Shahid Hussain

Category: Tech

  • Best file system for your USB external drive

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    Shahid Hussain
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    It’s not unusual these days to have computers, consoles and tablets in the house, all running different operating systems. If you want your external drive to be interoperable between them, you’ll need to think carefully about your choice of file system. I’ve broken down some popular options here so you can make the best choice…

  • How to acquire customers for your mobile app

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    Shahid Hussain
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    As an EIR, I spend a lot of time talking to startups about their problems and how to solve them. I sat down recently with one of the Oxygen Accelerator teams to discuss the the biggest problem by far for any startup – customer acquisition. Here’s an example flow of users for a generic mobile…

  • Google Drive vs Google+ Photos vs Picasa Web

    Google Drive vs Google+ Photos vs Picasa Web

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    Shahid Hussain
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    After the launch of Google Drive, I was excited to use it as a photo backup & sharing service. Unfortunately, the features for what I consider a good photo viewer are spread out over different Google products (Drive, Google+ photos, Picasa Web.) I want to back up my photos online This is easiest in Drive…

  • How to use pagination on your website

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    Shahid Hussain
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    Splitting content up into pages is pretty common on the web – you might see it in articles, comments, search results, or other lists of data. Want to use pagination? Let’s take a look at the options available to you. Option one: links to new page Having separate web pages for each page of content…

  • Implementation models vs mental models IRL

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    Shahid Hussain
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    If you’ve read “About Face” (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin) you’ll recognise this diagram. It’s a great description of how a product can be closely related to the way it was built (the implementation model), or the way a user relates to it (the mental model). Here are some products that are close to the implementation model:…

  • Making interface animation useful

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    Shahid Hussain
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    Many interfaces on the web contain some kind of animation. We’ve had Flash for a long time, and with jQuery and HTML5 it’s become even easier to add animation. Should we do it? People hold these two views about interface animations: Take the animations off! They are slow and I want to concentrate on function…

  • T-Mobile’s image compression

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    Shahid Hussain
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    I’ve been using a T-Mobile UK connection through a Nexus One to stay online in Blighty. It turns out that they employ some shenanigans to keep their bandwidth costs down. A few tricks seem to be happening: A transparent proxy loads your requested images, but sends you a more compressed version of your image instead.…

  • Web coding on a mac

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    Shahid Hussain
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    If you’re developing for the web, the chances are good that you have a server out there somewhere running a LAMP stack. If you’re doing a lot of iteration – which is probably a good idea – you’ll want to find a quick way of changing code on your server rather than downloading & uploading…

  • How To Be A Successful Blogger

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    Shahid Hussain
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    Some of you may have come across Chris Guillebeau’s 279 day guide to success as a blogger. For those of you who don’t have time to read it, here’s the short short version. First the obvious parts: Being a successful blogger takes a long time and is a lot of hard work. Even doing that…

  • UI Design Principles from Mozilla Labs

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    Shahid Hussain
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    As part of the Labs concept series, I attended an online talk by Alex Faaborg from Mozilla UX, presenting Jakob Nielsen’s 10 principles for software usability design. They are simple and useful, so here they are. Keep system status visible: Is there a web page loading right now? Am I in private browsing mode? The…