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
Paul Adams of Intercom on Medium: In the last year I’ve reviewed a lot of product design work from job applicants and I’ve noticed a worrying pattern. Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is often more aligned…
Bret Victor: We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that‘s worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that‘s led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history? See also,…
Matt Haughey on Medium: After seeing the first couple panoselfies Colin made, I became immediately enamored with the idea. You can see #panoselfies are picking up a bit.
I saw a discussion on Twitter while laying in bed last night. You can catch up right here. Essentially, it asks… why is Woo Commerce, which has a larger install base, valued so much lower than Shopify by the public market? A bit of background; Woo Themes, the company that built and maintains the Woo Commerce WordPress plugin,…
Facebook’s Instant Articles platform has us web people discussing the speed at which our pages load. It is excellent to see this discussion happening. Here are a few of my favorite tidbits from a few of the pieces I have read recently: Mark Llobrera on A List Apart: That’s my biggest takeaway from Instant Articles: we (designers and our…
A little over a week ago I wrote: They aren’t new. You can find them if you dig. But they aren’t “a thing” and I think they should be. I was talking about panoselfies. Well, we’re getting somewhere with this new way of taking a selfie and I’m glad to report a few bits of the hooplah here….
Joe Betz at Coursera: We’d like to try a bit of an experiment here at Coursera. Instead of building a project internally and waiting until we think it’s fully polished to open source it, we’re going to “throw it over the wall” before we’ve even gotten going on the coding. We did the same thing with Unmark and we…
In February Canalys estimated that there have been 720,000 Android Wear watches sold. Pretty good, I’d think, for a watch. Any watch maker would likely be proud of those numbers. Estimates for Apple Watch sales are all over the map. But recently KGI Research adjusted their figures and estimated that Apple will sell under 15 million Apple Watches…
Alex King: I’m working on a web app now and it recently struck me how much more complicated things have become. I agree. While some of the tools we’ve added onto the process of building for the web have some incredible value — we’ve made the barrier to entry much, much higher than it has ever been to…
They aren’t new. You can find them if you dig. But they aren’t “a thing” and I think they should be. So, yesterday I created a Flickr group called Panoselfies. I recommend giving it a try. How: Put your phone on pano mode Point it just over your right shoulder Slowly rotate your wrist as the phone takes the…
A few images from the weekend.
A little something new. Another try at daily blogging. This is what I looked at most of the day. We’re putting in a fair bit of work on some new things for Barley this week and I’m pretty excited to get them out the door. Had lunch at Backyard Ale House and managed to stick to salad. Go…
Me, on Twitter early this morning from bed: Startup culture is such that the word unicorn is used to describe a successful business. Imagine if the culture fostered success more often. Then, Fred Wilson on his blog this morning: I hate the word unicorn. It’s using fantasy to describe something very much reality. But I don’t want to…
Casey Liss on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code: All told, Code may or may not be for you, but it’s working out really nicely for me so far. I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I too have been using Code as my primary editor since it debuted at Build. I’m enjoying it. It seems much nicer than Atom…
Cade Metz for Wired on Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 to be on a billion devices and for applications from Android, iOS, and Windows all running on them “easily”: But this kind of thing is never as easy as it seems. “I’m skeptical of anything that pretends to be the magic bullet,” says one coder, who requested anonymity because…
Ed Bott, of the Ed Bott Report, reporting on ZDNet that Microsoft is shooting Windows Media Center in the head: That decision shouldn‘t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium“ editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, shortly after delivering…
Brent Simmons on his blog: But those aren’t my reasons for deleting my tweets. Instead, it’s because Twitter is a blogging (or micro-blogging, really) service that doesn’t meet my requirements […] Follow the link to read the rest of the post. This is very tempting. Ever since Jeremy Keith went Indie Web with his “notes” (read: tweets) I’ve been…
If you follow me on Twitter you can probably tell that for the past 48 hours my brain is swirling around Microsoft’s Build conference and keynote. In a lot of ways my brain is swirling in the same way that it did in 2002 when I saw Steve Jobs debut the 17” iMac. This was the moment I…
I just finished watching Microsoft’s Build Keynote from yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, and understand developer jargon, I recommend you watch it. My takeaways: Windows is about to get a lot more applications Office is now as big a platform for MSFT as Windows is Visual Studio Code is very good (I’ve been using it all day)…
Web people,
Jeffery Zeldman on whether or not Medium is a death knell of the open web: You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of the Enter button….
Aaron Draplin on the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s logo: Knee-jerk reactions. Cheap comparisons. Lazy remixes. Predictable reactions. So it goes. Unfortunately this is how it goes. A woman runs for President of the United States and the biggest news to come out of it is her choice of logo. I think people just like to tee off on…
What are Deep Links? Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a piece on Backchannel on Medium about Deep Links. He wrote: Deep linking means to bore a wormhole-tunnel that hops you directly from a specific spot in one app to a spot in another, no side trip to a browser or a home screen needed. You get it. If you…
For the past several years our industry, the tech industry, has been pulling designers that work within it down the stack — so to speak — towards engineering. They’ve drilled into their heads that they need to learn to code or, at the very least, to be able to create functional prototypes of their designs so that they can…