Piatti del giorno 52

The mid-career course correction is now public and underway, and I’m feeling pretty good in that brief interval between relief at what I can leave behind and panicked conviction that I’ll soon be living in a cardboard box.

• Rubber Duck [UX] Debugging - Or, you could also train your significant other to recognize when they can just nod, say “hmm” now and then and think about other things, as I do.
• Cancer and Startups - Empathizing rather than sympathizing, shall we say.
• My app design workflow - I was most struck by how few Photoshop features I was even aware of, let alone able to use.
• The Problem with Rails Callbacks - Callbacks are the path to the dark side. Callbacks lead to coupling. Coupling leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering, and so on (h/t @steveklabnik).
• Framer - A JavaScript-based alternative (‽) to Quartz Composer.
• Xcode 4’s Less Obvious Shortcuts - Assertion: nearly every program would be better if the UX/UI effort spent on editing were instead spent on navigating.
• Sandi Metz’ rules for developers - A winning combination: rules that will improve 95% of all Rails code, plus a clear guideline for when I get to pull the ripcord and do my own thing, since I always have to.
• SketchMine - A repository of files for Sketch.app, so you can see how it’s done.
• Why virtual isn’t real to your brain - Fascinating and, not surprisingly, more than I’ve ever stopped to think about it.
• CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed - Tossed onto my pile of skim-and-return a couple of years from now when I have some database-related scars to assist my understanding (h/t @rob_rix).
• A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Some thoughtful analysis to get you ready for sifting through the ashes of the Readerpocalypse (h/t @buzz).
• Apple’s new Objective-C to Javascript Bridge - Neat little cross-environment capabilities probably coming in 10.9 (h/t @apike).
• How To Get Great Ratings For Your Mac App - In short, don’t crash.
• Spark Inspector - Give me axonometric side views and I stop even caring what kind of whackery gets injected into the app bundle.