I was in a pixel mood while sketching in the Gimp tonight … trying to conjure up something old-school. Does it work?

I realized a few weeks ago that there are at least 3 design paths C++ programmers can take:

• Fusion, you mix C and C++
• Mr. Object. You like deep trees of C++ objects
• Object Zen. You use objects, but avoid the depths of purgatory. ¹
• Template-dude. You think in meta, and apply generic C++ (templates and such)

Who are you? Which styles did I miss?

1. Added for Steve ↩

I realized something today: I’ve been tagging slick site layouts as user interface inspiration. My thinking has shifted from thinking about user interfaces as buttons and boxes, to thinking of it as how information is presented: the aesthetics, the flow, and the grokability. Interfaces aren’t just facades for tools, but a face for the flow of information between people via the machine.

A tangent idea found it’s way into my virus-ridden brain: why not replace the window manager with Firefox and a local web app? You could do a consistent desktop metaphor on Windows/Linux easily, and applications would just be links to web apps (some may be google-gears-able). Would be fairly easy to snap it in a Linux distro too …

I predict a Google Gears plugin for WordPress in the next few weeks. If I had some free time this month, I’d even take a whack at it.

Where developers can’t agree on code standards, separate them by interfaces. Sometimes the differences are good, indicative of other valid approaches (and backgrounds). Should we kill developer productivity by arguing K&R versus Microsoft standards? In the end it’s about solid code and productive people. The rest is bullshit.

Tags are one of two things that make web tools better than client-side applications (the other being the possibilities in social linking). But for tags to really stick, they need to do more than group things together. Tags need to be shared between people, which makes the things they tag more useful. Tags also need to somehow underscore the essence of the grouping, so the groups themselves can be compared and related. This is where the power of tags really shines.

I was thinking the other day that web stats tools have gotten stuck in a corner. Most of the tools follow trends in a fairly sterile manner, making it difficult to really understand what you care about. They offer tables and time-ordered graphs, but they fail to answer a web-meister’s basic questions. Where’s the money? What are people interested in? The current tools seem to splat it all at the same amplitude, missing out on the really interesting trends. And where are the blinking red lights?