I just read Jakob Nielsen’s “Top-10 Application Design Mistakes” and thought I’d post some notes on it here and encourage everyone to read it since it is a great summary/categorization of the common issues.  Why am I qualified to comment on this list?  Well, I’ve made a lot of these mistakes in my own work and had to figure out how to avoid them the hard way!

Apologies and empathy seem to be losing any value because the expression itself is largely meaningless.  I thought I’d cover what actually constitutes an apology in this entry because there is a big difference between apologizing and saying you are sorry. 

An apology in its Greek roots means a speech of defense.

There are thousands of high quality Wordpress Themes available on the internet. In fact, there are so many that only the prolific number of sites powered by Wordpress could even come close to re-using them all. The theme I was using was supposed to be temporary when I put it in place in mid-2007. Here it is 2008 and I was still on it. I had to change it to give my site it’s own look.

Friday at 12:00am I started working to develop the visual style that would become our app for the Railsrumble.

Sunday at 12:25am I got to sleep after working with Jared to build a complete Rails application and deploy it in just 48 hours.

I have to gush a little bit because for my 29th birthday my lovely wife bought me a 22″ Widescreen monitor that matches the one I already own.  I love working with dual screens when doing everything from programming to just surfing the net because I can leave my communication tools open on one screen while I work on another.