“Software is everything. It also sucks.” Fascinating article on remedying that idea, about the team that writes software for the Space Shuttle. It’s practically the polar opposite of web development. Some bits of that are probably good; some are perhaps n
“Beat connects you very directly to a single soldier by thumping their recorded heartbeat against your chest… If we are going to continue to fight wars, we need better methods of feedback like this one so the costs are more visceral and real for us.”
“Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don’t believe it — I didn’t want to believe it… I know we all feel these people are idiots, but it’s our own geek cultural imperialism that makes us think we know better than non-techy folks.”
So, the latest version of Nokia/Symbian Series 60 has been previewed. There’s even a swanky video for it:
I’m still thinking about a lot of it. It’s clearly aiming at a slightly different market to the one Apple’s gunning for. There’s an interesting separation between “stuff that needs a stylus” and “stuff you can do with fingers/thumbs”. In reality, I think people veer towards thumbs if possible. Does that mean they’ll ignore the UI elements that are so small they need a stylus? Not sure. I haven’t given that enough thought, as I said.
The best bit of the video, though, is nothing to do with touch. It’s the bit where the model silences the phone ringing on the coffee table simply by physically flipping the phone over.
As an interaction, that presumes a lot. It presumes you leave your phone out, and if you do, you leave it face up. Many people leave their phones out (so they can see them skitter across the table when a call/SMS comes in) but face down, so the screen doesn’t annoy them. (Blackberries, with their persistent flashing light, are a prime candidate for face-downing). At the same time, it embraces that behaviour: when the screen lights up, you hide the screen and the phone silences. I like that.
Of course, you could do that on any old phone with a cheap accelerometer inside it. I wish it wasn’t part of some “premium” touch interface, but part of a lowest-common-denominator combination of hardware and software. Oh well.
LoadingReadyRun are playing non-stop Desert Bus for charity. Their high score is 6 so far. They have been playing for 4 days. They are insane. And have raised $20,000+. They rule!
"Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files." Apparently now does FLAC transcoding, too, which is useful.
"Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…" Delightful etymology behind it, too.
"The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be." I have wrestled with so many people about what "design" on the web means. This helps me understand myself
Mark Pilgrim looks at Kindle through what's been said about it so far, and what's been said about the act of reading in the past. His comparisons prove depressing, and worthy of at least some consideration.
"If you're a parent, I would be [concerned] about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds)... our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of this world you got to buy the right stuff." Sadly, yes.
"Are we absolutely sure that this is the very best we can offer young people?" [Lord Puttnam] asked. "Do we really want them to think of themselves as not much more than consumers?"
Yes. A healthy tonic to all the mind-numbingly irritating rants going around the place about making the web "prettier" and "more distinctive" and "more art directed" and whatever. It's a medium in its own right. Now work out what that means.
"DataMapper is a Object Relational Mapper written in Ruby. The goal is to create an ORM which is fast, thread-safe and feature rich." Looks very interesting; I rather like the migration-within-the-model thing (a la Django). One to watch out for.
Guest edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: a special issue of the JCMC on social network sites. Must return to this, because there's lots to sink one's teeth into.
Currently very-much-enjoying Pukka: brings decent bookmarking not only to Safari but to lots of applications, handles multiple delicious accounts well, and is generally very smooth to use. Will almost certainly register it when the time comes...
"Integrity will follow all of your internal links to find your pages, checking the server response code for all internal and external links found". Handy broken-link checker for OSX.