Posture, defined as the position of one’s body while sitting or standing, is something most developers take for granted. The cliche of the programmer hunched over their desk typing away on their laptop is alive and well in many offices. What, exactly, is the problem with poor posture? Is the job necessarily tied to poor back and neck health? What are the long term effects of poor posture? Is there a way to avoid pain down the road?
Looking into a classroom today, things might not look much different than they did 10+ years ago. But if you take a closer look, amongst the books and desks, there are computers, smart boards, and iPads. Technology has always had an influence on education, and in the digital age of today, modern tech companies and education institutions are working together to build effective learning tools.
Medicine and health care are big business, particularly in the United States. In fact, US consumers spend over 1.5 trillion dollars1 on healthcare related expenses each year. Over the last few years, more and more apps have become available that help you monitor and improve your health. As they say, there’s an app for that.
As a designer I’ve been influenced by many people and places. British designers Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver immediately come to mind. As well, countries like Germany and Italy have affected me. Bauhaus, Futurism, Bruno Munari, the Memphis Group, and other forms of modernism and post-modernism have widened my vision and deepened my understanding. However, the country and culture that has influenced me most is Japan. I’ve always related to its customs, design, and philosophy, which are often diametrically opposed to Western ideals. After traveling there extensively over the past 15 years I consider myself somewhat of a Japanophile and want to share 5 essential Japanese design principles that have influenced me.
After January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas there was a great deal of talk about the future of the Internet of Things (IoT). On the whole it was a far cry from the good-natured hype that had characterized previous years’ reporting. There was a new note of caution in the optimism.
With the acquisition of Next in 1997, a new tool was initiated into the Apple family. Originally known as an enhancement of OpenStep, called NextStep, it caught the attention of the developer community under the name of Interface Builder, as part of the XCode suite. Now about to celebrate its 20th birthday, Interface Builder represents the most powerful IDE to design user interfaces in a development suite. It doesn’t matter if you are writing an app for iOS, Cocoa, tvOS or watchOS; when carefully used, it will save you hundreds of lines of code. For this and other innumerable reasons, many developers, like myself, love this tool.
In growing companies, as software systems become complex and extensively engineered, maintenance can be a challenging problem. Moreover, when high profile bugs arise and/or a lack of system availability arises, it can have disruptive consequences on a business. Hence there is little room for mistakes in these crucial systems.
At some companies, designers and developers have little to no interaction with clients or customers. It’s not uncommon for the people working on a project to be walled off from clients by account managers or customer service. At Grio, every designer and developer is client facing, and everyone ends up doing some of the work that is traditionally done by an account manager, such as managing day to day contacts, relationship management, and responding to problems & issues.
Howdy, lazy bum! Enjoying the ReactiveX magic? Want to take a look at polling?
I’ll be walking you through a solution I put together for one of our up and coming apps! It works rather well, I learned a lot, and so far no complaints…although there are no users yet either!
Feeling quite charitable, I’m going to let you in on some useful bits and pieces as we build up to polling: threading, late subscribing, replay, manual re-triggering and error handling (a must for preserving replays).