Scroll of Wisdom
Great Moments in Technology
In the early 90s a young British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee had been tasked by CERN (Centre Européeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire the now famous large hardon collider that found the Higgs Boson or a tiny thing pretending to be it) to go in and see if he could find a way of getting the Tower of Babel of different computing platforms used by the hundreds of physicists at the plant to talk to each other. He came up with something that made use of metatextual techniques that he called The Information Mine. Being a very very modest man he realised that those initials spelled out his name, TIM, so he changed it at the last minute to the World Wide Web. He wrote a language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a set of communication protocols (chiefly htttp — the hypertext transfer protocol) and an application, as we would now say, on which all these could run, which he called a browser.
He planned, devised, programmed and completed this most revolutionary code in Geneva on one of Steve Jobs’s black cube NeXT computers. Hugging his close to him he took the train to Paris where Jobs was going to be present at a NeXT developers’ conference. Clutching the optical disc that contained the most important computer code in history he sat at a desk while Steve marched up and down looking at hopeful programs and applications. As in all of Steve’s judgments they either sucked or were insanely great. Like a Duchess inspecting a flower show he continued along the rows sniffing and frowning until he got two away from the man who had created the code which would change everything, everything in our world. “Sorry Steve, we need to be out of here if we’re going to catch that plane,” whispered an aide into Jobs’s ear. So, with an an encouraging wave Steve left, two footsteps away from being the first man outside CERN to see the World Wide Web. The two men never met and now, since Steve’s death, never can.
Favorite Steve Jobs Quote
Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we’ll find the mistakes and we’ll fix them.
Don’t Take Your Vitamins
Excellent article indicting vitamin manufacturers by Paul A. Offit of the New York Times:
Speaking in support of F.D.A. regulation was Marsha Cohen, a lawyer with the Consumers Union. Setting eight cantaloupes in front of her, she said, “You would need to eat eight cantaloupes — a good source of vitamin C — to take in barely 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C. But just these two little pills, easy to swallow, contain the same amount.” She warned that if the legislation passed, “one tablet would contain as much vitamin C as all of these cantaloupes, or even twice, thrice or 20 times that amount. And there would be no protective satiety level.” Ms. Cohen was pointing out the industry’s Achilles’ heel: ingesting large quantities of vitamins is unnatural, the opposite of what manufacturers were promoting.
Excerpt From “About The Finder…”
If the interface is hard to use, the computer is hard to use, and so on. The interface is the computer.
The Future of ReiserFS
ServerFocus:
Reiser4 has a somewhat uncertain future. It has not yet been accepted into the main line Linux kernel, the lead designer is in prison, and the company developing it is not currently in business.
Call me crazy, but I think it may be dead.
Edward Tufte on Windows Phone
Compared to the iPhone, most of the WP7S organizing screens have lower content resolution, which violates flatness and leads to hierarchical stacking and temporal sequencing of screens. In day-to-day use, maybe the panorama screens will solve the stacking/sequencing problem, or maybe they will just clutter up the flow of information. Of course Microsoft’s customers are already familiar with deep layerings and complex hierarchies.
Don’t Call iOS 7 Flat
Jony Ive:
One of the things that we were interested in doing is, despite people talked about this being “flat,” is that it’s very, very deep. It’s constructed and architected visually and from an informational point of view as a very deep UI, but we didn’t want to rely on shadows or how big your highlights could get. Where do you go? I mean, there is only so long you can make your shadows.
It wasn’t an aesthetic idea to try to create layers. It was a way of trying to sort of deal with different levels of information that existed and to try to give you a sense of where you were.
Typography in History
From For Shame – Happy Cog:
The Treaty of Paris in 1783 was interrupted by an argument between Benjamin Franklin and Louis XVI’s printer over whether to set the treaty in Baskerville or Caslon. Benjamin Franklin, mocking the Frenchman, contended Caslon was “passé” and began singing “Le Poisson” from The Little Mermaid. The fight was broken up by Franklin’s mistress. A patina statue off the coast of New Jersey marks the occasion.
A Neat Apple TV Feature
I was scooting around on my Apple TV after the update that brought HBO Go and I noticed that you can select a picture screensaver that randomly cycles through new/upcoming movie posters. After trying it out I realized how nice it was. Movie posters reveal a lot and having a scrolling canvas of upcoming ones is a great idea. I could see this being ideal for home theaters that like to build on the cinema experience.
Here is the setting to enable it
Here are a couple snaps of it in action
John Siracusa on Interface Design
Simplicity is great, as iOS has shown. But there’s a difference between conceptual simplicity and visual simplicity. Just hiding controls does make things appear simpler, but it doesn’t actually make them any simpler. The complexity is now just hidden. Similarly, removing features that few people use is a good idea, but like any good idea, it can be taken too far. At a certain point, you’re just making your application worse for everyone, even new users.
Great statement.
Ok, Google.
The Verge:
It’s called “Project Loon,” and as reported last month, it involved sending up a huge number of giant balloons to beam down internet access to remote regions around the globe. Google says that balloons make sense for this purpose — they’re cheap to deploy and can provide wireless coverage in areas that would otherwise be difficult to serve due to geography.
“Project Loon”
The Aeropress Station Idea
The Aeropress coffee maker makes a great cup of coffee, and making it is a nice experience but nice != great. You don’t settle for a nice cup of coffee so the experience making it should be as good as the result. My idea is simple: A station to elegantly hold all of the pieces of the Aeropress. Just a butchers block of wood with cut outs for each individual part. I don’t have a good diagram, but it’s not hard to visualize how this would look with different cuts on both the front and top for each component.
