In light of Apple's recent blunder.
This is an absolutely brilliant piece about the emergence of smart phones as legitimate photography instruments - but at a much more profound level hits on our frequent inability to separate love for a particular tool from passion for a particular craft. If you're anything like me, it's a very humbling read.. http://craigmod.com/journal/photography_hello/ Over the last decade, my rule as a creator — be it as a programmer, writer, designer or photographer — has been to use the simplest possible tool for the job. Use the simplest tool until you breach its potential. If you think you’re using the simplest tool and find one simpler yet, switch to that. Spot on re: industry's reluctance toward hiring remote employees... http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3707-the-person-you-could-be-hiring “They worry about the loss of synergy, and the collaboration, and then the fires that are stoked from elite software engineers and elite professionals being together face-to-face and what comes from that,” Cunningham says. “That’s where they’re hesitating.” It's now possible to get all of the WWDC 2013 sample code by running some terminal magic.
If you don't have Ruby installed, drop to terminal and execute the following: sudo \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails After the installation finishes, run the following to install the WWDC Downloader script: sudo gem install wwdcdownloader --no-rdoc --no-ri Finally, run the following to download the code samples: wwdcdownloader <your Apple ID> [<target-dir>] More details and script source here: https://github.com/jfahrenkrug/WWDC-Downloader We're becoming an increasingly visual society, but resumes and portfolios are as bland as ever...until now. I just stumbled on visualize.me. With one click (plus some optional tweaks), you can turn your LinkedIn profile into a stunning visual display of charts. Very cool innovation - you get a huge win and get to reuse a ton of existing keystrokes! Update... Resumup is another nice take on experience visualization. The service is still in beta and the interface seems a little less evolved that vizualize.me, but it's still worth checking out (and quick to set up).
This has little to do with software, but it's freakin' hilarious. I recently watched a presentation given by Evan Doll to some students at Stanford about how the iPad changes everything. He made a couple of really great points that I feel those of us in the tech community should reflect on EVERY SINGLE DAY. 1. Computers are still too complicated. 2. Those who design and build and write about computers are most likely to forget this. The summation of these points is an idea referred to as "The Gulf of Knowledge". Essentially, the more you know, the less you consciously know. Our expertise and constant exposure to a topic hurts our ability to explain it to others and prevents us from seeing things from an outside perspective. Because of this, we must pause, question and reconsider our instinctive thinking about technology. He goes on to rip apart two staples of personal computing. 1. Exposure to the file system and how unnecessary and confusing it is for a huge group of users. 2. The mouse. Geeks still argue about one button vs. two button mice but Doll says: Despite the last 20 or 30 years of mouse usage all around the world, the mouse is a bug; it's not a feature. It's something we take for granted. We use it every day, but really it's a very disconnected way to interact with our data. We're moving this one thing over here and there's this other thing moving around on the screen. Sometimes it changes its appearance. Sometimes it hides. If you actually watch someone who's using a computer for the first time, there's a lot of confusion about this disconnect between what you're doing over here and how that affects your content on the screen. |
Josh SloatThe flotsam and jetsam of a techie mind... Archives
March 2017
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