NetNewsNostalgia
Justin Williams wrote a beautiful retrospective about NetNewsWire, the most excellent RSS reader on Mac OS X.
NetNewsWire has been around forever. I started using version 1 almost exactly 7 years ago in 2004 and to this day and through several update cycles it remains my feed reader of choice. It’s probably the application on my Mac i spend the most time in, aside from the web browser. I can’t wait to see what Brent has in store for version 4.
Things to know
Jamie Wieck compiled a list of 50 things every graphic design student should know, broken down into easily digestible, Twitter-friendly bits of 140 characters or less. (via)
See also: 101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2011-04-24
- Chocolate bunnies: http://t.co/4mMHvr4 #
- Hunch ran some stats on Mac vs. PC people (and produced the obligatory infographic to go along with it): http://t.co/S7IpsYo #
- NYT & WaPo launch social news products (on the same day): http://t.co/L0WXogn & http://t.co/8vY5Jon #
- Video of all Mortal Kombat fatalities: http://t.co/hraSwXI have to admit i lost interest after 6mins… #
- HIP analysis of Tweetbot vs. Twitter App: http://t.co/i4lkKeL #
- Best of Google Video on MeFi – watch it while you can: http://t.co/LPqtenZ #deadmediabeat #
- A case study of iPod Touch use in the classroom: http://t.co/w1Za6BL #
- Saw Sucker Punch and Game of Thrones ep. 1 yesterday. Latter is better than former. #
- Otomata generative sequencer – fun musical toy: http://t.co/HFqHFWY #
- APA philosophy referee hand signals: http://t.co/spPUnoL #
The Reading List, Easter Edition
Because it’s easter holidays, meaning that publishing is slower while people have more time to read, here’s another reading list with some of the things i’ve enjoyed reading over the last few weeks that i haven’t posted here so far:
- Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville: Geoff Manaugh interviews my favorite author, China Miéville. Fantastic interview.
- Leaving in a Huff: Eric D. Snider looks back at the last days as a writer for AOL before being laid off. Related: AOL is doing layoffs the wrong way.
- Trouble @Twitter: Twitter is getting a lot of negative press these days. This is one of the more reasoned pieces.
- Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century: The NYT on the growing popularity and social acceptance of part-time work in the Netherlands.
- Motion and The Clay of Interaction Design: The importance of motion, specifically physically motion, in interaction design, discussed on the example of Twitter for iPhone and iPad.
- User-Led Does Not Equal User-Centered: A while back a terribly misguided critique of user centered design (that i won’t even bother linking to) made some waves. Lawrence Kitson wrote this sound rebuttal.
- Mediated Cityscapes 01: Four Statements About Urban Computing: Greg J. Smith presents four statements about urban computing, illustrated and substantiated by examples of current research and case studies. The second part in this series is also already available and well worth a read.
- Product design at GitHub: Everyone at GitHub is a product designer.
- Progressive Refinement: Guy English describes progressive refinement as a UI design pattern. Reminded me of progressive image loading techniques from back before everyone had broadband.
- Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Tim Berners-Lee argues for the importance of continued open standards and net neutrality to foster further development of the web. Written in layman’s terms and thus ideal to pass on to less techy friends and acquaintances.
- Against Chrome: A Manifesto: An argument against UI chrome (not Google’s browser).
- A book review of Jesse Schell’s THE ART OF GAME DESIGN: Bruce Sterling reviews Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design.
- Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds: Good critique of Jane McGonigal’s latest book, or rather its basic premise.
- Lost in Translation – Does Language Influence Culture? “If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world.”
- What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology.
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule: Why meetings are so detrimental to a maker’s schedule.
How to make QR Codes less ugly
Link.
Photosynth
If you have an iPhone you absolutely have to try out Microsoft’s Photosynth app for creating panorama photos. It works so incredibly well, it almost feels like magic. That’s probably the best one can say about any piece of technology.
Incidentally, Tom Hume made an interesting observation regarding Photosynth’s user interface: It brings UI design patterns and conventions from Windows Phone 7 to iPhone. I have to admit i’m rather fond of the visual styling.
Minimal Animated GIFs
If We Don’t, Remember me is a collection of great moments from movies in minimal animated GIF form.
From Me To You also has a section with beautiful, minimal animated GIFs.
Jonathan Stray » The editorial search engine:
[M]aybe a digital news product isn’t a collection of stories, but a system for learning about the world. For that to happen, news applications are going to need to do a lot of algorithmically-enhanced organization of content originally created by other people. This idea is antithetical to current newsroom culture and the traditional structure of the journalism industry. But it also points the way to more useful digital news products: more integration of outside sources, better search and personalization, and story-specific news applications that embody whatever combination of original content, human curation, and editorial algorithms will best help the user to learn.
iPhone Tracker Follow-Up
As a follow-up to the iPhone tracker fuss, a few notable articles:
- Alex Levinson, who wrote a book about iOS forensics, tackles three issues regarding this disclosure. As it turns out the existence of this geolocation tracking has been known for months, it just wasn’t as widely publicized.
- Wired has a rundown why you should care about this disclosure. It’s certainly better that this story raised awareness about potential issues regarding this functionality than to leave people oblivious of it.
- Technology Review has a good article on how people inadvertently give away their position by posting geo-tagged photos online.
- Lastly it’s worth pointing out that Android collects geolocation information for caching purposes as well, but is apparently more diligent in expunging the cache file.
Viewer Friendly Interfaces
Watching this video of an indoor navigation concept by Nokia i can’t shake the feeling it was primarily designed to look good on video rather than to function well, be usable and useful:
I wonder if gravitating toward viewer friendly user interfaces is a common problem with UI concept videos as they are surging in popularity lately.
