logiccolony.com/blog

So I’m finally finding the time to get working on the design of the Logic Colony website. I just intend to do some very public incremental development. Today was the first iteration if you like, where I spent about an hour just getting things together on the server and throwing some Javascript widgets on the page.

Is there a master plan? Not really. Well certainly not a top-down detailed plan. I do however, have some strong ideas/themes for what I want the site to become, but its more of a case of seeing where the process takes me. Given the limited time I will have to spend on the site, it’s definitely going to be a case of embracing constraints.

Photo by mat0s, used under a Creative Commons license with thanks.

Large Systems Suck

This rule is 100% transitive. If you build one, you suck.

Just one highlight from Steve Yegge’s Rich Programmer Food. In a word: awesome.

Came across some nice Twitter visualizations:

• RailsConf Twitter visualization (from twitter.com)
• Twittervision
• Flickrvision

I’ve got to say I really like the twittervision and flickrvision web mashups. Both are really nice pieces of information design.

…or conventional thinking leads to conventional results.

I’ve come across two articles recently about the non-conventional design and architecture of systems that are yielding some outstanding performance. First up is an article about writing high performance code for the Sony PlayStation 3 (itself an example of a non-conventional hardware architecture).

The second article is a blog post about the architecture of the Mailinator service. It’s a great read about the design of system tightly tuned for its purpose.

Yahoo! revamped their TV listings site, and got a whole load of negative feedback:

• Paul Kedrosky really doesn’t like it.
• Yahoo! blog - check out the comments (via scripting.com).

Sensible design and ease of use trump flashy websites any day of the week. Of all the AJAXed sites I use, the best still have to be Gmail and Google Maps. Mind you having said that, I’m starting to feel a bit of clunkiness in the Gmail UI. To be fair, I’m probably on the power user end of the scale, and am getting a bit too tag happy for my own good.

Of course, this would never be a problem with a rich client app .

As for Google Maps, mouse wheel zooming is just wrong. For every other website the mouse wheel is used to scroll around the page. Hit Google Maps and that behaviour flies out the window. Annoying and inconsistent. Googlers, make it stop.