January 2010
10 posts
Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh
(via frijole)
A poem by beat poet Gary Snyder, as published in today’s New York Times:
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon, Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me, Because it is poky when cold, Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents, Because it is flighty, Because my mind flies into it through my fingers, Because...
Indie Relief
Birdfeed, the Twitter client Neven and I made, is participating in Indie Relief, a great project Justin Williams and Garrett Murray put together to raise money for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. All sales for participating applications on January 20, 2010 will be donated to a charity doing work in Haiti (in Birdfeed’s case, Doctors Without Borders). There are a lot of fantastic developers...
“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a...”
– Brian Eno (via Eric Case)
“It may have been a fine cookie. But, since no single person played a central...”
– Malcolm Gladwell: The Bakeoff
For years now, whenever the subject of open source product design has come up in conversation, I’ve mentioned this 2005 Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece about Steve Gundrum, a tech-minded Silicon Valley baker who decided to pit three software development...
“Zelda is brilliant in its minimalism combined with depth. And it was all...”
– Adam Mathes: What is the greatest video game ever made?
It’s funny how a lot of us who grew up playing 8 bit games like Zelda now look at today’s graphical powerhouses the way adults who grew up reading books looked at TV: “It was so much more fun when you had to use your...
“The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who...”
– Guy English: Software Sea Change
Guy English’s thoughts on what he calls “Pop Software” mirror a lot of my own recent thoughts about the iPhone App Store, and why, in so many cases, the qualities that make people successful Mac developers are unhelpful (and possibly even...
“There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy...”
– Plan 9 from Bell Labs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via socmoth)