OAuth was designed to combat an anti-pattern. Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it's a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that's just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an untrusted site! So, that's why we use OAuth. Rather than handing details to a random site, we authenticate…
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We live in a world of our own creation. This means we can find it inconceivable that outsiders don't know the acronyms we use daily. How can anyone possibly live without understanding what we do? Customers don't understand your company's acronyms, processes, or business model. It's worse than that, though - most users don't even recognise your company's name! Here's a great example. In Zinio's …
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In a mixed paradigm environment, how do you ensure content is surfaced which is context specific? By which I mean - how do you make your content serve the user's time-bound constraints? What I'm trying to say is - serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives. Or, to break it down further, a user may only have a specific amount of time to dedicate to your app; how do …
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I've been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently. I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: Greg Parker@gparkerA programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.❤️ 41💬 6🔁 019:10 - Wed 22 February 2012 When I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could desi…
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Bitcoin me! 1LJmePYmet9VzzzzzzLbd0RVGoYcLqAZhk If that "sentence" makes any sense to you - you're not a muggle. Muggles (for want of a better epithet) don't want to invest a lot of time into things which don't fit with their mental model of how the world works. Without getting into a philosophical discussion on what money is and how value is generated - let's look at how Bitcoin works in…
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Summary Twitter's way of linking URLs is broken. It's annoying to users, and a pain in the arse to developers. This quick post talks about the problem and offers a solution. I've raised a bug with Twitter and I hope you'll star it as important to you. (more…) …
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Google Plus has a serious flaw. It's summed up in this question: Why are you following me? I know who I want to share my "I hate my job" posts, and "Oh, my cat is so cute" pictures - but I talk about a wide range of things, not all of which you'll be interested in. At the moment, I've got nearly 150 people following me - and I don't know which circle to put them in! So I asked a simple…
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The Metro have been on quite a QR splurge recently - this is their latest effort encouraging people to write in to the paper. On the surface, it's quite a simple idea - yet Metro have needlessly complicated it. The Process The simplest process would be Scan Code Send Email That's not what Metro have done. By using Scanlife as an intermediary, they change the process to Scan …
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Why doesn't Twitter's OAuth let me specify the length of time a 3rd party has access to my account? Take a look at all the crap you've given access to your Twitter account. Are you ever going to use that "See how many of your friends like cheese" app again? No. Long time readers will know that I have some severe usability and security concerns with Twitter's OAuth implementation. See also my …
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One of the most influential books I have ever read is Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". In the book, Norman rails against the usability flaws which seek to undermine our comfort and sanity. Everything from lightswitches which never seem to have a consistent state, to to alarm clocks with impossible to figure out controls. It really is a must read for anyone who cares about…
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Google has rightly received praise for its reworked "Contacts" functionality. But there is still a rather glaring error. One of the things I love to do is add images to my contacts. It gives me a visual cue when I'm scrolling through looking for a person, it prompts my memory when I see the face of a friend calling me, and it helps me remember what people look like. As you can see, I'm pretty …
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I want to tell you a story about really appalling industrial design. This isn't about a nuclear reactor melting down due to covered switches, or even lethal doses of radiation - but of a much more sinister threat.... Pair and Go's battery pack for the Wii Fit! Take a look at their promotional image - it seems like a nice, drop in replacement for 4 AA batteries. What could possibly go wrong? P…
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