Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Wayne Barz, on knowing your market, the needs of that market and thoroughly understanding your competition and how they address that market and those needs: The fact that a $6 billion market exists is good. Knowing that it is generally growing at 11% per year is a little more meaningful. But for the most part, I don’t care….
Four weeks ago I decided to follow in Om Malik and Heather Armstrong's shoes and create a digest of some of the more interesting things I saw throughout the week. After four consecutive weeks of creating these posts, and really having a great time putting them together, I plan to complete as least 52 of these posts. I…
Vacations are weird. We work really hard before vacation so that we can, you know, go on vacation, and we work really hard after vacation. I'm doing the latter part of that this week by trying to catch up from being a week away. I've been successful! Now, onto this week's links. Whisky tour of Scotland on Places…
In case you missed it, Apple just held a press event to showcase the updates to iOS coming next week, two new iPhones, and the fact that iWork for iOS is now free with all new iOS devices. Here are my thoughts on each of these announcements. iWork for iOS being free for all new iOS devices: In…
For the last few months our team at Plain has been using Editorially to collaborate on blog posts, newsletters, magazine columns, interviews and much more. Now, we can't live without it. Editorially is a Markdown editor; which means a simple text-based markup language that allows you to add just enough emphasis and style to your documents to allow…
Coast is a new web browser built for the iPad by Opera. (App Store link) Why is there a back button in iPad browsers? The iPad is, after all, designed for touch. You swipe, drag and use gestures to move around. Bringing Chrome or Safari from the desktop to iPad always felt like bringing a known app in…
I'm vacationing on the beach in South Carolina with family so this week's post is a day late and a little lighter than usual. I'm looking forward to getting back at it next week. Video: The new trailer for Gravity. I'm very much looking forward to this movie if for no other reason than to see these shots…
This has been a busy week. We've just turned on the sales engine at Barley and it has been interesting to go out and talk to potential new customers, resellers, and partners. Even with this busy week, though, I managed to find some interesting things on the web. Here are some of them. I'm on vacation next week…
This one is an instant gem, folks. Matt Gemmell writes about how the medium through which we devour content has changed from print to web and how publishers seem fixated on ways to push the medium rather than focusing on what is truly most important – the content. We’ve become lost whilst trying to work out how to…
My friend Kyle Neath at GitHub writes about Relentless Quality and how shipping early and often doesn't have to mean a sacrifice of quality. Quality isn’t something to be sacrificed. Move fast and break things, then move fast and fix it. Ship early, ship often, sacrificing features, never quality. Bingo. The entire post is perfect. Read it.
Some of this we've read before, but a lot of it we haven't. Nicolas Carson published a "biography" of Mayer for Business Insider: On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohn’s last board meeting, Yahoo made it official: Thirty-seven-year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoo’s new CEO. It is fascinating to see this type of stuff go down. I've seen…
Inspired by Om Malik's What I'm Reading Today and Heather B. Armstrong's Stuff I Found While Looking Around comes my own series of posts; What I saw this week. Video: CarChat with Don Dethlefsen of The WerkShop about the 1970 BMW 3.0si Estate Wagon – If I ever have the resources to restore an old classic car (and…
John Paczkowski in 120,000 Apps in BlackBerry World (Spoiler: 47,000 Made by One Developer) for AllThingsD: That means more than a third of those apps were published by S4BB, a developer for whom quality doesn’t appear to be a priority. I wouldn't think they'd be able to focus on quality with that many titles in the app store….
Remember when I said we need more ways to find good blogs and blog posts? Here's one… the always excellent Om Malik of GigaOm has a series on his personal blog called "What I am reading today". Here are a few of his recent lists. August 20th, 2013
The Zemanta Tech Circle: Tech Circle is a simple way to recommend highly related content from its members to the whole Circle. We’ve long been fans of a well curated blog roll, but with the shift to content streams and mobile consumption, often the blog roll simply never gets seen. This isn't really new and whether or not…
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here is Jason Fried from this past July on Why we're doing things that don't scale on Signal vs. Noise: But automation can also lead to myopia. And premature-automation can lead to blindness. When you take human interaction out of a system, you’re removing key opportunities to see what really happens along…
Pasquale D’Silva on Medium in Starting your career as an Artist on the Internet: Your immediate goal should be getting a good foundation of work in your portfolio. You don’t have clients to report to yet. Learn as much as you can. Experiment. It’s freedom, embrace it. The same should be said for just about anyone doing anything…
Paul Graham in Do Things that Don't Scale: The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. The entire piece by Graham is a must-read for people starting…
Like Pamela Fox, speaking at conferences and meet ups has generally been part of my job description to help spread the word about the product or company that I'm working for. But also like Pamela I never really stopped to think about why I speak and whether or not I get anything out of it. This is what…
Fred Wilson, on _Android and iOS_: But I find myself rooting hard for Apple now. I sense the danger they are in and I don't want either smartphone OS to be so dominant that we lose the level playing field we have now. It's very important for startups, innovation, and an open mobile ecosystem for all. It is…
Related: I'd love to see Windows Phone become the third horse in the smartphone OS race. Marco Arment in Google Blindness: Developers aren’t fools. We aren’t swayed by charismatic figureheads who try to convince us to develop for their platforms. The formula is quite simple. We’ll develop for a platform if: We use it. A lot of other…
Bret Victor: The Future of Programming is a presentation he did for Dropbox's DBX conference earlier in July. Victor goes back-in-time to 1973 to give his presentation on what the future of programming could be. A perfect illustration for all of us that work on computers to know that we simply have not figured everything out yet. The…
I'm always on the lookout for new ways to deal with my ever-growing library of photos. It used to be that every time I upgraded my camera I had to worry about losing more and more space with each photo I captured. Each update to my camera created larger and larger filesizes making it very difficult for my…
Two months ago to-the-day I wrote about turning off Push Notifications on my phone, tablet and laptop. In this area I'm still doing really, really well. I recommend this for anyone. I still do not have any applications that send me any notifications. Only if my wife calls me does my phone even ring. And when not in silent…