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 »
How to Watch Youtube in a Chromeless Browser Window
I wanted to have Bloomberg TV’s Youtube stream in a minimalist window and first tried the /embed/ trick, but publishers can disable their Youtube videos to work outside of youtube.com… Read more »
Geopolitical Tectonic Movements: Watch the Mediterranean & Beyond
Note: this entry was originally published in February 2015, with ongoing updates and edits since then. Though the daily ebbs and flows of the news cycle may make it seem… Read more »
SaaS Integration: Multi-Step Workflows & The Category’s Future
Retrieving and remixing data from web APIs and SaaS through two or more steps is a decade-old idea, starting with Yahoo Pipes in 2007 if not earlier (screenshot above from Derek… Read more »
Mount, Backup, Sync: Flexible Cloud Storage Options for Windows Users
Cloud storage for consumers and small businesses (i.e. not enterprise) has “traditionally” been associated with the concept of syncing a dedicated local folder with the cloud, because it’s the way… Read more »
Combine PhpStorm with Browser Dev Tools on Windows For Top Productivity
Following my entries on PhpStorm and Docker, here are my notes on the state of browser dev tools. When working on a website, especially if you’re doing full-stack work that… Read more »
Robots Everywhere: Orchard Edition
You may think apple picking is the sort of inexpensive yet complex enough labor that it’s not worth automating. You’d be wrong. Abundant Robotics’ prototype is still slow but you can… Read more »
How to Find & Open Any File In a Jiffy with Launchy + Everything + Dopus
Here’s a quick animated gif showing how I use Launchy to send scoped searches to Everything, leading to opening folders in Directory Opus or files in their associated app.
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 »
Using Docker Instead of Vagrant for Web Dev on a Windows PC
I started using Vagrant to develop Linux-based websites on my Windows desktop in 2014, as an upgrade from running XAMPP. At the time there were significant practical differences between Vagrant and Docker, but… Read more »