Some points it brings up:

I am beginning to think that the whole idea of attention is a key to designing an engaging UI. I’ll write more in future articles about that. Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns.

People look to others for guidance on what they should do, especially if they are uncertain. This is called social validation. This is why, for example, ratings and reviews are so powerful on websites.

Link

Website usability testing is indeed a critical component of any effective online publishing strategy. When properly utilized, usability testing allows you to effectively scan and rapidly identify which are the critical issues to be addressed in your web publication that can improve legibility, the time visitors spend on your website or the ability to turn offers for products and services into actual conversions.

Not only does the article talk about the benefits, but outlines how best to use the tools and also which tools to use.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

Gruber posits that this move is about branding:

But, still, Apple sees the App Store as an extension of the Apple brand. That’s why flat-out pornography has never been and never will be allowed. You can walk into a Barnes and Noble and buy a copy of Maxim, but you won’t find a copy of Hustler. Not because Hustler wouldn’t sell, but because selling pornography goes against the Barnes and Noble brand.

I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn’t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn’t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the “new” apps in the “productivity” category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.

I agree, this is about image. Using sex to sell your application isn’t in line with Apple’s branding. Low quality software also isn’t in line with Apple’s branding. Neven Mrgan explains:

The most popular section of The App Store is the Top 25, and other Top Lists. [...] Unless Apple significantly betrays what the word “Top” means in this context, they’re powerless to stop the influx of crass, experience-cheapening apps into these invaluable portals.

And I bet that bugs them. A lot. These days, when Apple’s aesthetically-minded, Disney-friendly thinkers visit their shiny new playground, they see a whole lot of dead grass, rusted swings, sharps and used condoms. They’re acting as impulsively as they are because it drives them crazy.

Personally, I’m glad. Those applications cheapened the experience. They showed that scammy, unless apps exist and put them right up front in an attention grabbing way. It has nothing to do with the content, these apps were pure novelty. I feel like the app store should have stricter quality control and this is a step in the right direction.

The real issue here is that people have no other way to get application onto their iPhones. This is the tricky part, Apple needs to allow people to put unapproved apps onto their phone. I may not want jiggly boobs on my phone, but I’m sure there are people that are. I don’t want to create applications that only shows bikini clad women but there very clearly are people who want to do this and they should be allowed to. It should just stay out of the app store and be put somewhere else, preferably next to the fart apps.

The underlying secret to beautiful user interface design is realism: making 2D objects on your screen appear to sit in 3D space with volume, surface properties and undulations that might appear in real life. These faux 3D objects have highlights and shadows just like objects on your desk might have, and they have textures that emulate real objects from glass to sandpaper and everything in between. Designing beautiful user interfaces has more to do with the why than the how.

Read the full article here.

The “cloud” — hosted, centrally-managed services — cannot be your only copy of data. Just as RAID is not its own backup, cloud services are not inherently backed up, although they usually make every effort to maintain data integrity and regular backups. But even when done well, that only accommodates for a subset of loss scenarios. For example, if someone gains access to your account and “legitimately” (as far as the service is concerned) deletes your data, or a botched sync operation unhelpfully synchronizes a mass deletion across all sync clients, cloud infrastructure probably can’t help you. Even if they have offline backups, the chances of them accessing them just to get your old files from an isolated incident are slim.

You aren’t in control of your data if you can’t easily and frequently make useful backups onto your own computer and your own media.

The current world wide web does basically one thing: simple, stupid, mindless hyperlinks. But even that alone was enough to build a functional and useful internet for the world. And Google was able to build a zillion dollar algorithm out of discovering the relationship between those dumb hyperlinks.

All that, when the most fundamental building block of the web, the hyperlink, barely works at all. Hyperlinks are fraught with peril and pitfalls even under the best of conditions. The current state of hyperlinking is almost literally the stupidest thing we could build that works. Frankly, the current system sucks beyond belief, as Ted himself notes:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent — ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

I decided to conduct a highly-scientific (read: not scientific at all) survey of my friends and got the following results: