Blogature

Part of what characterizes the Web 2.0 era is the close connection between (and sometimes merging of) creators and consumers. This is part of what makes this era fundamentally different from previous ears. We’ve seen this all over, but primarily on the web. Blogs turn anyone into writers, and readers are only a comment […]

While staring at http://www.microsoftshitbrick.com (a site not for work or for the turd-phobic), Jon said (of the Zune): “why do people still think imitating Apple will make them successful too? It’s like a design cargo cult.”
Quite so.
Apple has been an incredibly strong force in popularizing design in consumer electronics and beyond, starting with the original […]

Jon and I were answering some interview questions for an email interview we’re doing with the folks over at VoodooVentures a few days ago. One of their questions was about how we defined Web 2.0 and whether we thought we were a Web 2.0 application. The idea of Web 2.0 has bugged us for a […]

Here’s a conversation Jon and I have a lot: What is the incremental cost to the usability of our application if we add a specific new feature?
We think this is a critically important question when designing an interface. Thinkature is intentionally a really simply application. We offer fewer features than some of our competitors. Strategy, […]

Very large JavaScript applications like Thinkature are not yet very common (or at least not as common as their smaller AJAX cousins). As a result, the body of literature on designing, debugging, and optimizing those applications is small, although it is growing.
As we got ready to launch Thinkature, we noticed that loading complicated workspaces […]

I was chatting with Brian from AlwaysBeta last week about web application deployment strategies. He was worrying over setting one up, and was curious what Jon and I have been doing for Thinkature. We’re aware of nice systems (like Capistrano, née SwitchTower), but just haven’t invested much time in setting something like that up. I […]

If you had met us five weeks ago, and asked us “So, when will you have something I can play with?” we probably would have said “Should be about two weeks.” Then, if you ran into us a restaurant a two weeks later and asked the same question, you might have been surprised to hear […]