Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

DATS a New Interface!

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As any unfortunate soul who has ever lived with me can attest, I am a neat freak. I like things orderly. If you have some books out and head to the bathroom, the books will probably be gone when you return. It’s just how I am. Terribly sorry. Those books weren’t being used.

This works out better for product development, however, because I am ceaselessly trying to bring order to places where chaos abides. With SlopeCharts, I was increasingly bothered that as we kept adding features, the menus got more and more cluttered. I feared that our marvelous feature set would get buried under all the clutter.

Thus, this weekend, we totally reworked how the menus were organized. I am much happier now with what I call our DATS setup: that is, Display, Analysis, Tools, and Social. (more…)

Internet Explorer and SlopeCharts

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Some of our fellow humans are racist. Some of them are sexist. Me? I’m browsist.

What I mean by that is that I have strong feelings and biases about browsers. I’m a Chrome user, and I see no reason to use anything else. In spite of being used by countless millions of people, Internet Explorer has long been heralded by engineers around the world as an absolute nightmare. I’ve never understood why such a popular product would be so awful, but it is.

Indeed, even back in 2002 when I was hiring for Prophet, our standard interview question was, “What kind of browser do you use?” We had agreed that IE would be an instant disqualifier. Happily, all the applicants had other answers. (At the time, Firefox was considered a very good response). (more…)