• "It is a sign in a public space displaying dynamic code that is both here and now. Connected devices in this space are looking for this code, so the space can broker authentication and communication more efficiently." Gorgeous, thoughtful work as ever; I completely love the fact the phone app has no visualisation of the camera's input. Timo's point, about how the changing QR code seems to validate it more, seems spot-on, too.
  • Kars' "hypertext remix" of his marvellous dConstruct talk. It was sensitive and well thought-through, and appealed to me as both a designer and game maker. Very much worth your time.
  • "With the full avatar spritesheets available in the API, we dream of Glitch characters overflowing the bounds of the browser —and even the game itself— to find new adventures, anywhere people can take them. To this end, our new developer site is chock-full of resources to enable web/HTML5, iOS, and Android developers to build interesting applications leveraging Glitch APIs." Full spritesheets! Gorgeous. But really: this has the potential to be super-brilliant, and it's nicely designed. Hopefully more conventional developers will get on this sort of thing at some point. Bungie? Valve? Blizzard? Watch out.
  • "In re­cent re­leases, Sa­fari has been re-ar­chi­tected, with some of the work farmed out to a thing called “WebProcess”. This doesn’t seem to be work­ing out that well." Much as I was excited about Safari 5's re-architecting, I must admit: I've seen everything Tim says, and it's driving me nuts.
  • "The Fretless Fader concept involves a cross fader which can move vertically as well as horizontally, allowing an extra parameter to be controlled simultaneously with the traditional fader movement – most notably, pitch. It’s probably best demonstrated in video…" Nice chat about productising this, but seriously, the first video is marvellous – it's "Drunk Trumpet" all over again…
  • "A billion drinks per day of Coca-Cola is an amazing thought, but such uniformity is a symbol of inertia, not dynamism. For the most part world trade still travels at the speed of shipping containers, not data packets." I chatted to Matt at dConstruct about this, and I'm really glad he's written it up: so much good examples and thought, about recognising the difference between pace and impact, of attention versus raw numbers.
  • "I’m aware on some level that a photograph is misleading but at the same time we have to remember that photographs are just a frame in time. By its very nature the medium is misleading. We don’t know what is happening outside the frame, we don’t know what happened before the frame, we don’t know what happened after the frame. So I carry in my head two feelings about the Falling Man. On the one hand he was no different than the other jumpers on the day but at the same time I hold onto the essential truth that the image represents." Sontag's "moment selected at the exclusion of other moments" again.
  • "All Hockney's work and thought is dedicated to the proposition that there is always more to see in the world around us. Art is a way—you might say a set of technologies—for making images, preserving them in time, and also for showing us things we aren't normally aware of. Those might include gods, dreams, and myths, but also hedgerows." Hockney continues to be marvellous.
  • Lots of good analysis and tips in here. It's very much not a selection of things to do, more a selection of issues noticed and ways to fix them – many of which are contradictory.
  • "A silly version of postmodernism would suggest that contemporary scientific claims are identically as valid as those made in the dark ages, whereas really they are valid in different ways. Whereas a smart critique of rationalism (and of the Dawkinsesque pastiche of Enlightenment) is one which recognises the evolutionary nature of science, capitalism, culture, such that we cannot throw off our current mindset, culture or language, but nor are we imprisoned in it. We recognise the present as constitutive of who we are, but also as a single moment in an unfolding drama with no apparent conclusion." Cracking writing from Will – and some good stuff linked from this.