Excellent, new print periodical:
Three beautiful, illustrated hardbound books a year, each holding six articles and six personal lessons that use the maturing of the discipline of web design as a starting point for deeper explorations of our work and who we are as designers.
Publishing is not dead, and neither is print. But I think we're experiencing a changing of the guard.
See another collection here, and the whole archive, too.
(via kottke)
Max Temkin:
The same is true of the company he made. Steve’s beliefs are in Apple’s bone marrow, and Apple is a company with radically human values. Steve Jobs’ Apple is a progressive, egalitarian company that believes in making technology both available to and usable by everyone. This isn’t just a business strategy for Apple, it’s a philosophy. Jobs went around saying things like, “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
James Montgomerie:
I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.
Former Visual Studio developer Chris Granger:
Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text?
Even if this idea doesn't seem feasible, just the thought of real innovation in this space is exciting.
The video starts off simple and then quickly makes your brain overflow.
(see also)
If you're the kind of person who takes an interest in topics Paul Graham writes about, chances are you've already read this. But if it's been sitting in your to-read box for too long due to its length, I'm giving it a good nod it's worth your time. Two related bits which really stuck out to me:
This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?
And:
One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations. And I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.
These are both really interesting. Try to think of the difference between today and 100 years ago, and project that to 100 years from now and today.
A great find by Maria Popova. Russell:
The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
And these are just the first three!
We exist as parts in a grand system: the Universe, a continuum which has been in motion for billions of years. We exist as but the briefest of instants in the grand cosmic scale of this continuum.
Though all of us unique, we share so much from our close progenitors. We are all the same. We are skin and bone and blood. We bleed and cry and laugh, though some of us have forgotten how.
In Carl Sagan's stirring, enchanting words,
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us — but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.
I'm envious of those palimpsestic humans who come after me, of those who will experience the benefits of the future. They will be better than us, but they also depend on us. Though we exist so briefly in this continuum, we are the ones making the world in which they will live.
Paul Miller:
Now I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I'm so "adept" at the internet that I've found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I'm pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn't belong.
The extremely well-produced video in the article is also worth a viewing.
Time away from the internet is a very good thing.
(See also the fantastic album linked in the post)
Dan Provost:
I’m with Marco on this one, although I do think a bump in screen size would be nice. I don’t think increasing the height of the screen, while preserving the width, is the right way to go about it though. Rather, I think Apple should keep the 3:2 aspect ratio and increase the physical size until it reaches the 300dpi retina boiling point, maintaining the 960x640 pixel count.
Yes, but why? Why would Apple make a bigger screen. Apple can do lots of things, but they won't unless they have a good reason. I've yet to hear a good reason for this.
The idea which sparked the previously linked TED Talk, in HTML:
The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.
If you don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, shame on you.
For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
It's a brilliant video. It's interesting to see how his thoughts seem to jump around like links on a page.
Absolutely essential reading if you're doing any kind of progressive-enhancement on the Web today. Tim Kadlec:
A little while back, I mentioned I was doing some research for the book about how images are downloaded when media queries are involved. To help with that, I wrote up some automated tests where Javascript could determine whether or not the image was requested and the results could be collected by Browserscope for review. I posted some initial findings, but I think I’ve got enough data now to be able to go into a bit more detail.
The cartridge contains a random actual game. What a beautiful and wonderful idea.
Can't tell if I've gone through this or am currently still going through it.
Jason Kottke's got the best synthesis about the Instagram+Facebook deal. It's well worth a read.
Great editorial by @zpower on the Verge:
Last year I wrote an editorial, The universal status indicator, in which I bemoaned the internet's inability to rally around a standard for communicating presence and contact information. It got extraordinarily positive reaction — there's a real need here. And it turns out that Twitter is uniquely positioned to strike: it already has the universally-understood ID format under its belt. People have heard of it; you're not asking for the moon by starting at square one and requiring people to sign up for yet another service that won't be of any benefit without massive buy-in, the classic chicken-and-egg problem for online startups. And unlike every other service on the market — Facebook and IM services included — Twitter has tight integration with every mobile platform that matters. This is deeply critical; the hooks are already there in iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone.
If you want to start learning Objective-C on a Windows computer, you’ve come to the right place. This tutorial will show you how to install a compiler and the necessary frameworks to start hacking Objective-C on Windows today.
Using clang gives you goodies like ARC. I haven't tried this myself, so I can't comment on what the GNUstep libraries are like (that is, how much they've kept up to date with modern Cocoa), but if you've ever wanted to try Objective C on Windows, here's how you can get started.
(See also the followup post on compiling with Block objects, too.)
Absolutely stunning photos of an early NASA space program.
Let’s hope you’re not reading this column while munching on a chicken sandwich.
That’s because my topic today is a pair of new scientific studies suggesting that poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic.
Odi Kosmatos on the rumoured littler iPad:
So a 7″ tablet wouldn’t be an “iPad mini”, it would actually be more like an “iPod maxi”. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. A 7″ or 7.85″ tablet still has to have a clear purpose. To be able to do something far better than the smaller devices (iPod touch and iPhone) and far better than larger devices (the iPads).
