Topic: Software Development
With several mobile device platforms in wide use, the designer's job is more complex than ever. Suzanne Ginsburg sorts it all out, proposing several approaches and giving examples and tradeoffs of each. Should you design a native app only for the iPhone? A web app that works on Android and Windows phones, too? Or should your design fall somewhere between, targeting only a few platforms? Or take a hybrid approach? Suzanne gives guidelines to help you decide and describes tools that can ease the designer's task.
Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Jin Yang - our resident web/graphic designer here at Stack (the distinction between the two becomes a discussion point). Once we get the proper picture of Jin in the chatroom, he relates everything from his background in design to how he ended up at Stack Exchange and our philosiphy behind design.
With each new social network, it seems social media becomes more important. With a lot of competition for our attention, effective user experience is critical. Erin Malone says we must focus on how people first interact with our designs, then carefully help them flow from one stage of participation to the next. Erin describes clear patterns that help social services ease people on board and encourage them to interact with others.
Building the right marketing strategy can be tricky if you see your customer only through a bubble of research. Peter Merholz strives to construct better models for understanding customers as something more than sheep, highly-rational Vulcans, or Type A personalities. Peter's case studies include connecting consumers to a financial services program and redesigning insulin pumps.
Elephants have long memories and, as far as PostgreSQL is concerned, are no longer slow or lumbering. EnterpriseDB's Ed Boyajian and Bruce Momjian discuss the many improvements, benefits and features in PostgreSQL, as well as its success as a commercial database. Alternatively focusing on the business and technical components of the database, Boyajian and Momjian present the new and improving PostgreSQL.
This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Patrick McKenzie - StackOverflow contributor, internet commentator and SEO expert (especially when it comes to driving traffic for bingo cards). After a few early tech issues we jump right into things, with tons of discussion covering everything from creating bingo cards to optimizing question formats. Also - how much does upvoting someone's first question make them more likely to come back? Tune in to find out.
A flash at 3 AM inspired Wei-Min Shen and Peter Will to use life-like hormones to control robot transformations. Years later, Wei-Min Shen is still learning new advantages of such a novel life-science approach to robotic control. In this interview, Per Sjoborg asks Wei-Min Shen how he defines three-degrees of freedom for his reconfigurable robots, how far Shen's blue-sky dreams reach and how to achieve his practical goals. In this fun exchange, Sjoborg explores the nitty-gritty problems of keeping robots clean, dry and safe before aiming for loftier goals.
This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Rory Blyth (with no 'e' as he is very insistent) fresh off his move to a new house in Portland, OR. Check out as Rory leads a rambling conversation from Will Smith movies to iPhone development to some awesome new Stack Overflow features!
Giving a quick history of MySQL, Tomas Ulin and Duleepa Wijayawardhana explain the changes the system has seen in the editions from MySQL 5.1 to the present MySQL 5.6. Tomas Ulin, Vice President of the MySQL Engineering team, also discusses the current state of affairs for MySQL, recently acquired by Oracle. In terms of past development and current changes, Ulin also predicts future uses of new features being created in MySQL.
Jeff & Joel are joined by Steve Karantza, better know as Shirlock Homes, our #1 user on the DIY Stack Exchange. Steve is also our first non-programmer oriented guest on the podcast!
