Fuelling the iPad-as-Camera Bandwagon
Shadoe Huard, on his personal blog: I‘m officially coming out in favour of iPads as cameras. Brave man. Loosely related: Craig Mod’s piece in The New Yorker, and Apple’s new iPad ad.
Blog
Longer-form posts and essays.
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Brett Terpstra goes indie
No one can say his name correctly, but Brett Terpstra has pumped out a slew of amazing projects over the years — most of which were offered for free. Brett has decided to part ways with Aol Tech and strike out on his own. Now is the time to open your wallet and show your appreciation for any…
Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo News Digest is a new app from Yahoo in collaboration with the team behind Summly, which Yahoo purchased last year, to show you a digest of the day’s news stories twice a day. It is excellent. Summarization is only one part. Tweets, graphs, videos, etc. round out a great way to look at a news story. The…
Writing it down
Brian Doll, on his personal blog: Today, while technology has seeped into every cranny of our personal and professional lives, when a thought comes to me, when I want to remember something now, when I need to draw that sketch of an idea, or make yet another list of lists, writing it down in a Field Notes notebook…
Writing from home
Me, last night on Twitter: I know @jkottke said blogs were dead. I know I said they were “just sleeping”. It might be Jason’s fault, but I think they’re on the upswing. Jeremy Keith has noticed too: I’m not saying that this is a trend (the sample size is far too small to draw any general conclusions), but…
Will we lose the web?
Cory Doctorow, on his personal blog, is worried we’ll lose the web this year: Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. It is worrisome. “They” have always ruined everything. We know we can’t have anything nice. And for the last several decades we’ve had the Internet all to…
What blogging was
Dave Weinberger, who started blogging even before me, writes about What blogging was. Your blogroll was a list of links to the bloggers you read and engaged with. It was a way of sending people away from your site into the care of someone else who would offer up her own blogroll. Blogrolls were an early social network….
The Indie Ocean
Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the potential for indie devs to up their game. My finger-to-the-wind says that apps and services aiming for mainstream consumer appeal, which were already impossibly hard, are only going to get harder in the coming years. There’s too much noise, and attention is fleeting. Any company that hasn’t started by now…
Source Code in TV and Films
If you're even remotely geeky you'll have noticed countless instances of code showing up in television shows and movies. And, usually, you can see that the code is total junk. In comes this tumblog which showcases code in TV and films and goes the extra mile to detail what the code is actually designed to do.
Some non-tech podcasts I’ve enjoyed lately
I think when some of us hear the word podcast we immediately think of those that deal with technology or those in which a few tech nerds sit around and chat about tech-related topics. But podcasts are so much more than tech. Though they’ve been around a little while they are still a revolution. They are incredible. They…
Software in 2014
Tim Bray on the state of Software in 2014. I agree with him on many things including: Browsers suck too. […] JavaScript is horrible. […] CSS sucks too. […] /via John “I can use whatever extension for Markdown I want” Gruber.
Hyperrealistic pastel drawings of icebergs by Zaria Forman
These works by Zaria Forman are simply amazing. /via Marco Suarez on Twitter.
How to turn off Google‘s new Gmail option that allows strangers to send you emails
Yesterday The Verge revealed that Google “made it really easy for strangers to email you”. Google being Google. No one can out-Google Google. Anyway, TUAW shows how to turn it off.
Comments are not dead
Tina Roth Eisenberg on Twitter: Comments are not dead. She’s right, of course. However, I don’t have comments on my blog for the following reasons. I do not want to manage them I’d much rather people respond via their own blog, Twitter or email I do not want to manage them This topic will simply never go away…
Blogging matters
Dave Winer, on why comments on a blog post turned bad: What bloggers are guilty of — always — is telling their story imperfectly. It's the imperfections that make it interesting, and human — and worth it. I have an opinion on many things. Typically I have a rather strong opinion on many things. And I've tried to…
Jelly
Biz Stone and Ben Finkel have launched Jelly. Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. In short, if you're wondering about something and have a question you can use Jelly to ask those in your extended social network to find the answer rather than searching for it yourself via…
iOS 7 restarts
MG Siegler laments in I Got Bugs: At least two times a day now, my devices running iOS 7 will simply cease to function and restart themselves. Ditto. iOS 7 and Mavericks, although huge steps in what I feel will ultimately be the right direction for both platforms, are the buggiest versions of Apple software I've used in…
\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by…
Changes to Evernote, spurred by a blog post
Jason Kincaid wrote, on his personal blog, Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant. The post met with some very encouraging responses… Two days ago I published Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant, recounting the ongoing issues I’ve had with the service (and, more recently, serious incidents of data loss). The response has been staggering: over a hundred comments on my post, hundreds more on Hacker News,…
re/code
The team behind AllThingsD, a property of the Wall Street Journal, has just launched "a new tech and media news, reviews and analysis site" re/code. And it seems that it will just be the beginning of much more to come. We are thrilled to announce that we are forming our own new and independent media company, Revere Digital,…
The anatomy of Smaug
Great post going over the anatomy of Smaug. It seems Smaug changed from one release to another. Keen eyes. /via Michael Heilemann on Twitter.
Inspecting view hierarchies of iOS apps
This is far too geeky and cool not to link to. Peter Steinberger has cleverly used an iOS 7 jailbreak loophole to see the view hierarchies of other iOS applications. He explains why: Why? Because it’s fun, and it can inspire you to solve things differently. Studying the view hierarchy of complex apps can be quite revealing and…
Wil Shipley describes John Carmack’s source code
Wil Shipley, in a story about porting Doom to NeXT, describes John Carmack's code: Don't take this to mean his code was spaghetti—it was actually some of the easiest-to-understand code I've ever worked with. It has an almost indescribable quality of "obviousness." Like, you know when a really good teacher explains something, it seems obvious? That's what his…
Tech journalists have no enthusiasm
Or, at least according to John Gruber many don't. There’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields. Sports, movies, cars, wristwatches, cameras, food — writers who cover these fields tend to celebrate, to relish, the best their fields have to offer. Technology, on the other hand, seems to attract enthusiasts with…