The answer is: reading, and long “consumption” sessions. Reading is something that is not comfortably done on an iPad, compared to a dedicated e-reader like a Kindle. That’s because it is relatively very heavy (over 600 grams), and too large. The new iPad is even heavier. You can’t hold these up comfortably. They are also rather expensive, starting at $400, compared to a dedicated e-reader. That’s why my friends with iPads that like reading also bought and use a Kindle. Reading is also cumbersome on an iPod and iPhone, because they are just too cramped and tiny. For comfortable reading, you need a device that’s not more than 400 grams (determined by reading reviews of various e-readers), with a long lasting battery, a screen more tailored to reading than other iOS devices, and it has to be more affordable than an iPad.
At that kind of size and resolution, it's going to be really crisp, but ultimately offer no additional "screen real-estate". iPhone 4-sized retina displays are already about as detailed as you could want them. The most likely scenario would be iPod touch goes away, as its sales numbers are dwindling, and this thing takes its place.
I still don't buy it. All these rumours still feel like they're begging the question of this being an actual problem. I enjoy reading on my iOS devices, but I imagine that's much more of an edge case than to warrant needing another dedicated device. You know the first thing people will do with it is install Fat Angry Birds on it.
COLON "Hollywood is officially out of ideas"
Coding Style seems a perennial topic among computer program writers, often leading to fierce debates on one style or another. These style preferences can differ immensely, and it seems everybody has their own take on what's good style.
Over the past few years, I've developed my own, internalized Style Guide for iOS and Mac Cocoa development, and recently I decided to formalize these rules into an excruciatingly detailed guide. I present The Elements of Programmatic Style. The guide details all of my Objective C style and idioms, from naming conventions to whitespace to project settings and everything in between.
As you read through it, you may very well disagree with some of the guidelines I've laid out. In fact, I hope this is the case. This guide is for me and the people I work with professionally, and it may not apply entirely to you. But it's a starting point, and a great document to reference as a starting point for discussion among my contemporaries. Most of this document is even up for debate, as the language evolves, so too will this document. Objective C is currently in a mutant state.
The one aspect of the document not up for change, and this is the root of much debate, are the guidelines for whitespace. My code keeps bare lines between logical chunks of code, and extra (two minimum) between methods or function definitions. Whitespace is free, but more importantly, it greatly affects readability of code. When I see two bare lines, I know this indicates a logical change in the code.
It goes beyond just grouping chunks together or pure aesthetics. Vertical rhythm is essential for legibility (you'll notice this page even pays particular attention to the line spacing of textual and bare lines). This principle has been in use for centuries, and it's all in the name of readability. Our code deserves to be just as readable, if not more, than any other normal text. If you're interested in the subject, I'd highly recommend both this book and this adaptation of it for the web (which appears down for the moment…hmm).
Having a style guide, whether internalized or explicitly documented is important. Whatever your opinion is over white space or the place of a brace, we can all agree consistency trumps all. If you're considering creating your written style document, feel free to use mine as a starting point. Just be sure to tell me how yours differs!
Great journalism by Frank Cifaldi:
Nintendo has an internal launch date for both the NES and Super Mario Bros.: October 18, 1985. For most that would be the end of it: we have an official source stating an exact date, end of story. But I want to know where that date came from, and what it actually means. Besides, Nintendo has been wrong about its own history before.
Blaine Harden, in a horrific story of a man born in an North Korean prison camp and his escape:
In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them.
The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea's labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining camps are "complete control districts" where "irredeemables" are worked to death.
This story is not for the faint of heart.
It's sometimes embarrassing to be a human, to know this sort of thing still exists in our world, that left unchecked, this is what humans do to each other. I think we're very much still in the Dark Ages.
Bezos:
Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration. A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind's mission to the moon?
It's amazing and fantastic when the rich use their wealth for discovery and curiosity.
Slides from my totally fun "Modern Cocoa" talk last week at Ottawa Cocoaheads. You really had to be there.
Chilling.
Stephen Hackett on Daring Fireball style Linked Lists:
Currently, everything on 512 Pixels would be considered a “post” on a DF-style blog. That is, that the headline goes to the permalink for the post itself, not to the linked content.
The most common criticism of this set up is that it seems like I’m double-dipping for page views. (Granted, I’ve gotten a whole two emails about this in 4 years.)
I don’t see this as a viable argument. If you want to go straight to another website that I’ve linked to, doing so is as simple as clicking the link in your RSS reader of choice. No one ever has to view my actual site to get to content I’m linking to. Since I offer all of my content as full-length posts in RSS, no one is getting left out.
The "Linked List" style is the exact same style my website has used since the beginning: most things I post here are links to interesting things I find on the web, and the title for each post is actually a direct link to the page in question, instead of a link to my post about the link. This way, the links are always in a consistent place and my readers never have to hunt around in the body text. Simple.
Stephen's website follows a more classic style of having the linked article referenced in his post, with his headline linking to his post about the link. It's a subtle difference, and he recently polled his readers about switching styles. With the classic style, the website link is somewhere in the body text, but it's in a different place every time. For the record, I don't think Stephen is double dipping.
Even though I prefer the Linked List style, and actually find myself cursing at 512 Pixels for his choice of link style from time to time, I'm glad Stephen is sticking to his guns. It's his website and it's his content and he's sticking with what he believes is best. I think it's admirable to do so in spite of what a survey might tell you is best.