I'm happy that at least one company tries to get it right BEFORE unleashing its products on the public. From my experience, the iterative approach often means that a bunch of casual users are given as much input into a design as the designer who devotes months or even years to trying to solve a problem holistically. Iterative design usually means Frankenstein design, that is, a product with way too many unnecessary features, a lack of cohesion and just plain ugliness. The iPhone could not have been created iteratively, and even if it had been, it certainly wouldn't have had the design impact it did. I don't think Google is even on the same planet as Apple, design-wise.

Do employees actually take vacations at companies without a predetermined number of vacation days?

For people who have issues with this, I'd suggest asking your manager or whoever is in charge whether X days of vacation per year would be acceptable. And then track your own vacation days and treat them like you would at any other company.

Manager: "Take as much time as you want, but know that your absence would be highly disruptive to the company."

yes, but you also don't get paid out vacation time when you leave, and there's always this social pressure to not take long trips (3 weeks, anyone?)

I think it really depends on how many products you need to display. If you have 200 products in a category, I think you'd want the user to be able to scan very quickly through all of them (via a grid), whereas if there are only a few, you'd want them to consider each product individually (vertical listing).

That's my feeling too - perhaps it's also a function of how many products you think might be suitable for a person. eg. if I'm looking at iconfinder.com I like 100 to a page, in a grid, so I can scan the icons really fast, little scrolling. I'm going to eliminate 99% of the icons very quickly.

But with teas, it's perhaps not so obvious, so the vertical listing seems to work better to allow people to choose.

I thought the article was impossible to read at 16 px - just not enough density - too few words per line and too few lines per screen to read comfortably. I'm 46.

Seconded, and I'm 26.

Each to their own.

I've yet to meet a good designer who LIKES to code.

Hello. :)

Definitely a regular login/password using my email address as the username and no validation on the password. I hate when I have to come up with a unique, really complex password for a site I don't use often unless it's a financial site or something.

Whenever I log in with Twitter or Facebook I'm always afraid that whatever I do on that site will be published to my Facebook or Twitter status.

My Google password is unique and precious and I don't want to use it log in to anything but Google.

I think Netflix solves this problem nicely. You use a computer to add things to a queue and then a remote to browse through the queue.