Quotes & Sayings About Interfaces

Things that we need to learn are the importance of establishing brand, establishing market presence. Technology-wise, it's things like ease of use, user interfaces; all of these things that tend to be less important in our other business segments are important things for us in the consumer market. — Charles Giancarlo

Folk wisdom in software development teaches that interfaces shouldn't be unduly influenced by implementations. Writing a test first is a concrete way to achieve this separation. — Kent Beck

User interface is customer service for the computer. — Julie Larson-Green

Complexity assertions have to be part of the interface — Alexander Stepanov

The best part is that you can use any number of different interfaces." Tap, tap, drag. "This one's made of Lego blocks, for younger kids. See how there's a Lego representation of the DNA? — Michael Grant

In meditation and/or intense life interfaces, our personal view is often superseded by Self's, causing our apparent reality and all of it's limitations to disappear. — James R. Swartz

First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard. — Bjarne Stroustrup

I had argued that it was ridiculous for a person to have two separate interfaces, one for local information (the desktop of their own computer) and one for remote information (a browser to reach other computers). Why did we need an entire desktop for our own computer but get only a window through which to view the entire rest of the planet? Why, for that matter, should we have folders on our desktop but not on the web? — Tim Berners-Lee

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole — Eric S. Raymond

Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter. Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls "human networks" - so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily. — Thomas L. Friedman

Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials). — Peter Thiel

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology. — Clayton Christensen

Interfaces called transparent allow us to interact/do what we're supposed to do without being aware of how the effects are obtained. We should perhaps speak instead about their opacity, given that we cannot see through them to the machine. — Stephanie Strickland

I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency? — Jef Raskin

The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant. — Bill Gates

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous ... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction. — Eric S. Raymond

I'm interested in ways that digital interfaces can be utilized as powerful narrative devices, and to engage people in new and exciting ways. — Aaron Koblin

Since changing interfaces breaks clients you should consider them as immutable once you've published them. — Erich Gamma

Inheritance is the idea that one class is a specialization of another class. The purpose of inheritance is to create simpler code by defining a base class that specifies common elements of two or more derived classes. The common elements can be routine interfaces, implementations, data members, or data types. Inheritance helps avoid the need to repeat code and data in multiple locations by centralizing it within a base class. When you decide to use inheritance, you have to make several decisions: For each member routine, will the routine be visible to derived classes? Will it have a default implementation? Will the default implementation be overridable? For each data member (including variables, named constants, enumerations, and so on), will the data member be visible to derived classes? — Steve McConnell

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces. — Daniel J. Bernstein

Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death. — Paul Stamets

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information. Typography should not vary widely in an interface. — Alan Cooper

Living in a diverse world - or leading a diverse work force - is more than a mental construct, a memorized list of cultural differences, or a willingness to be tolerant. It's about examining how well we function at the margins and interfaces of life, where divergent ways of being and believing meet and collide. (Kemper — Mark E. Mendenhall

Make interfaces programmatic rather than semantic when possible. Each interface consists of a programmatic part and a semantic part. The programmatic part consists of the data types and other attributes of the interface that can be enforced by the compiler. The semantic part of the interface consists of the assumptions about how the interface will be used, which cannot be enforced by the compiler. The semantic interface includes considerations such as "RoutineA must be called before RoutineB" or "RoutineA will crash if dataMember1 isn't initialized before it's passed to RoutineA." The semantic interface should be documented in comments, but try to keep interfaces minimally dependent on documentation. Any aspect of an interface that can't be enforced by the compiler is an aspect that's likely to be misused. Look for ways to convert semantic interface elements to programmatic interface elements by using Asserts or other techniques. — Steve McConnell

Individualism is bad for business - though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. — Tom Robbins

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones. — David Gelernter

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. — Marshall McLuhan

The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was 'complete' - the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured - in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes. — John Battelle

Unfortunately, nigh the whole world is now duped into thinking that silly fill-in forms on web pages is the way to do user interfaces. — Erik Naggum

The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren't
quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment,
they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations
could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this,
though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican.
Also, it's quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfish
people ... if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/or
brain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that no
current human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn't
something that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of past
communists can't prohibit any particular future technological advance from
being possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse to
turn liberal. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works.

Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They should be developed by a different team, one who delights in finding bugs. — Martin Fowler

the book of 944 design guidelines for text-based user interfaces of bygone days that Smith and Mosier of Mitre Corporation developed for the U.S. Air Force (Mosier & Smith, 1986; Smith & Mosier, 1986). — Rex Hartson

Code is never neutral, and interfaces can signal all kinds of things to users. — Sarah Jeong

Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible. — Alan Cooper

As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces - tapping and shaking and whatnot - but a shift in presence. — Jamais Cascio

First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product - the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone. — Steve Jobs

When your tests depend on interfaces you can refactor the underlying code with reckless abandon. — Anonymous

Love is not our only emotional need. Psychologists have observed that among our basic needs are the need for security, self-worth, and significance. Love, however, interfaces with all of those. If I feel loved by my spouse, I can relax, knowing that my lover will do me no ill. I feel secure in her presence. I may face many uncertainties in my vocation. I may have enemies in other areas of my life, but with my spouse I feel secure. — Gary Chapman

Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces. — Rob Pike

Innovators are developing the ideas and bringing them to life in amazing new applications. All we, as an industry, need to do now is focus on standardizing the interfaces to ensure interoperability - and stand out of the way. — Henry Samueli

The most effective learning takes place in the classroom, where you can easily raise your hand, engage in spontaneous discussions with classmates and faculty, turn to the person next to you to ask for clarification, or approach the professor after class or during office hours to ask questions or exchange viewpoints in a way that practically guarantees an instant response and is not constrained by typing, software interfaces, or waiting for a response. — Ian Lamont

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself - and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense. — Neal Stephenson

Brainstorm new interfaces that could introduce opportunities or threats to your business. — Nir Eyal

One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible. — Steve Case

To the user, the interface is the product. — Aza Raskin

new interfaces are most understandable when they build on what users (and audiences) already know. — Nathan Shedroff

Jobs's intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him- the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store-he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something - a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug- he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.
He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism. — Walter Isaacson

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The best way to learn the value of good interface design is to use lots of interfaces - some good, some bad. Experience will teach you what works and what doesn't. Never assume that a painful interface is "just the way it is." Fix it, or wrap it in — Marijn Haverbeke

It's often the case that teams working in agile processes do not actually go back to improve the user interface of the software. But, as the saying goes, "it's not iterative if you only do it once." Teams need to make a commitment to continuous improvement, and that means not simply refactoring code and addressing technical debt but also reworking and improving user interfaces. Teams must embrace the concept of UX debt and make a commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience. — Jeff Gothelf

Although humans today remain more capable than machines for many tasks, by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes. Humans and machines will need to become far more closely coupled, through improved human-machine interfaces and by direct augmentation of human performance — Werner J. A. Dahm