“The future is this place at a different time.
Bruce Sterling”
(From The Future (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist) « Der Feuilletonist.)
Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.
“A wise man once said ‘We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.’ With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around.
Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate.”
(From Welcome - Ommwriter.)
“Grids have been in use long before graphic design became a discipline. During the 13th– and 14th-centuries, scribes used the Villard Diagram to organize their handwritten manuscripts. In the 15th-century, Gutenberg and others divided their pages using the Van de Graaf canon.
The use of a grid is not a trend, it’s a fundamental skill that designers should possess. Grids have been around a very long time and are an important part of the design process.”
(From Myths & Misconceptions About Grid Systems • Blog Archive • AisleOne.)
“MacBook never sounded better.
BassJump makes those great sounding, built-in MacBook speakers sound even better by adding mid- and low-frequencies through one well-designed, travel-sized subwoofer. It’s a smart, simple way to dramatically improve the sound of your MacBook without cluttering up your workspace with a clunky set of replacement speakers and cables. Once the BassJump software is installed, simply connect one single USB cable, launch iTunes and enjoy the new and improved sound of your MacBook, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.”
Long but good:
“I no longer cringe with guilt when I come across a 1000+ word anything that I know I want to read — but which I also know I have no time to read right now. So, I hit a button, and I forget about it. Now — especially combined with Marco and Nostrich’s not-missable Give Me Something to Read — I have no excuse not to lose myself in longer pieces of non-fiction whenever the opportunity presents itself.”
“‘Less is more.’ – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
‘More is more.’ – David Tudor
‘Less is less.’ – Jason Fried”
(From ❧ The Web Mind of Sebastian Waters - “Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.)
That would be cool (they are actually building a working version, just for jailbroken iPhones, though):
“I’d have loved for this post to be the introduction of our latest iPhone application. An application that introduces a new default optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you. We’ll all have to keep dreaming for the time being. Unless you’re willing to jailbreak your phone it simply isn’t possible to develop and implement this type of hostile UI takeover using the iPhone SDK.”
“[…] there ARE other typefaces and one of them is helvetica […]”
(From the ragbag - arial & helvetica
on friday, i hosted a screening….)
“We, the undersigned, wish to declare our support for the direction in which the HTML5 specification is heading. […]
HTML5 is not perfect in our estimation, not that any markup language could be. In particular, we have significant concerns about some aspects of the specification. But we are optimistic that the official channels provided by the working group will offer a sufficient and fair hearing of our concerns.”
(From HTML5 Super Friends.)
Great rules:
Software
- Use as little software as possible.
- Use software that does one thing well.
- Do not use software that does many things poorly.
- Do not use software that must sync over the internet to function.
- Do not use web applications that should be desktop applications.
- Do not use desktop applications that should be web applications.
- Do not use software that isn’t made specifically for your operating system. (You’ll know it when you see it because it won’t look right or work correctly.)
- Do not run beta software unless you know how to submit a bug report and are eager to do so.
- Use a plain text editor that you know well. Not a word processor, a plain text editor.
- Do not use your text editor for tasks other than editing text.
- Use a password manager. You shouldn’t know any of your passwords save the one to your primary email account and the one to your password manager.
- Do not use software that’s unmaintained.
- Pay for software that’s worth paying for, but only after evaluating it for no less than two weeks.
- Thoroughly delete all traces of software that you no longer use.
Hardware
- Do not buy a desktop computer unless your daily computing needs include video/audio editing, 3D rendering, or some other hugely processor-intensive computing task. Buy a portable computer instead.
- Do not use your phone/smartphone/PDA/UMPC for tasks that would be more comfortably and effectively accomplished on a full-fledged computer.
- Use a Mac for personal computing.
- Use Linux or BSD on commodity hardware for server computing.
- Do not use anything other than a Mac at home and Linux/BSD on the server.
- The only peripheral you absolutely need is a hard disk or network drive to put backups on.
- Buy as large an external display as you can afford if you’ll be working on the computer for more than three hours at a time.
- Use hosted services in lieu of hosting on your own hardware (or virtual hardware) for all but the most custom applications.
File Formats
- Keep as much as possible in plain text. Not Word or Pages documents, plain text.
- For tasks that plain text doesn’t fit, store documents in an open standard file format if possible.
- Do not buy digital media crippled by rights restriction technologies unless your intention is to rent the content for a limited period of time.
These are my rules and they make me happy. I hope they make you happy too. If you have computing rules of your own that make you happy, I encourage you to publish them.