Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The iPad Luddites
In the end, progress doesn't care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology's inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.
ongoing by Tim Bray · Memory Matters
If memory-starved tablets become ubiquitous, we’re looking at a future in which there are “normal” computers, and then “special” computers for creative people.
Boing Boing: iPhone - the roach motel business model
It's ironic that a company whose name is synonymous with "Switch" has built its entire product strategy around lock-in. The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can't check out.
Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) - Boing Boing
The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » cd-roms and ipads
We’re not in the age of CD-ROMs now. Our price-points are all over the shop, and a sealed environment like the iPad permits all kinds of unnatural pricing inversions. We’ll pay more for a ringtone than a full MP3. We pay $10 for a README file on our Amazon Kindle, and a dollar for a pocket application that plays farts.
Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the long road to the iPad. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
Now in 2010, the iPad takes the same ideas to their logical extreme. It is a beautiful and nearly perfect machine. It is also Jobs' final triumph, the final step in Apple's evolution away from Wozniak and toward a closed model.
Context Switches are Bad, but Stack Traces are Worse
Categorically that the most expensive question a manager can ask is "What are you working on?"
Interuserface | Don’t press any key to continue
Imagine clicking “send” for an email message and watching your message appear in a brief queue. Perhaps it counts down about ten seconds before sending, more than enough time to cancel an erroneous send, but little enough time in the scope of e-mail communication as to not interfere with normal usage.
Learning from the iPhone's failure as a gaming platform: gem-session.com blog
If we want mobile applications to stay around as a sustainable business, we need to be more honest about the strengths and weaknesses of a touchscreen UI, rather than salivating about an imaginary realm of unnamed possibilities.
privacy-related changes coming to CSS :visited ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
We’re making changes to how :visited works in Firefox. We’re not sure what release this will be part of yet and the fixes are still making their way through code review, but we wanted to give a heads up to people as soon as we understood how we wanted to approach fixing this.
CSS Speech Bubble · David DeSandro
Speech bubble icons have become synonymous with comments. When creating yet another one for a standard comment link, it occurred to me that there might be a way to make the icon without ever opening up an image editor. It could all be done with CSS
Voodoo Doll to Kill Internet Explorer | Walyou
The hatred of the users for the Internet Explorer browser has reached such a height that now a Voodoo Doll has been made to help show one’s anger for this browser out on this doll.
jsPlumb demo
jsPlumb can visually connect elements together with curved (or straight) lines. The demo has examples of Bezier curves and straight lines.
Data, Context, and Interaction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Data, Context and Interaction (DCI) is a paradigm used in computer programming. The pattern separates the domain model (Data) from Use cases (Context) and Roles that objects play (Interaction). DCI is complementary to MVC. MVC as a pattern language is still used to separate the data and its processing from presentation.
I Can't Wait for NoSQL to Die - Ted Dziuba
They don't teach you this in college, but the fundamental theorem of the software industry is the idea that everything needs to be rewritten all the time. As a corollary, web startup engineers believe that there is no problem but scalability, and architecture is its solution. And thus, the NoSQL movement was born.
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library
Comprehensive, yet simple, stealthy and fast. Datejs has passed all trials and is ready to strike. Datejs doesn’t just parse strings, it slices them cleanly in two.
Kickstarter
KICKSTARTER IS A FUNDING PLATFORM FOR ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, FILMMAKERS, MUSICIANS, JOURNALISTS, INVENTORS, EXPLORERS
LukeW | "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
A while ago, I came across a unique registration form built by Jeremy Keith for his audio sharing site, Huffduffer. Though it asked people the same questions found in typical sign-up forms, the Huffduffer registration form did so in a narrative format. It presented input fields to people as blanks within sentences (Mad Libs-style, if you will).
Indeterminate Radio Buttons | CSS-Tricks
The most popular option should be checked. If choosing nothing is valid, then a radio group isn’t a good fit because the user cannot easily revert the group to its indeterminate state
Gamasutra - News - GDC: Hecker's Nightmare Scenario - A Future Of Rewarding Players For Dull Tasks
The reason this "nightmare scenario" is a genuine concern is because people are clearly perfectly willing to engage in repetitive dull tasks if they are extrinsically rewarded, even if their appreciation for the play itself is diminished.
Jason Calacanis vs. David Heinemeier Hansson on This Week in Startups - (37signals)
An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of This Week in Startups.