iSecure and iWallet patents

5 little design decisions to admire

Snapchat’s single button for taking photo + video
Tap to snap. Hold to capture video.It’s intuitive because the thing you want to capture is the same in both instances; what’s different is how long you want to capture it for

Candy Crush Saga’s “5 more moves.”
Couldn’t finish the puzzle in the allotted number of moves, buy for more 5 moves.

Path’s sticker store
The sticker packs are displayed oh-so-prettily on neat little shelves, complete with dramatic spotlight as if this were a museum exhibit of sorts. Tilt the phone, and the stickers swing along, playfully reacting to your movements.

Spotify’s “Popular” section
For one thing, the discrepancy between the order of the songs and the global plays gives you an indication of what’s popular recently vs. what’s been popular historically, useful if you’re new to an artist. You also get a sense for the difference in popularity between various songs, something a simple sorted list doesn’t give you, so you can tell if the artist is a one-hit wonder or a consistent chart-topper

Evernote’s note cards
I’m talking about those little squares that look like white Post-It notes that show you a preview of the note’s content. There’s something about the tangibility and physicality of that design that makes it work so much better for me than a list.

State of DevOps in 2013

The benefits of reverse proxy
A reverse proxy is server component that sites between the internet and your web servers. It accepts http requests, provide various services and forward the requests to one or many servers.
Here are some benefits:

• Load balancing: route HTTP request to identical servers.
• Security: hide your web servers behind DMZ
• Authentication: single point of authentication for all HTTP requests
• SSL Termination: handle HTTPS requests.
• Serve static content
• Caching: HTTP caching
• Compression
• Centralised Logging and Auditing
• URL Rewriting
• Aggregating multiple websites

Netflix Ice

Ice provides a birds-eye view of our large and complex cloud landscape from a usage and cost perspective.

Ice help us view our accouts, services, cost and usage,...

TypeScript 0.9 Preview Release
This release provide some new features: Generics, Overloading on Constants, Export =, Enums. The new compiler improves performance, reliably, enhance completion, type information, error report.

Digg Reader is released in June 26

Startup geography
A look at where startups are located.

Outsourcing and Limiting to Core Competencies are Essential

The leanest companies will identify as few core competencies as possible, and outsource everything else. Instagram’s initial core competencies were (a) software development of image filters, (b) iPhone photo-sharing application development, and (c) driving adoption. 14 employees can handle that. When you throw in the other things I listed above, they’d need at least double the staff—so they outsourced, for example, to Amazon Web Services (server + network administration).

85% of all developer time must be spent on business-specific logic

What's Wrong with the iOS 7 Icons?
Poor choice of color, inconsistent language, weak use of metaphor are comments of iOS 7 icons on HackerNews

Hekaton is a new in-memory OLTP database engine in SQL Server 2014. It's inside SQL Server, so it does not require a separate hardware, or seperate database.