Words (for all developers) To Live By

In coming up with a presentation for work on characteristics of quality, I've done a lot of expanding my brain.  Lots of defining, clarifying, quantifying, and a fair amount of reading.  This morning I took another looks at Apple's ADC guide for Human Interface Guidelines--particularly the part on Characteristics of Great Software.  I'm pretty sure they'd updated it since the last time I'd been there, as I noticed a link on that page to another page called "Know Your Audience".  I followed. First nugget: "It is useful to create scenarios that describe a typical day of a person who uses the type of software product you are designing." Second nugget: "Develop your product with people and their capabilities—not computers and their capabilities—in mind." Third nugget: "It is not your needs or your usage patterns that you are designing for, but those of your (potential) customers." Read it. Enough said.

Vista & Its Own Mind #2

Yet again, Vista presents the pleasant surprise of exiting all my work and rebooting, just to apply updates that it never told me about. I'm appalled for the second time now. Update: And Outlook didn't even save the emails I had written but not yet sent... So freaking annoying.