I honestly don’t know what to say. I could watch this channel for hours…
Via Kottke
Touch me
I’ve noticed this strange quirk happening lately, most noticeably when I’m on my laptop at work. I’ll glance up at the laptop screen, spot a link in a web page (perhaps one I’ve launched using a keyboard shortcut), and reach up to touch it. Not reach for the mouse, not reach for the trackpad (which is already halfway between my hand and the screen), but reach up for the screen itself. My brain is telling me that the right thing to do is to touch it.
I’d written off the concept of touch screens on laptops, after all, who wants to spend their time hovering an arm above a screen, won’t we all suffer from gorilla arm or stress injuries? Well perhaps not. I’d say that perhaps 20% of my time on the ipad goes to touching the screen for input (scrolling, swiping, pinching and so on), perhaps another 20% of it is spent typing with the rest of that time spent simply reading. Now that I’m using (and loving) the apple bluetooth keyboard, I’d say the time I spend touching the screen for that would be down to around 5-10%. The iPad is simply the most-read piece of media in my life, hands down (no pun intended).
Given how much Lion is shifting OS X towards iOS, perhaps the concept of a touch screen laptop isn’t so crazy after all. Nevertheless, the more I use the iPad, the more I expect OS X to behave the same — and not in the ‘i wish control and command were same key’ way you might experience when shifting from mac to windows. This really does give me reason to pause when it happens (a few times now), and realise that something quite profoundly different in the paradigm of personal computing is happening right before my eyes — and I can’t keep my eyes off it.
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This is meant to simplify things, right?
Stephen noticed a neat hack to create new wordpress posts using dropbox on ios. I’ve been looking into this kind of thing since I stumbled across calepin a few days ago. None of the solutions I’ve found (only 2 so far..) have worked, and even those are rather complicated for my liking. Take this for example;
I setup two Hazel rules. NVAlt supports Simplenote tags through OpenMetaextended attributes. The first rule looks for a file in my Simplenote folder to get the OpenMeta tag of “post” and makes a copy of the file to another folder. Importantly, the Hazel rule will not overwrite a file if it already exists in the destination folder. This is critical and I’ll explain more later.
?
It gets worse;
The new workflow looks something like this. I write as much as I want in MultiMarkdown in Simplenote/NVAlt. If I want, I preview with Marked. When I’m ready to post, I just add a Simplenote/NVAlt tag of “post” to the entry. The article gets published by my server at home without any other effort from me. Additionally, the Markdown version of the article is saved my archive folder for permanent reference.
Simple, no? To me, the beauty of the iPad and the Internet is that they work so well together. I don’t yearn for a laptop or a computer as much these days, because the strings that tie it all together really do work magic. If I’m going to change my posting workflow (and I really do want to, the wordpress iPad experience is terrible, to say the least), I want something simpler than my current methods. Not the other way round.
The wait continues, unabated.
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Facebook internal email system sucks, no real surprise there
Andrei Alexandrescu, a Facebook research engineer, on the (laughably) crummy tech they use to communicate;
The tools use our own technologies (talk about dog food) so they work, look, and integrate beautifully. Best part, if someone doesn’t like something, well, they can just fix it. (To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized” in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for everyone!”)
A few things spring to mind;
- Facebook has been looking for ways to displace email for at least years now, it’s really no surprise given that i) their own internal email systems suck, and ii) they prioritise their own innovation, that their email system would be a bit clunky,
- It’s a real surprise that they don’t have an internal/private facebook on which they could coordinate efforts and communicate. If chat, messaging and wall posts could somehow replace email in the near distant social media future, why aren’t they leading the charge with their internal workplace culture?
- Other tools like basecamp are designed to take care of the things email doesn’t do well (group planning, collaboration, shared tasks, documents and contacts). It would seem like a no-brainer to shift gears and stop wasting time fighting the email invite system.
