Let's review: What kinds of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) do we currently have? On the one hand, there are Desktop GUIs whose development has been a bit stagnant for a while (I have written about some new ideas, older, but not yet widely used, include lifestreams, zoomable user interfaces, and 3D GUIs). On the other hand, there are smartphone interfaces that have recently enjoyed a resurgence via multi-touch.

Update 2012-04-04: Brought several smaller things up to date, added a conclusion.

LaTeX on Mac OS X is a very pleasant experience, because both LaTeX and the operating system have excellent support for PDF. That means that you’ll be able to use a “PDF-only” workflow (with the occasional bitmap graphics thrown in). In this post, I describe my favorite setup for LaTeXing on the Mac.

The article "The Hero's Journey: Are You Experienced?" uses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to explain how people learn: Initially, when they are novices, they cannot handle a lot of contradictions. They want to be told what to do and everything must be simple and consistent. Combine this with the observation that abstractions must be built by amassing concrete examples, and one can derive a few rules for teaching (some of them borrowed from "Hero's Journey"):

My guess is that most people will soon find out that constantly being interrupted by one's cell phone makes it hard to relax or concentrate. On the other hand, it is convenient if someone is easy to reach.

Generics allow parameters to determine the type of the return value. This can be used to avoid a cast when returning objects from an internal map, by using the class of the object as a key.

Description:

The UMBC Semantic Web Reference Card is a handy "cheat sheet" for semantic web developers and programmers. It can be printed double sided on one sheet of paper and tri-folded. The card lists common RDF/RDFS/OWL classes and properties, popular namespaces and terms, XML datatypes, reserved terms, grammars and examples for encodings, etc.