iA Writer for iPhone. My favorite writing application on the Mac is now live on the iPhone. It includes support for iCloud and Dropbox. I would love to pay them more than $0.99 for such a wonderful piece of software.
Tag: design
Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces. Perhaps parking lots don’t have to be dead zones in cities. Would be neat to see some of the ideas deployed on a larger scale.
Graphic designers defined
Graphic designers don’t make things pretty. Graphic designers solve problems. They work with research, they analyze and watch, they test and iterate, they tell stories. They’re not coloring things in. The graphic in graphic designer is not limiting or to be taken literally.
Mark Boulton – “Visual Design is Not a Thing” from The Manual vol. II.
From the workshop: Don’t steal my Theme Options. Great writeup on theme options in Duet by Andy at the Theme Foundry. When you put this much thought and care into the settings of your product you are going to create a wonderful product.
The challenges of working remotely. Sage advice from Sam Brown about how to make working remotely a success. Much of what he writes holds true to my experience of the last two years.
Status
Tonight’s plan: Lakers vs. Clippers on ESPN Radio and crafting mockups for a theme Daniel and I are working on. It’s a good night.
The Readable Future
So sad and so true:
No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.
Brent Simmons – The Readable Future.
Americhrome. File this under things that make complete sense but which I had never thought about or realized before. It turns out the federal government has an official color palette for everything they contract out for. Every time I see a road sign I’m going to think of this now.
Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”
News sites as “Angry fruit salad on meth”
Don’t let your drive for advertising dollars undercut your purpose:
I made the mistake of going to a website today. It’s understandable, of course — everybody does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll forgive myself, eventually.
I don’t mean just any website, of course, I mean a publication. A place where a business publishes interesting things that I like to read.
I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.
Brent Simmons – The Pummeling Pages.