Recently in Technology Category

• What: regular TV on iPad.
• Why: for in bed & on couch - less hot/cumbersome than laptop and can put on while using laptop.
• Love: portability; queue (though you get that with regular Hulu).
• Hate: some shows still Web only; has ads; endless buffering.

• What: daily newspaper on the iPad.
• Why: initially bc sister works there (graphic designer), but now bc it is fun to read before going to bed at night.
• Love: UX, i.e. nice browsing and readability features; good graphics.
• Hate: can't go back to older issues since I don't pick it up every day.

• What: 3-way video calling.
• Why: hate going to meetings in person.
• Love: way more personal phone.
• Hate: often peoples' Internet connections aren't fast enough.

• What: free, two-day shipping on many Amazon products (no minimum, overnight for $3.99).
• Why: going to the store is a hassle.
• Love: shipping is so fast (often just one day).
• Hate: how much stuff on Amazon is not prime-able.
  

• What: online code repository.
• Why: easy private collaboration; could use my servers, but it has issues built in and don't have to share credentials/resources.
• Love: easy segmented collaboration.
• Hate: dealing with pull requests.

• What: online fax.
• Why: my home fax doesn't work very well.
• Love: easy.
• Hate: feels expensive.

• What: cloud services.
• Why: initially wanted easy failover and scaling capacity; now run as primary host.
• Love: spin up new nodes in minutes.
• Hate: dealing with EBS issues; instances fail more than (I think) they should.

• What: virtual (shared) servers.
• Why: shared development resource.
• Love: cheap, root access, no bs.
• Hate: larger plans expensive.

• Load the app as fast possible. By this I mean two separate things: first, reduce the time it takes to press the icon and be able to interact with something on the screen. If this takes too long, impatience sets in and the app is likely to face the gong (home button).
  
  Second, reduce the number of screens before the actual app appears to zero, i.e. go right into the app. Yes, I understand you want to upsell and do other stuff there, but just don't. When you do that, especially when put links to the app store there, the toddler will click them, and then get confused. For example, Park Math is a great app, but I hate their home screen -- that big yellow bus is so attractive to click!
  
  
  
  
  
• Move all settings out of the app. For iOS at least, you can move settings out of the app and into the general settings window. Please do this because toddlers are drawn to your little setting icons, and they a) destroy the flow of the app and b) the toddler will change all of them and put the app into an annoying state, e.g. in another language, too hard for them, etc. Interactive Alphabet is another app we like, but it really needs to drop those 4 unnecessary buttons on the bottom of the home screen.
  
  
  
  
  
• No pop-ups/notifications. See a theme here? If there is a non-app associated thing the toddler will click it :). Pop-ups are the worst because they are modal giving them a 50/50 chance to click on the wrong thing. They're just not appropriate in these apps. There must be a presumption in these scenarios that the parent is controlling the app at that point, but at least in our household this is usually not the case. He scrolls through the screens and picks the apps he wants to use.
  
  The worst offender I've seen with this point are the Dr. Seuss Apps. These apps need work in general and I don't really recommend them, but this aspect particularly annoys me.
  
  
  
  
  
• Make everything tappable/clickable. Toddlers love to interact with the app and point out and press everything. When things respond to those taps, it makes the experience a lot better. Itsy Bitsy Spider does this really well.
  
  
  
  
  
• Change it up/give surprises. The best apps not only make everything cilckable, but also do different stuff from screen to screen and even hide games/easter eggs. For example, a click may do something but a long-click may do something else. In a book, one page you may have to color and the next page you may have to click a series of things. Jack and the Beanstalk by Ayars (there are several) does this excellently. Here's an example page where they have this mouse dragging game action built in.
  
  
  
  
  
• Give multiple ways to do things. Sometimes it is unclear what to do, or the toddler hasn't mastered a way to do something, e.g. the swipe motion. So it is better to offer an alternative. In the swipe example, little arrows to turn pages work well.
  
  
• Give hints. If there is no activity for a bit, it is great to give the toddler a hint of what to do, e.g. by highlighting something they could/should tap. A similar behavior is to offer a mechanism to get hits when something is hard to do. Animal Hide & Seek Adventure does this well. You're supposed to tap the hiding animals, and they offer a dock on the bottom to shake the animals if you can't find them.
  
