Airtable Product Updates Showcase their Own Product
Smart move by Airtable to use their own product to list their updates, not just as an embed in this page, but also as a fully usable database that people… Read more »
Category Archives: best & worst practices
Making It Easy Enough, But not Easier, To Cancel Paid Subs
Baremetrics’ Josh Pigford makes good points here about business self-preservation and customer service:
On Game Tutorials, Or Any App Onboarding Really
Whether designing a computer game, a business app, or an API, the premise should be the same: people want to do stuff right away, not meander through attention-challenging learning that… Read more »
Interesting Design Pattern: Content Organized by Date
I’ve noticed in several apps and sites lately that the way they organize content based on date metadata ends up being pretty convenient. What these apps have in common is that you… Read more »
Favorite New Office 2016 Feature: Tell Me
“Tell Me” is Microsoft’s infamous Clippy finally done right, and somehow I hadn’t paid attention until very recently. It gives unobtrusive help when you need it, focused on task completion… Read more »
Ideas to Improve Software Documentation, Raise Productivity of Mere Mortals
July 2016 update: I’m resurfacing this entry, first posted in March 2014, in light of StackOverflow’s launch of their Documentation hub. They’re one of the best-positioned companies to tackle at… Read more »
Web Services and APIs Need to Advertise Their Health Status
It seems everything is now being turned into an off-the-cloud service, and as a case in point StatusPage.io launched in 2013 to let companies outsource their availability dashboards. They already have lined up a… Read more »
Open Source Project Watch: Brackets… by Adobe?!
A year ago I wrote about how the involvement of various media companies in open source software was worth paying attention to. It still is, but it is equally interesting to see… Read more »
Insta Case Study: Feature Update Notifications Done Right
Kudos to Intercom for the very smart way they integrate their change notifications to the application itself. First, they use the increasingly popular “counter over an icon” notification that is… Read more »
Where to Register Domain Names, Host DNS, Email
After my previous post on hosting, here are some quick notes on some other essential bits of online technology and favored/hated vendors, from the perspective of a small business looking for… Read more »