advocacy

The New BostonGlobe.com

The New BostonGlobe.com:

I’m beyond impressed with the new Boston Globe web site. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. Congrats to @beep and the rest of the designer/developer team. As +Craig Hockenberry said on Twitter, other newspapers are going to look at it and either realize they need to imitate it, or they’ll keep dying.

If you have a big monitor, resize your browser window from very narrow through to full screen. Go very slowly, and watch as the layout adapts to the new size, every step of the way. The images resize, the number of columns will change from 1 to 2 to 3, each column’s width changes… it’s brilliant.

(What I’ve mentioned here is just the first-glance stuff. Look around, the attention to usability and detail is intense.)

[Impressive work.]
Source: Truer Words – A Journal

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles

Interview: Fast Boy Cycles: I danced professionally for a few years, and then taught for almost ten. For a lot of that time I had a company and was making work. I went to art school (university of the arts in Philadelphia). I thought I was going to study industrial design. I was pretty disenchanted when I realized that the industrial designers weren’t that involved in the engineering side of making stuff (or really the MAKING side of making stuff). Mostly just how it looked. How it felt. So there was a lot of CAD work, and some molding of models out of plastic. Someone dared me to take a dance class one night. I did. It seemed like much more fun than the visual arts core classes I was taking, so I switched majors the next day (“you want to switch majors!?” “Yes, if that’s possible.” “have you ever danced before!!?” “Yeah… I took a class last night.”). I stopped to catch my breath almost 15 years later and realized that I sort of hated dance. When I finally ran away screaming, building bikes seemed like a safe harbor. Can’t remember how I connected THOSE dots. [Go read the whole thing. Ezra Caldwell takes great photos, builds beautiful bikes, and continues to beat cancer. In a world where “awesome” is overused…]
Source: Cycle EXIF Update

Patagonia and Ebay

Patagonia and Ebay:

Good ol’ Yvon Chouinard. A couple of days ago, Patagonia announced a partnership with Ebay, urging consumers to buy and sell their used Patagonia garments and refrain from purchasing the new stuff. The whole thing is part of the longstanding Common Threads Initiative, and in order to be part of the buying and selling bonanza, you have to make a pledge to Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle and Reimagine. No argument here.

Sorta makes any “We made this garment with the most eco-friendly this and that” greenwashing statements a little less powerful, eh? Because really, what’s more eco-friendly than telling people to buy used gear?

[Yvon & Co. Really push the limits huh? Awesome.]
Source: Cold Splinters

The screwdriver

The screwdriver: When we talk about ourselves, and our own experiences, there’s no amount of generosity that feels like too much.  When we talk about others, everything is supposed to be bounded and thought out and make sense.

Generosity is a way of walking through the world and spreading joy.  Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s up to you to decide how much you want of that in your life. [Righteo.]
Source: Sasha Dichter’s Blog

A Supercomputer in Every Backpack

A Supercomputer in Every Backpack: People visit my school all the time. They shake my hand as they leave and tell me how inspiring it all is and often they sign off with “truly, the iPad is the future of education”. I bite my tongue every time because unlike Richard Stallman I’m not an anti-social jackass, but I want to correct them.

I want to tell them that the iPad is not the future of education, it’s the present of education. If we consign the iPad to the realms of the future, then we are implicitly saying that it’s not for right here, right now, today. We’re saying that we can postpone the task of seriously engaging with the educational and social impact of ubiquity of Internet-connected computing.

I ask you to consider other industries that put off dealing with such challenges. How is that approach working out for record companies? For newspapers? For booksellers?

The hour is already late. We have allowed a 16-year gap to develop between society and schools in terms of our children’s access to computers. Can we properly prepare Beth and her cohort for the year 2029 with the same level of access to computers that I had 35 years before?

How long can we let this gap continue to grow? Another five years? Another ten? In another 14 years, if GSMA are right, society as a whole will have 7 connected devices each – will we be delivering relevant education in that world if each pupil only has a third of a computer to themselves?

Cedars is not a school of the future. I think we’re a decade late. [Everything that Fraser has been working cuts close to my heart as I concern myself Noah’s education. What parts are his school getting right? What parts are they getting wrong? Where is it so bad that I need to shore it up, where can ignore it as it as irrelevant? Clearly his school has the computer and technology stuff wrong. But I don’t think it matters because that is something that I can (fortunately) fix. Not everyone can, but I (we) can. The stuff I can’t fix? What they feed him. The crappy behaviors he learns from the kids on the bus. Yeah, I know all survivable stuff, but considering the importance of these years… anyway, consider how your child’s education doesn’t match the needs of the marketplace. What are you going to do about it? Where do you think it’s lacking?]
Source: Fraser Speirs

Glassboard is for sharing privately with groups

I’ve just started using Glassboard. Glassboard is for sharing privately with groups on your iOS, Android or WP7 devices. But while I’ve barely sent a message as yet it fits so well where tools like Twitter were failing. And yes, that means that it only runs on mobile devices at least for now. Could easily work, but for me, having the ability to see activity on my boards from bots, or notify my desktop could be helpful. Maybe. I have to think about that some more. But it certainly seems that way for the use cases I have in mind for myself.

There are other tools that I’ve been using that do similar things (so far) like Groupme which has advantages (at least for now). For example, not everyone I work with or everyone in my family has a smart phone. But every one (at least as of recently) can receive and send text messages. But they also fail in various ways.

I’m looking forward to see how Brent and crew move this forward.

Steve

It’s nearly impossible to deliver “revolutionary”. Huge leaps in technology are rare. Huge leaps in anything are rare. To create great things you must take steps. Sometimes the largest steps you can. Steps that have some pain associated with them. But by taking steps, your audience, users, clients, etc. can follow along. They might be a bit uncomfortable, they might feel some pain. But they can deal with that. But if no one reaches, no progress is made.

Steve has pushed the boundaries for a long time. He wanted quiet machines that were easy to use. He wanted to eliminate the clutter computers required both mental and physical. He wanted them to be elegant and simple and purposeful. He wants them to disappear into the “doing” of it, without the device being the focus.

He didn’t do this as an artist, working by himself in a studio advancing his personal craft. He edited and filtered the ideas of others, demanded precision and detail, and unforgiving excellence from generations of corporate citizens. He needed folks to follow along, trust his instincts, fix everything down the tiniest details. And then do it again, and again, and again.

To me it very much a tortoise and hare story. He kept going when others said enough. That’s a hell of thing. Because it’s easy to say “enough”.

CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday

Icon Ambulance: Google’s Vic Gundotra recalls Steve Jobs The Perfectionist:

Joining other reactions on the web to Steve Jobs’ sudden resignation as the CEO of Apple yesterday, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra recalled on Google+ a particular Sunday in January 2008 when Apple’s boss asked him to call his home. The reason? The Google logo on the iPhone:

So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow. I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?

The following day, the world’s greatest product developer followed-up with an email message with the subject “Icon Ambulance”, directing Vic to work with Greg Christie to fix the icon.

Since I was 11 years old and fell in love with an Apple II, I have dozens of stories to tell about Apple products. They have been a part of my life for decades. Even when I worked for 15 years for Bill Gates at Microsoft, I had a huge admiration for Steve and what Apple had produced. But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I’ll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.

[Incredible.]
Source: 9 to 5 Mac – Apple Intelligence