May 2012
17 posts
“When I made Dune, I didn’t have final cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because...”
– David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish
“There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly.”
– There are no small changes | The Contrast Blog (via jericsinger)
Amen.
“Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right...”
– Jeff Atwood, “Please Don’t Learn To Code” (via evan)
I’ve been a bit reluctant to write about it for fear of sounding like an elitist spoilsport, but something has always rubbed me just slightly the wrong way about the current “everyone should learn to program!” meme. One one...
“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does...”
– W.H. Auden (via brysonian)
It’s as if Auden anticipated the genre of “glib startup advice” blogging.
“Tasks are the weeds micromanagers mistake as beautiful flowers in groupware.”
– Adam Mathes
“In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably...”
– Jamie Montgomerie: Apple, Failure, and Perfect Cookies
“When people want a native app, they are asking for an app user experience, which...”
– Ben Sandofsky: Shell Apps and Silver Bullets
Based on my own experience and recent discussions with many of my peers, I think this is a very under appreciated point right now in the startup world. Many web-centric managers and engineering organizations are confronting the “essential...
“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never...”
– Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps - Technology Review (via Jason Kottke)
This is precisely what I’ve been saying for awhile now (see my interview with Pixel Union and my SXSW panel for examples). It seems insane to me that publishers today feel compelled to run complex native development...
“The first thing a leader needs to learn to do is communicate—tell his team where...”
– The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg — New York Magazine
“There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond...”
– Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine (via Michael McCracken)
Algorithmically created goods! The Horse Ebooks of Fashion! The Spam-ternet of Things! Paging New Aesthetic!
“My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are...”
– John Carmack: Functional Programming in C++ (via Phillip Bowden)
This is the best, most pragmatic overview of functional programming I’ve ever seen. I’m accustomed to thinking of functional programming as a somewhat idealistic, neckbeard-ey thing, but this makes me realize I’ve...
“But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a...”
– Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs’ Best Years | Fast Company (via Christopher Bowns)
“…[GMail’s] old interface had colored borders and variations in...”
– GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism « Not The User’s Fault
This nicely sums up what bothers me about the school of UI design that glorifies visual minimalism and denigrates even light skeuomorphism as kitsch (Google’s Honeycomb tablet UI is another great example). While...
“In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the...”
– George Monbiot – The Self-Attribution Fallacy
April 2012
17 posts
How to write an iOS app purely in C - Stack... →
(via Klaas Pieter Annema)
I’m not big on super wonky interview questions, but when I interviewed engineering candidates at Apple, one of the advanced questions I occasionally liked to trot out was about ways to use object oriented techniques in a non-object oriented language like C (if you’re wondering what I was getting at with this, take a look at the OO-like conventions employed...
“In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made...”
– Gender-Reveal Parties and Cultural Despair : The New Yorker (via Rachel Syme)
Things like this increasingly feel to me like plot points in my generation’s version of “Mad Men,” 50 years from now.
“Pebble’s Kickstarter success isn’t an anomaly; that they didn’t raise money...”
– Funding the Internet of Things - Andrew Cove’s posterous (via jericsinger)
This feels a lot closer to how I’d prefer to fund a product than the model that currently prevails in the tech industry.
“Really good software engineers are like great musicians. They have practiced...”
– James Turner, Developer Week in Review: Everyone can program? (via wka)
“What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every...”
– Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)
There you have it: a generalized economic theory of social networks.
“A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When...”
– CEOs and the Candle Problem
I think this kind of short term incentivized thinking affects startups as much as big companies—perhaps even more so.
“Oh to be back in Hollywood, wishing I was back in New York.”
– Director Joe Mankiewicz, sitting at the bar at 21 in the early 1940s (via Rachel Syme)
This kind of sums up how I’m feeling these days.
TechCrunch: Pair Programming Considered Harmful →
(via lucius)
In one of my previous jobs I worked in an environment where pair programming was briefly foisted upon me, and I’ve never been more sure of my absolute distaste for anything in my professional life. While its defenders would undoubtedly allege that this is because I’m an egotistical cowboy coder who simply can’t handle collaboration, my experience was that far from...
“It’s okay to have a few gestures that aren’t easily discoverable, if they are...”
– ignore the code: iPhoto’s Mystery Meat Gestures (via Neven Mrgan)
More evidence of the ill-advised trend (as discussed recently in a great post by Phillip Bowden) toward heavily gesture dependent interfaces on iOS—this time from an Apple-developed app.
“The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a...”
– Clay Shirky - How Will We Read (via bijan)
“Kurt Ling, 48, the CEO and co-founder of Pure LatexBliss, a Georgia-based...”
– Bio as Bible: Managers Imitate Steve Jobs - WSJ.com (via thisistheverge)
As I’ve said before, God save us from the Steve Jobs wannabes.
“The rapacious new corporate ethic was summarized by two phrases: “churn ‘em and...”
– Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com
I’ve been in the tech industry for quite awhile now, and I have yet to see a company with the “90 hours a week and loving it” mentality that actually executes to the level that that imperative would imply. The one exception might be...
“Skilled people without a process will always find a way to get things done....”
– » 28 March 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles @ The Pastry Box Project
March 2012
22 posts
Prior Art for Pull-to-Refresh?
Lately much has been made of Twitter’s patent application for the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism popularized by Loren Brichter’s Twitter client Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone). While I’m no expert on patent law, I thought it might be worth pointing out that Neven Mrgan and I toyed around with the pull-to-refresh concept for our own (now defunct) Twitter client,...
“For now, I miss the grit and grime of New York. It is real and raw, and the...”
– Why Branch Is Moving Back To New York City | PandoDaily
I like this analogy, except for the bit about the disliking the taste. While not everyone is going to love coffee (or New York), if your reaction is a generalized dislike, there’s a good chance you haven’t been to the right...
“I’m not a foodie, I just like what I like,” she says. “Yes, I know, it’s just...”
– The Young Foodie Culture — New York Magazine (via Annie Werner)
I’m glad the rest of the world is catching up to my longstanding distaste for Yelp.
“We’re at the early stages of a massive wave of innovation in the payment...”
– The Credit Card Is The New App Platform - Forbes (via Alex Rainert)
This is something I was always a bit obsessed with about Square. There may eventually be a lot more overlap between Foursquare and Square than you might initially think.
“The look on Milch’s face was intense, and John was pretty upset and he...”
– Nick Nolte Has a Story About David Milch, Michael Mann, and a Baseball Bat — Vulture (via Briana Mowrey)
Nothing makes me feel better about my own creative projects than reading a good tale of moviemaking insanity (see also: “Hearts of Darkness”).
“Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as...”
– Paul Graham: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Or, to use an example I’ve always loved: want to create the iPad? Start with music playing software, use that as the impetus to create a music playing device, then build a touch screen phone based on the music device, and finally a larger...
Tumblin': Buzz Andersen →
My friends at Pixel Union, designers of many excellent Tumblr themes (including the one used on this blog), interviewed me as part of a series about Tumblr users they like. Their questions weren’t exactly softballs, but I enjoyed the opportunity to play armchair designer/economist/sociologist/psychologist.