It seems so very obvious to me when im making coffee via the Aeropress that there needs to be something like this created. So im releasing my idea to the wild. If there is enough interest, I may try to develop a prototype and head to Kickstarter. Alternatively, I would we willing to work with someone who has the wherwithal to make this happen. I have a pretty good idea of exactly how the block would need to be cut to accommodate for each component.
Trying to use inventor fusion, I created the mock-up below but it doesn’t really come across exactly how I want it to. As well, this would be something I would research more to see how folks are actually using them. I know how I use mine and I will keep the two primary tubes together after a “press,” but I don’t expect this in every case. So it would require some more development to find the “just right” layout.
The Aeropress Station Prototype
Reach out to me on twitter @tbolt if you want to know more and/or are interested in helping.
Flat Design
The hot topic of the month is flat design and expectations that it will appear in iOS7. What I want to know is, why hasn’t anyone pointed out that Windows Phone 7/8 is a quintessential model for flat design, and that it’s failing?
Yahoo Potentially Buying Tumblr for $1.1 Billion
Wild. Yahoo is on a march to redeem it’s late ’90s early ’00s title as a serious contender in the web-companies ring. Question I have is, where does this fit in Yahoo’s larger strategy?
Netflix Domination
On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined.
John McAfee is More Interesting Than You
From a slashdot article (which I recommend reading all of it):
I haven’t been involved with McAfee Ant-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87% of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations – madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few.Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.
and
It’s odd that people focus on the possibility that I might now be doing drugs (I’m not) and totally ignore the fact that from 1971 to 1982, 99% of my income came from smuggling and selling drugs. It’s a well documented feature of my past life. I was also taking more drugs weekly than most of you will do in a lifetime, and I was a totally indiscriminate user. Whatever came across my desk went up my nose, down my throat, in my veins or up the nether region. I never reached the notoriety of George and my writing, in comparison to him, did not merit writing books about my exploits, but we were not so totally different, he and I. I had my right testicle shattered by a hammer in 1974 when I ran afoul of some local drug barons in Oaxaca. Its the size of a grape now and shaped like a small frisbee. I have been in Mexican jails on three separate occasions and, frankly, I cannot recommend them. I was arrested in Bristol Tennessee in 1971 and charged with felony possession of a dangerous narcotic. A good lawyer got me of. (I always, oddly had tons of money that helped integrate me slightly back into humanity and smooth my transgressions).
Wow.
Yahoo and Dropbox
Big news today, Yahoo is partnering with Dropbox to do file attachments. Especially interesting considering Dropbox just purchased Gmail client app Mailbox. I’m going to stamp this as a Marissa Mayer move.
Techcrunch:
In case you’ve forgotten, Yahoo! Mail is still the No. 3 most-used mail service in the world behind Hotmail and Gmail. But the last time we checked, it was No. 1 in the United States.
BlackBerry 10
Highlights from todays unveiling
- RIM today announced it was rebranding itself as BlackBerry. An interesting move but not shocking.
- Two new devices running BB10, the Z10 and the Q10. The Z10 is a full touchscreen phone with a 4.2″ display at 356PPI, and the Q10 is a traitional BlackBerry device with a portrait keyboard
Instagram and The Blogosphere
Yesterday was an interesting day for Instagram. The morning was full of backlash and outcries over their new Terms of Service. Then, after an official statement from Instagram, there was even more comotion. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I decided to take a look back.
Start by reading MG Seigler’s article on Tech Crunch
Some highlights:
Some days I feel like the blogosphere is full of paranoid attention whores. Other days, I’m sure of it. Today is one of those days.
Have to agree with this as I really don’t think the story warrented such a reaction.
Well, now we have Instagram’s actual statement on the matter, and it’s pretty straightforward: “To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos,” wrote co-founder Kevin Systrom. He goes on to note that: “The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.” Not quite as straightforward — and I’m sure we’ll have 15 more blog posts on the matter — but clearly well-intentioned.
Well-intentioned or not, its quite the opposite of straightforward. It’s not their intention to sell everyones photos, but that doesn’t answer the question whether they will or not.
Fortunately, I am not the only one who drew this conclusion.
Note how ‘it is not our intention to sell your photos’ isn’t the same as saying ‘we won’t sell your photos’. Despite the forthrightness of the tone, the message is still unclear – will you or won’t you?
Update: Instagram has reverted back to the original Terms of Service
Late 2012 iMac thoughts
Remarkably thin.
That’s the impression the first glance gave me. It’s quite an engineering achievement, and further strengthens the argument that this is the future of desktop computers.
Now this new slim design doesn’t come without sacrifice. iFixits teardown shows just how difficult it will be to do any sort of upgrades or repairs. While a batch of nerds will be upset with this, it’s clearly the right move. Apple sells a clean and complete desktop. If you need hot-swap hd bays, or easily removable RAM, look elsewhere. Id wager 90%+ of iMac owners never even consider upgrading even the RAM.
Concerning the “updated” display. It’s nice, a good upgrade but not jaw-dropping. About what you expect since its not retina. Apple claims 75% reduction in glare, which, I had a hard time distinguishing that this was true. But going back and forth from a Thunderbolt Display, the difference is clear. It’s a very nice improvement but still not on the level of matte.