Seth Godin:
The best new media (like blogs and possibly twitter) open doors to people who didn’t used to have a voice. The worst ones (like blogs and possibly twitter) merely create new venues for scams and senseless yelling.
Linked
Link Posts
Feltron’s CNN Report →
Speaking of good information design, check out this examination of CNN.com’s entire history of daily web stats (13 years worth!).
What Makes Good Information Design →
Is it interesting, easy, beautiful, and true?
Also, Chris Bowler’s Monday’s Top 5: Hidden Prefs →
Numbers 1, 2, and 5 for me.
Chris Bowler’s New Office Setup →
Gotta love guys that geek out over building a new cave.
“The Greatest Story on Earth Deserves the Greatest Stage on Earth” →
Sean Sperte’s deck from a talk at Northwest University about his Church, the Internet, and web standards.
Longbrake’s San Francisco Pics →
“Random, but it’s cool”
Fixing a Little Annoyance in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app →
Remove the name and brackets which accompany email addresses when copying them.
“Macintosh Shapes Up a Winner” →
Speaking of the past and the LA Times, check out Lawrence J. Magida’s 1984 review of the Original Macintosh 128K.
Once you’ve set up your machine, you insert the main system disk, turn on the power, and in a minute you are presented with the introductory screen. Apple calls it your “desk top”. What you see on your screen looks a lot like what you might find on a desk. Instead of just a blinking cursor you see pictures, called icons, that graphically represent the things you can do with the computer.
Phil’s Favorite iPhone Photography Apps →
Not all iPhone photo-processing apps are created equal:
After trying these out and putting them through their paces, I found myself getting frustrated with the fact that these apps are similar enough to want to only use one, but different enough in the style of photos they produce that it’s hard to decide which one to use in any given time.
A Newspaper Serves Its Community →
Perusing the PBS video archives I came across this old, 13-minute documentary of the writing, editing, typesetting, printing, and delivery of the LA Times.
And boy has advertising changed since this video was made. I’m not too sure how many people today would buy a clothes dryer because the ad showed a smiling sun on the inside.
Tweetie 2.0 →
What Loren has done in his design of Tweetie 2 is similar to what many of the best authors do in their writing. Some authors lay out plainly points 1, 2, 3, and 4, so we, the readers, are sure to be with them when they reach the height of point 5.
But, in my estimation, only the best writers have the skill to skip 2 and 4 while still bringing us to 5 — their prose alludes to the missing pockets of plot just right so that we figure it out on our own. And this they do without us realizing, because though we were actually led by the writer, we feel like smarter readers.
It is in this regard that software developers are not unlike writers. But instead of a plot they have a feature set, and instead of prose, a UI. The developer can lay out the whole of their feature set before the user with menus, sub-menus, and more. Or they can hide pieces of it hoping that each feature will be discovered, but knowing that perhaps they won’t.
But ignorance can still be bliss, because in my book a simple, well-written application that delights is far better than a feature-rich one which overwhelms. And this is why Tweetie 2 is not just my favorite Twitter application on any platform, period, it may also just be my favorite iPhone app.
Adventures in Rural Internet Access →
Chris Bowler is on a quest to live off the land, do more gardening, get some chickens, and raise a goat. All while having access to fast, affordable internet.
Simplenote Restyled →
Now here’s a good-looking interface for Simplenote. And it’s compact. So if you use Simplenote in Fluid as an SSB it makes for a minimal footprint.