Facebook wants to replace email, so it’s no real surprise their own email system sucks. If you’re going to commit to a goal (warts and all), may as well go 100%. It would be a shame to see all that dog food go to waste.
Via Noah Brier
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On format
Printing Press, by Thomas Hawk
I’ve been thinking lately, about the plethora of new book distribution formats (be that electronic, audio, print-on-demand) and one thing occurred to me that I just can’t shake.
How will we look back on todays written word, in generations to come?
I don’t mean through the lens of nostalgia, rather I mean how will we retrieve, access, read and learn from this moment in time – when a staggeringly huge amount of it is locked up in proprietary formats and in many ways destined to decay along with their creators. I’m reasonably certain that the standards-based web (HTML, CSS, JS) will be with us for a long time, but what of other book formats and their makers? The ePub format, for example. Or the DRM ridden .aa format? I’m not one to yearningly look back on years gone by, but have we not seen the rise and fall of platforms and media time and time again? The one thing that has seemingly undergone utterly minor transformation (and has certainly stood the test of time) is the printed word. It’s possible to browse the pages of a 100 year old manuscript without fear of destroying the contents. Which of todays formats will stand that test of time. Will we be wrestling with archaic kindle formats in 100 years time? I can’t see it happening.
This doesn’t mean I see no value in innovating through the digital. This kind of transformation is absurdly disruptive (just ask Amazon or Borders Books), and I look forward to watching apple wreak havoc on the incumbent textbook industry.
I do wonder, though, what the next 20-40 years will look like from the other side. Will we look back on the e-books of 2012 with the same nostalgia given over to old photographs, or to a 19th Century printing press?
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Can’t see the wood for the trees
Ben and Marco on ibooks/ebooks/books in general;
Ben Brooks:
I can tell you from first hand experience that the reading experience is very different on each of the different mediums and that’s why the distinction matters to me. I don’t care which version you bought because it changes what you read, but I do care because it may not be the same as the book I read (sometimes in the minor content differences, but always in experience and layout).
I disagree. Many people romanticize the experience of reading a printed book, but I just don’t get it.
When I start reading, the form of the book quickly disappears. Just as I don’t notice the individual letters in each word, I stop noticing the layout, the font, the paper, the binding, and every other physical artifact because I’m focused on the writing.
For me, the format only matters so much as it interferes with my ability to get lost in the story. I’ve recently started listening to a lot more audio content (podcasts and audiobooks), and I’ve found them in many ways much more compelling than printed or electronic books. The key element here is your ability to engross me in a narrative, a story and keep me there — irrespective of what I’m doing or where I am — without the medium getting in the way.
One example of a bad mediated experience would be reading text on an iPad. I can’t do it for more than an hour, the high contrast back-lit screen really makes it a struggle. The Kindle (and the printed page for that matter) make it a breeze, light permitting. I must say, though, I’ve never found it easier to enjoy a story for 12-14 hours straight than I have managed to do with the audiobooks I’ve bought from audible.com.
Marco again;
Whether I’ve bought a book made of dead trees or encrypted bits doesn’t really matter, and I don’t think my experience suffers when I choose the bits.
Since I don’t think the distinction matters, I rarely need to say “I bought the Steve Jobs book in iBooks,” or “I bought the Steve Jobs book on my Kindle.”
I just say, “I bought the Steve Jobs book.”
Aren’t we forgetting the most important thing here? We’re actually talking about purchased books. Angus & Robertson are in receivership, Borders books have closed their doors, and I’ll wait to see what happens to Dymocks. The retail industry – and that of books in particular – is being disrupted so drastically by amazon and now apple, that sales alone are actually noteworthy. And, unlike the movie and music industries (where piracy is the silent killer), legitimate digital material is a force to be reckoned with.
In a few years time the book retail market is going to look very different to today. The printed word isn’t going anywhere, but the bricks and mortar world is. Let’s not get caught up in format, when the very nature of these business models are transforming before our very eyes.
