The January Reading List
January was very busy, so i didn’t get much reading done unfortunately. Here are some of the pieces that stuck out, in no particular order:
- The Cyborg Ethics of Eating: Tim Maly on the morality of changing our environment vs. changing ourselves. Great piece.
- A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation
- What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York
- Alex Payne on Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms. I tend to agree that cross-platform UI design simply doesn’t work.
- What Good is Wall Street? From the tagline: Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. No surprise there.
- Matt Gemmel reviews the MacBook Air 11″. I haven’t come across a single negative review of the MacBook Air so far.
- Inside the Parliament Square kettle: Laurie Penny reported from the student protests in London last month. Terrifying.
- Reality is Alright: Ian Bogost reviews Jane McGonigal’s new book “Reality is Broken”.
- Jack Monahan argues Against Dilettantism, specifically in game design.
- Asleep and Awake: Tom Armitage ponders the nature of “active” (e.g. iPad) and “passive” (e.g. Kindle) screens.
- I, Reader: Alexander Chee discusses his relationship with ebook readers.
- Few personal year end retrospectives are worth reading (i believe they’re mostly written for oneself anyway), but i rather enjoyed Craig Mod’s: So Long 2010, and Thanks for All the Pageviews.
- Good and Bad Procrastination: Paul Graham on how intelligent and productive people procrastinate – by putting off the small stuff.
- Why Is Eric Schmidt Stepping Down at Google?
- Comic Illustrator Paul Duffield isn’t a big fan of motion comics. Here’s why.
- The Awl presents The Most Emailed ‘New York Times’ Article Ever.
Rands Interviews Marco Arment
Rands interviews Marco Arment of Instapaper fame. Some great development advice:
The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.
This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.
These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.
More great development advice by James Hague: Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program.
It’s extremely difficult to be simultaneously concerned with the end-user experience of whatever it is that you’re building and the architecture of the program that delivers that experience. Maybe impossible. I think the only way to pull it off is to simply not care about the latter. Write comically straightforward code, as if you just learned to program, and go out of your way avoid wearing any kind of software engineering hat–unless what you really want to be is a software engineer, and not the designer of an experience.
The Human API
Beautiful piece by Richard Ziade on the limits of automation and where it leaves us humans:
As I stare at my Twitter stream, I don’t feel like I’m staring at anything more substantial than data. Yes, it’s humans creating bits of information, but it’s humans behaving more like individual APIs than humans behaving like humans. By imposing constraints and reducing the overhead to post to near zero, Twitter tempted us with a whole new way of communicating – and many of us embraced it. As a consumer of Twitter, I find myself staring at that assembly line as product whizzes by. It’s nearly hypnotic and rarely impactful.
Reminded me of this bit in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:
The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each “headline” stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. “Knowing” the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sony’s NGP Introduces Back-of-device Interaction
Sony’s PSP successor, the Next Generation Portable (NGP), includes a multi-touchpad on its rear side. This should make for some interesting new back-of-device interaction techniques and capabilities. I can’t think of any commercial products that have tried this before, but it reminds me of Baudisch’s LucidTouch concept from a few years back.
Print Stuff
This is rather interesting: Guido Tamino invites everyone to use his printer at home and print stuff, then streams the results online. The collected submissions will (probably) be published as a book. (via)
Marshall McLuhan Speaks is a collection of short videos in celebration of the centenary of his birth. (via)
Little Big Details
I love user interface forensics like this analysis of iPhone Mail scrolling behavior, digging deep into some small and easily missed detail of an interface that adds tremendously to the user experience and usability of a product.
Turns out there’s a tumblr called Little Big Details for collecting these interface details. Not all examples are great, but some are. Worth subscribing.
Why 3D doesn’t work and never will
This one’s making the rounds lately – Academy Award-winning film editor Walter Murch details in a letter to Roger Ebert why 3D doesn’t work and never will:
The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.
Which, as far as i understand, at least doesn’t preclude holographic 3D displays from being enjoyable.
Also, even though i agree that 3D cinema sucks most of the time, i’m really looking forward to Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D (a shame we had to wait this long for its release here in Austria).
Facebook Social Authentication
Facebook touts its social authentication feature as an alternative to captchas. They show you photos of one of your friends and you need to name the person in the photos.
Which reminded me of this bit by Tobold from a few weeks back:
Once I came back home from traveling, I found that both Blizzard and Facebook had blocked my accounts for “suspicious activity”, caused by me having logged in from a different IP. Facebook was especially annoying, demanding I identify my “friends” from their photos to be allowed back in. Unfortunately I’m “friends” with 288 people I found via this blog, none of which I ever met in real life, and there are only a handful among them from which I know the face.
The widespread adoption of seemingly small and isolated features like this one could have a significant effect on long term usage patterns. I wonder if Facebook consciously considered (or even planned for) the effect of deterring people from adding friends they don’t know personally and face-to-face when designing this feature.
WordPress Theme Insecurity
Siobhan Ambrose did some research on WordPress themes and found that only one in ten themes was “clean” and without any questionable exploits or malicious code. WordPress seems to be a victim of its own success, with scammers, spammers and exploiters focussing their attention on WordPress because of its popularity.
