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  3. A 2003 iSight sitting on top of a 2012 iPad:

    The iSight was built to work with a great many products, and as a result is extensible. The lead is a standard Apple firewire lead nested inside an adapter which can fit onto many different attachments. On the attachment, there’s a thumbscrew, so that same clear plastic hook can join onto items of many different thicknesses (such as the iPad). That’s four levels of modularity.

    The iPad was built to be useful for two years, tops, before being replaced. Its dock connector is already out of date. Its case is incompatible with the previous model.

    Which is better designed? Which will retain its value longer?

  7. I’m loving the feedback loop of using the things I build.

    Wasn’t blogging much → improved typography, design → want to write more and better.

    Started using my tune stream → discovered a bunch of problems → fixed them, now I can practise more effectively.

    Lessons?

    1. Hacking on stuff does have a wider beneficial effect on life, provided you’re making stuff which matters.
    2. Stuff which matters doesn’t have to be life changing in order to matter
  8. ↪ Joel Stewart: @BarnabyWalters All musical instruments?

    @joelestewart hm, I suppose so. Instruments are mostly one-way though, with a performer transmitting culture to an audience — even if you consider composer to performer, that’s not so much through the instrument.

    Whereas computers are direction-agnostic — one or multiple people can use them simultaneously to consume and create culture. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why they don’t look like what they do.

  9. Has there ever been a device other than modern computers which is simulataneously used for creation and consumption of culture?

  10. When dealing with character encoding issues I repeatedly get this feeling that we need to throw away computing and programming and redesign it all in a way which prevents stupid, hard-to-debug problems from happening live in trees and eat pita bread all day

  13. Current status: manually copying, pasting and emailing my iOS diagnostics information to myself so I can mine and visualise it. This is stupid.

  14. What is it called when you subconsciously expect a UI to be somewhere it isn’t, e.g. double-tapping a word in a dead tree book to get a definition, or expecting a "like/favourite" button in, e.g, an email client?

    And no jokes about obsession :) it can't just be me.

  16. ↪ Aral Balkan: Sexist? Want to learn PHP? We’ve got just the book for you: SexyPHP: A Fun Way to Learn Object Oriented PHP http://t.co/nz1650vr

    aral hideous. That makes me more embarrassed to be a PHP dev than all the bad rep it has as a language. And they're teaching SVN! It gets worse :(