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31.
by btn 14y ago
One of irks I have with "slight visual cues and subtle animations" is that they assume all users will give the same amount of attention and have the same reasoning process as the designer does. They then call the design "obvious", as if tha
32.
by btn 14y ago
It's roughly the same as the improved GCC error message ("index out of range"), but with only 29 extra lines of incomprehensible compiler meandering and stdlib internals!
33.
by btn 14y ago
The authors of Touché did a follow-up paper at UIST this year to study this exact question [1]. In brief, you can train a classifier on the impedance profile of specific users, but there are some significant limitations (impedance profiles
34.
by btn 14y ago
That's a patent application , which was rejected earlier this year in light of a prior IBM patent ( http://www.google.com/patents/US5463725 ) and another of Apple's ( http://www.google.com/patents/US7469381 ).
35.
by btn 14y ago
I'm a little surprised to see the NY Times perpetuating the hysteria that typically follows patent issues with exaggeration of their scope and claims. This is a design patent , meaning that Apple has protection for this specific animation
36.
by btn 14y ago
I suspect the lack of any tactile/haptic feedback introduces a small refractory period between keys/letters.
37.
by btn 14y ago
Sure; physical chording keyboards have been around for decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard
38.
by btn 14y ago
The description isn't very detailed, but where do these strings come from, and what's the licence for using them?
39.
by btn 14y ago
The article is very light on details about how the "study" arrived at their conclusions and figures (I hesitate to call it a study , because it didn't actually test any hypotheses). The report is published by a group that lobbies for "co
40.
by btn 14y ago
Apple's original claim didn't have that "loophole", but added it after the patent office rejected the original version as being anticipated by prior art (specifically, a patent [1] and a patent application [2]). [1] http://www.google.com/p
41.
by btn 14y ago
Keep reading... "If an app continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, it might be appropriate to leave it running after the user closes the main window. For example, iTunes continues to play after the user closes the
42.
by btn 14y ago
> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave. This is almost consistent with Apple's HIG: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users cl
43.
by btn 14y ago
They use it under licence from Cisco. See: http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license.
44.
by btn 14y ago
None of these are lies or even deceit by Apple (apart from a little bit of chartjunk). Apple may have cherry-picked some particularly complementary surveys/analyses/metrics, but I'm not sure what you'd expect from the keynote of a company's
45.
by btn 14y ago
According to its PCT entry [1], it's still making its way through the Australian, Canadian, European, and Japanese patent offices. 1: http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO200...
46.
by btn 14y ago
The USPTO publishes its operating manual for examiners on its website. All of chapter 900 deals with prior art and searches for it, but an overview of the process can be found in these sections: 904: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mp
47.
by btn 14y ago
There's now an option in every user's General Account Settings: Allow friends to include my email address in Download Your Information. I'm not sure what the default is, but mine is currently set to "no" (and I don't recall changin
48.
by btn 14y ago
The code that generates the completions [1] and displays them [2] is fairly simple. It uses a mix of scanning for a function's docstring, Python's built-in rlcompleter module [3] to generate the possible identifiers and keywords, its own mo
49.
by btn 14y ago
Don Norman wrote a similar essay titled "The Trouble with UNIX" in 1981 [1], where he praised UNIX as an "elegant system", but criticised its commands for their "incoherent, inconsiderate design". The greatest surprise actually is that
50.
by btn 14y ago
This is a new version of the Samsung i8520 [1], announced/released in 2009/10, but with a lower resolution camera and projector (although that says little about quality). [1]: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i8520_beam-3150.php
51.
by btn 14y ago
I think that the "legitimacy of the US order" refers to the evidence that will be presented to the US grand jury, not the search warrant in New Zealand. The Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act [1] requires that the Attorney General be
52.
by btn 14y ago
That's not a patent, it's an unreviewed patent application .
53.
by btn 14y ago
Something he misses is that good documentation isn't just an English translation of what the source code does, it's also a contract that describes what the source code may or may not do now and in the future . If "the source code is
54.
by btn 15y ago
The BOM is optional in UTF-16 too: The UTF-16 encoding scheme may or may not begin with a BOM. However, when there is no BOM, and in the absence of a higher-level protocol, the byte order of the UTF-16 encoding scheme is big-end
55.
by btn 15y ago
Perhaps the (formerly) regular release cakes that they exchanged: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Response_from_Microsoft
56.
by btn 15y ago
The design philosophy behind much of Objective-C is described in Brad Cox's book "Object-oriented programming: an evolutionary approach" [1]. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy handy to give you a quote. [1] http://books.google.co.nz/books
57.
by btn 15y ago
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but there was a Simpsons parallel in "Much Apu About Nothing": [Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch. Homer watches proudly.] Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like
58.
by btn 15y ago
The boundaries of what defines a derivative work is a bit fuzzy, and how much you need to take from a work in order to create new work that would be classified as derivative is open to debate/common law. Suppose that HP holds a patent relat
59.
by btn 15y ago
I think the licence text itself is fairly straightforward (as much as legal agreements can be "straightforward") about it: each Contributor hereby grants to You a [forever lasting] patent license to [do anything with] the Work
60.
by btn 15y ago
That is still a draft document, and has not been accepted as a BCP (Best Current Practice) RFC yet.

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