Painfully Obvious.

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Category: Web

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Senior vice presidents [at Microsoft] sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar — really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge.

philipsu
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Perfect playthrough of Night Trap, one of the first games to use full‐motion‐video. This game seems like it was made just so that some schmuck would make fun of it on his blog twenty years later. As SeanBaby puts it: “Night Trap is exactly like switching between eight different channels — only at any time, seven on them are static shots of empty rooms and one is the worst show you’ve ever seen.”

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The world of the World Cup is the one I want to live in. I cannot resist its United Nations–like pageantry and high‐mindedness, the apolitical display of national characteristics, the revelation of deep human flaws and unexpected greatnesses, the fact that entire nations walk off the job or wake up at 3 a.m. to watch men kick a ball.

Sean Wilsey
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If you’re an engineer at a company where becoming a manager is considered a promotion, then you only have three choices: become a manager yourself, or leave, or resign yourself to being a second‐class employee. It should be obvious — you can work through the math using three sock puppets — that this is an arrangement that pushes a company inexorably towards mediocrity. The best engineers either leave the company or try their hand at management, often with doubly disastrous consequences: they simultaneously lose the company a great engineer and gain them an awful manager.

Steve Yegge
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Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation. On breadcrumbs vs. the back button, one user said: “It’s safer to push ‘back’ because I know what I’ve seen. If I push this [breadcrumb link] I don’t know if I’m going to get what I got before. I don’t want to waste any time.” Moral: unless it’s a single‐page application, do not break the back button in your web app.

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Dashcode has been rumored to exist for a while, but now we know for certain: it’s being bundled with new MacBooks, and some kind soul sent his copy to Cool OS X Apps. It’s way more robust than I expected. Breakpoints, easy interface building (complete with a library of “ooh shiny” components), a GUI for your widget’s PLIST file, and built‐in localization. This is awesome. I really ought to start working on version 2 of my Azureus widget.

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The ability to pick shit up quickly and solve problems is far more important than the ability to regurgitate arbitrary facts. If I can hand you anything from a broken mail configuration to a broken coffee machine, and you tell me “I know nothing about this, but I’m on it,” you’re somebody I want working with me.

Heresiarch
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In other huge JavaScript news, FireBug 0.4 is out. This is a huge release, so rather than enumerate the many new features I’ll just tell you to go download it now and find out for yourself. I’ve been beta testing it for a couple weeks and I already can’t imagine going back to 0.3.

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Sam Stephenson has a blog, finally. (No, Projectionist doesn’t count.) His first post is monumental: he all but guarantees that Dean Edwards’s Base will be integrated into Prototype, allowing for true inheritance. (I’m guessing this is a 2.0 feature because it’d prompt a rewrite of stuff like the Ajax classes to use the new model. This isn’t something you submit a patch for.)