of systems. We present case studies that highlight the importance of representations in communication between not just usability experts and end users, but also graphic designers, clients, and technologists. Our case studies are used to illustrate the need to select appropriate representations for the target audience and the stage of system development. We argue that relationships can be identified between representation fidelity, target audience, and stage of development. These relationships can then be used to inform the appropriate selection of representations.

We present and evaluate a new technique for performing diary studies under mobile or active conditions. Diary studies play an important role as a means for ecologically valid participant data capture. Unfortunately, when participants are asked to capture data while mobile or active, they are often unwilling or unable to invest time in thorough, reflective entries. Ultimately, this leads to lowered entry quality and quantity. The technique presented here suggests the capture of only small snippets of information in the field. These snippets then serve as prompts for participants when completing full diary entries at a convenient time. We describe how this system automates collection of snippets via text (SMS), picture (MMS) and voicemail messages and later presents these snippets for full entry elicitation.

At times, programmers work opportunistically, emphasizing speed and ease of development over code robustness and maintainability. They do this to prototype, ideate, and discover; to understand as quickly as possible what the right solution is. Despite its importance, opportunistic programming remains poorly understood when compared with traditional software engineering. Through fieldwork and a laboratory study, we observed five characteristics of opportunistic programming: Programmers build software from scratch using high-level tools, often add new functionality via copy-and-paste, iterate more rapidly than in traditional development, consider code to be impermanent, and face unique debugging challenges because their applications often comprise many languages and tools composed without upfront design.

The role of prototypes is well established in the field of HCI and Design. A lack of knowledge, however, about the fundamental nature of prototypes still exists. Researchers have attempted to identify different types of prototypes, such as low- vs. high-fidelity prototypes, but these attempts have centered on evaluation rather than support of design exploration. There have also been efforts to provide new ways of thinking about the activity of using prototypes, such as experience prototyping and paper prototyping, but these efforts do not provide a discourse for understanding fundamental characteristics of prototypes. In this article, we propose an anatomy of prototypes as a framework for prototype conceptualization.

In this research, we provide a qualitative and reflective analysis of usability evaluations of a text messaging functionality of a mobile phone by comparing three types of prototyping techniques—paper-based and computer-based and fully functional prototype. This analysis led us to realize how significantly the unique characteristics of each different prototype affect the usability evaluation in different ways. We identify what characteristics of each prototype causes the differences in finding usability problems, and then suggest key considerations for designing more valid low-fidelity prototypes based on this analysis.

oftware prototypes are becoming more and more important, as computer applications invade new domains and as personal prototyping environments become more powerful. Although numerous approaches recommend their use, prototypes are sometimes treated like their developers' personal toys, and little effort is made to extract and share the experiences and knowledge that emerged as a by-product of building the prototype. In this paper, a strategy is proposed to extract crucial pieces of knowledge from a prototype and from its developer. The strategy is based on monitoring explanations that developers give, analyzing their structure, and feeding results back to support and to focus explanations. During this process, the prototype turns into the centerpiece of a hyperstructured information base, which can be used to convey concepts, implementation tricks and experiences.

Creating multiple prototypes facilitates comparative reasoning, grounds team discussion, and enables situated exploration. However, current interface design tools focus on creating single artifacts. This paper introduces the Juxtapose code editor and runtime environment for designing multiple alternatives of both application logic and interface parameters

Designing UIs that run across multiple devices is increasingly important. To address this, we have created a prototyping tool called Damask, which targets web UIs that run on PCs and mobile phones, and prompt-and-response style voice UIs. In Damask, designers sketch out their design for one device while using design patterns to specify higher-level concepts within their design.

Source-code examples of APIs enable developers to quickly gain a gestalt understanding of a library's functionality, and they support organically creating applications by incrementally modifying a functional starting point. As an increasing number of web sites provide APIs, significantlatent value lies in connecting the complementary representations between site and service - in essence, enabling sites themselves to be the example corpus. We introduce d.mix, a tool for creating web mashups that leverages this site-to-service correspondence.

Prototyping is the pivotal activity that structures innovation, collaboration, and creativity in design. Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to test them. Framin design as a thinking-by-doing activity foregrounds iteration as a central concern. This paper presents d.tools, a toolkit that embodies an iterative-design-centered approach to prototyping information appliances.

Experts predict context-tailored contents to be the future profit earner of mobile communication. On the other hand, mobile applications and services suitable for tailoring and delivering those contents have low market penetration so far. A lack of standardisation concerning the handling of context-information and high technical complexity involved in the development of mobile applications are reasons for this situation. This article presents 'Hydra', a framework to simplify and shorten the development of context-aware mobile applications and thus render the development of these applications more economically viable.

Location-enhanced applications are the most widely adopted type of ubicomp application. However, they're hard to design and test. New Wizard of Oz techniques for testing location-enhanced applications allow efficient testing of prototypes in the early stages of design without deploying any sensing infrastructure. On the basis of the authors' experience in location-enhanced applications, they present general challenges and principles for designing WOz testing for ubicomp applications.

We have built a toolkit, the Context Toolkit, that supports the rapid development of a rich space of context-aware applications

set of JavaScript examples

Ten Great Books on computer science and programming

As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers.

Stanford class lecture videos on iTunes. Includes iPhone app development class

app produced by Stanford's iPhone app development course

Good starting list of areas in need of startup innovation

List of interest approaches to alternatives to currency (might be something to think about give the strange things happening with the US dollar lately)

Good guide to bash shell scripting