a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose.
This essay will present many features! The trick is to see through them — to see the underlying design principles that they represent, and understand how these principles enable the programmer to think.
Tag: software
App.net just added annotations to its API. Opens up a lot of doors for some pretty killer client application uses.
I think I might use App.net primarily and push those posts to Twitter once there’s a good iOS client that’s released. There are a few out there now in-development but they’re in closed betas.
Ilya Lichtenstein on the Fear of Money:
Their fear is justified, because the second you start charging for a product, all of the bubbly bullshit falls away. The market is cold, rational, and effective. It doesn’t care about your lean startup methods, your rockstar team, or your fawning tech press. All of your assumptions, vision, business plans and pitches are irrelevant.
You’ve either built something worth paying money for, or you haven’t.
There’s a Lift for that. I’m excited to see Lift launch today. I’ve been using the beta for a couple weeks now and it’s really fantastic. The social features are neat, but the key is having a simple way to be mindful about taking daily action toward a goal.
Professors without borders. Interesting overview of mass, distributed, web-based teaching tools. Things like Coursera and Udacity are neat but they’re really just an alpha. They take the same model of education as traditional colleges and shift it online. The revolution will come when someone sets the goal of building a web-native tool for learning. Then it will get interesting.
WordPress as an app platform
One of the things Matt mentioned in the State of the Word this year was the rise of WordPress as an app platform. After that keynote many people took it as their queue to come up to the Happiness Bar and ask questions about using WordPress as the background layer for apps. The interest is definitely there.
In light of that, I enjoyed Matt Eppelsheimer’s post yesterday:
The WordPress platform essentially manages content and authentication for us, gives us frameworks to build custom UI and our own functionality, and offers extra features in the form of plugins developed by a large community. It gives us everything we need to rapidly build our own custom tools that fit our own process, style, and needs.
We’re tackling the low-hanging fruit first: We’re customizing P2 to make our internal discussions less reliant on third party limitations, and we’re building a Parking Lot for action-oriented discussions we’ve identified to iterate on the way we work.
There’s more to it as well. Rocket Lift wants to build their task and project management on top of WordPress and perhaps take on an accounting plugin. I know both of the Matt’s 1 behind Rocket Lift and am stoked to see what they come up with. Should be fun.
Notes:
- For those counting at home, that’s 3 different Matt’s in one post. 🙂 ↩
Mid-week reading list
With the craziness of running a WordCamp last week I didn’t have much time to read through my Instapaper queue. Thankfully, I had some extra time to catch up on things tonight. Interestingly I had a lot of articles that hit on similar themes. Last week seemed to be the week to publish pieces about publishing.
Scott Hanselman’s Your words are wasted was first up. It speaks to my belief in the importance of open source software and owning what you publish. As he says, “I control this domain, this software and this content.”
It’s been a while since I’ve read something from the Nieman Lab but I think I need to start following them more closely again. 13 ways of looking at Medium was well done. They save the critical questions for the end and there could have been more of those, but it’s an interesting look at Ev Williams’ new publishing tool.
The Dangers of Being a Product Instead of a Customer was another good post. As Diego writes there, “I’d much rather be a customer of web services than a product.”
Anil Dash’s musing on streams was interesting as a somewhat higher level piece. People do read on the internet, they just require content to be presented in the right way.
Interesting stuff going on.
When you let it be itself, everything on the Internet belongs to everything else. The walls tech people try to raise, to convince investors that there’s dollar value there, are fake. They don’t hold anything behind them that has any lasting value. The only things that stand a chance are things that flow. And for that, the walls get in the way.
When I switched to webOS from my old iPhone, it felt like I was using the future. The inductive charging and reliance on cloud accounts for contacts, calendars, and email permitted me to be have a truly cord-free phone.
I totally agree with Ian here. I loved using my Palm Pre and webOS was so much fun to interact with. The hardware was a weak point but over time I figured that would be solved. It’s truly a shame Palm couldn’t make it in the marketplace.
But when Apple announced the Retina MacBook Pro at WWDC, revamping all of my apps and my web site jumped to the top of my list of priorities…
Why? Because HiDPI customers may be a fringe group, but they are a forward-facing fringe. They represent the users of the future, and the more we cater to them now, the more deeply embedded our products and designs will be in their culture. The future culture.