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After Yahoo Pipes: Back to square one?
I had long expected the Yahoo Pipes end-of-life announcement, but it was still sad to finally read it. Wiring the Web, as Pipes and newer services like IFTTT and Zapier do, will continue to be a great...
View ArticleWhy is automating simple tasks so hard?
It seemed like such a simple thing: Make charts and tables and share them with the team. If I had to do that only once in a while, it would be straightforward to do it in Google Apps. But I need to do...
View ArticleHands on: Slack gets a real-world teamwork test
Resistance to Slack was predictably futile, and now we are assimilated. I was not among the resisters. Nothing floats my boat like powerful team-enabling software, and I'm having a ball exploring the...
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Soon everyone will be annotating the Web
You are not likely to find yourself in this situation: Jon Udell Here's the setup. I've browsed to Brian Donohue's Medium.com essay Bookmarklets are Dead, and I've selected a sentence. Three...
View ArticleWhere GitHub, Slack, and Trello fall short for collaboration
If you are a small software startup operating in 2015, as we are, you have quite possibly converged, as we have, on Google Apps and the trio of GitHub, Slack, and Trello. In theory that trio could...
View ArticleGoogle falls behind the curve in collaboration
Google's Web-based collaboration suite feels increasingly at odds with modern Web collaboration. Exhibit A: Page breaks in Google Docs. You can't get rid of them. Yes, you can trawl through forums and...
View ArticleMicrosoft doesn't get collaboration -- but it might
Cruise the hallways of Microsoft's Redmond campus, peer into doorways, and observe what kinds of collaborative apps are running on the multiple monitors attached to every PC. Here are some you won't...
View ArticleWindows 10 hardware is off to a shaky start
I bought an original Surface Pro in 2013, and it's been my all-purpose computer ever since. I wanted to believe it was the long-awaited perfect union of desktop, laptop, and tablet capabilities. But...
View ArticleWindows 10 hardware tale has a happy ending
I'm pretty sure I now hold the world record for most 2-in-1 Windows 10 PCs owned by a single lunatic individual. Our story begins where it ended two weeks ago: I'd run into problems with a Lenovo Yoga...
View ArticleTrello: Collaboration is in the cards
The aha moment that led to Trello, says its creator Joel Spolsky, was a series of "customer visits to see how people were using Excel."His findings, gleaned while Spolsky was a program manager on...
View ArticleBreak the tyranny of native mobile apps
If like me you're a Windows Phone user it can be painful to re-enter the United States after an overseas trip. At certain airports, including SFO, people with Apple and Android phones get to skip...
View ArticleThe art of working globally, office not included
I've been a remote worker since 1998 when Byte Magazine ended. At first, and for a long time, working from home was nothing but wonderful.Byte had been wonderful too, in many ways, but it was an...
View ArticleScreencasting captures what words can’t
This week I've been interviewing users of our product. As always, I'm struck by the ways in which the words we use to describe existing (or wanted) features can fail to capture implicit -- or tacit --...
View ArticleWhat is TypeScript? Industrial-strength JavaScript
Historians who reflect on JavaScript’s emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the...
View ArticleHow web annotation will transform content management
Jon Udell is director of integration at Hypothes.is. In February the W3C approved recommendations to enable annotation on the web. There is a long lineage of annotation tools that enable readers of...
View ArticleWhat is TypeScript? Industrial-strength JavaScript
Historians who reflect on JavaScript’s emergence as a dominant programming language in the 21st century may find themselves quoting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the...
View ArticleWorking observably: The next best thing to being there
When I joined Hypothesis, my new employer, I wondered: "Why are we using IRC instead of Slack?"It boiled down to three reasons. First: inertia. The company had established an IRC culture before Slack...
View ArticleHow Steampipe enables KPIs as code
Ciaran Finnegan is the cybersecurity practice lead at CMD Solutions Australia and Phil Massyn is a senior security consultant there. About a year ago they began using Steampipe and its CrowdStrike...
View ArticleAutonomy, packet size, friction, fanout, and velocity
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug and it’s always risky to wallow in it. So those of us who fondly remember the early blogosphere, and now want to draw parallels to the fediverse, should do so carefully....
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Build a Mastodon dashboard with Steampipe
I was determined to write my Mastodon #introduction today. To get started I used the tag search in the dashboard I’m building. IDG The idea was to look at a bunch of other #introduction posts to get a...
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