  
  
  
  
• Add delays. Once a toddler understands how to do something, like turn a page, they want to just keep doing it. But this leads to them doing things like rushing through the app without really getting much out of it. The way around this is to delay some of the interface elements (including hints). For example, instead of showing the arrow to the next page right away, wait 5 sec. for doing so. I actually haven't seen anyone doing this yet, but would really appreciate it. The same goes for hints, i.e. the animal game I mentioned above. It would be better if the hint dock did not show all the time.
  
  
• Give instructions. Literally tell the toddler what to do, i.e. speak instructions to them. This can be done in conjunction with the hints and delays mentioned above, and also at the beginning of a task. Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (also on Android) does this very well.
  
  
  
  
  
• Update the app. It's great when you can update the app and the toddler can see the changes. It doesn't have to be new features, but could just be new themes or other look changes. Elmo's Monster Maker does this well by releasing seasonal and holiday updates.
  
  
  
  
  
• Highlight words and letters as you say them. When reading to the toddler, I think it will help them associated words and letters with the sounds better if you highlight what you're saying as you're saying it. The Monster at the End of This Book does this well.
  
  
  
  
  

I just replaced Google with DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. I'm VERY tired of having advertisers jump all over me everytime I do a search for, well, anything.

For example: watching THE TUDORS on iTunes, one of the characters had gout. I wanted to know if gout was a recognized disease during the time of the Tudors. So I Googled "gout", and checked out the wikipedia entry on the subject. Turns out it was in fact a recognized disease at the time (although they had no idea what caused it). I don't have the disease. I don't personally know anyone who does. I certainly don't have any need for medications that treat gout. But now I'm constantly bombarded with ads for all kinds of drugs intended to treat it. 

All I did was get currious, just once, about a disease suffered by a TV character on a show I like to watch, and now every advertiser on the planet is apparently convinced that either I, or someone I know, has gout, and they're not about to pass up even the most minuscule chance of selling me something.

• Downtime. BOSS has had a lot of down time. Recently, it was down for about 24 hours straight. You can't build a reliable search engine on that kind of down time. Moreover, there is no API status dashboard, which I've pushed for, and there is also no reliable way to communicate with Yahoo! about BOSS downtime. They say to use the usergroup, but is anyone really checking it at 4AM? It doesn't seem like it.
  
  If I'm paying I would hope to have an SLA with some way to reach the ops team. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one monitoring! I get alerted (by email and text message) when it goes down and report it after I determine it isn't my fault. And I'm pretty much the only one reporting it like this.
  
  
• Bing. If Bing is powering Yahoo's organic results, will it also be powering BOSS? The announcement seems to indicate this will be the case. If so, why not just use Bing's API, which is currently free and would give the exact same results? If not, then why wouldn't we expect it to just degrade in quality as Yahoo spends less time and money on generating their own organic results (e.g. on crawling, indexing, etc.)?
  
  If I'm paying I would hope to have solid answers to these questions. I hope that they do continue crawling and indexing, because for me I'd like to use reliable independent APIs. Otherwise, the combined entity is essentially a single point of failure, or maybe single+epsilon.
  
  
• Bugs/Roadmap. There have been a lot of outstanding bugs in the BOSS API for a while now, which I have worked around. For example, the API will change your query in some cases and won't tell you. There hasn't been great communication as to a roadmap, and I get the sense that everything was sort of on hold for a long time because of the Microsoft deal. If the commitment to BOSS is serious, please start treating it accordingly.

• Window -> Lines of scrollback -> 10000. The 200 default is sort of ridiculous. I often have long script outputs and want to scroll back.
  
  
• Window -> Behavior -> Window title -> <server name>. I currently have 19 putty windows running. If they weren't individually named by server, it would be a disaster.
  
  
• Terminal -> Bell -> None (bell disabled). If I don't turn that bell off, I get a headache after like 5 min.
  
  
• Window -> Translation -> UTF-8. The default (Latin encoding) causes all sorts of problems if you tail a log with UTF-8 output.
  
  
• Connection -> Data -> Auto-login username -> yegg. Saves time.
  
  
• In the past, I've also messed with default colors (Window -> Colours), but have always gone back to the default. I've also changed the keepalive (Connection -> Seconds between keepalives), but my current servers simply don't drop ever.
  
  

I doubt you'll find MFA spam to be better on DDG than on Google, but please, if you see a query where they are beating us. Send it over. :) I can guarantee you that I'll get a lot of eyes looking at it.