dilbert.com
The way my brain is wired I always want to jump right into a task before I hunt for an app. I often accidently choose my text messaging icon instead of email, cancel the texting app, open email, choose the addressee box, type addressee, choose subject, and so on. The process feels inefficient and it bugs me every time. I want to start working immediately, while a thought is fresh in my mind. Only after I have done my work do I want the phone to deduce which app I intended.
baronessmusic.com
On August 15th, just before 11 am, Baroness and our crew were involved in a very bad crash while on tour. The brakes in our bus failed completely, on a notoriously dangerous, incredibly steep (12% grade) hill in Monkton Combe, UK, on our way from a show Bristol to another show in Southampton. Our bus went entirely out of control, and we had no choice other than hitting a perpendicular guardrail going about 50 mph at the bottom of the hill. The guard rail and the 20 or 30 trees we ploughed through snapped like matchsticks as we went fully airborne and fell down more than 30 feet off of a viaduct to the ground below.
Whoa!
joelonsoftware.com
It’s hard to believe that something as trivial as taking out the trash is impacted by software, but it is, thanks to a flashlight app I installed on my smartphone. So many aspects of modern life are affected by software. You couldn’t eat a pineapple if there wasn’t software controlling delivery logistics, in the jet airplane that delivered it, and in the supermarket cash registers. Pay for that pineapple with a credit card and you’ve probably caused millions of lines of code to execute somewhere.
Software is everywhere.
Exciting times.
theatlantic.com
The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google’s maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human.
Fascinating read.
This following bit pretty much describes the biggest challenge I had - and still have - with NZ Walks.
“So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
arstechnica.com
iOS 6 doesn’t make the iPhone 3GS any slower or more difficult to use than it was before, which should be good news to anyone who keeps theirs around as a secondary or backup phone—indeed, it’s pleasantly surprising how many of the refinements and improvements make their way down to Apple’s oldest-supported piece of iOS hardware.
Helpful article for all the 3GS users -like me - wondering whether to upgrade to iOS6 or not.
dpreview.com
Nice new mirrorless camera from Sony featuring some intelligent hard- and software-designs.
They also introduced the first full-frame digital compact camera.
Exciting.
dpreview.com
Seems like more and more point-and-shoot cameras are getting wireless connectivity and a powerful operating system.
I am not interested in these point-and-shoot cameras per se, but it will be interesting to see when and how these features make it into the enthusiast and pro cameras.
unicornfree.com
Amy Hoy:
Until now, [the students have] always worked for approval, abstracted from results: the question has always been, Is this the answer the teacher wants? or Did the committee like it? — not Is it true? and Did it help the customer?
It’s as if Galileo dropped his ball and feather from the top of the tower and, as they fell, sought to convince his audience by argument instead of simply looking.
This is the way most of us grow up to live, learn, and work. And it’s toxic.
inc.com
Jason Fried:
How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to “mess around” with new ideas? How can we afford not to? We would never have had such a burst of creative energy had we stuck to business as usual.
Bottom line: If you can’t spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you’ll never get the best from them.
dpreview.com
Finally, more sophisticated software is making its way onto cameras. This is going to be huge, I think. When you look at the camera usage stats on Flickr, it’s two smartphones - the iPhone 4 and 4S - that take the two top spots amongst all cameras.
Personally, I think having a full Android OS running on a camera, seems to be too distracting. And - unsurprisingly - battery life is greatly diminished.
But WiFi connectivity, great apps for editing and organisation, plus the ability to upload your photos straight to a website and/or your computer/tablet is a huge win and something I miss with “real” cameras.
daringfireball.net
John Gruber on the Retina MacBook Pro and high-dpi displays:
A revolution in resolution.
culturedcode.com
After two years or so in the making, cloud sync finally comes to my favourite to-do list app.
That’s great news. I will so not miss losing data when accidentally leaving Things running on two Macs at the same time while syncing via Dropbox.
fastcompany.com
Marissa Mayer:
DATA IS APOLITICAL.
“When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they’re always like, ‘Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss.’
Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn’t matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we’re looking at data all the time.
We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things.”
pattern.dk
A nice little web app for your iOS device.