Macminicolo – Hosting a Mac mini as a Jenkins continuous integration server:
A good development workflow is critical to producing a high-quality app, especially if there is more than one developer involved. At Day One our current team is comprised of four full time developers and one designer. The great majority of our work is focused on our Mac and iOS apps.
[Nice.]
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz : The New Yorker:
Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.
[An amazing story. What other bits and pieces are hanging around from AS?]
Matt Gemmell on skeuomorphism and intuitive design:
Matt, a programmer by trade, addresses the skeuomorphism debate more effectively than most designers I’ve heard arguing about it.
[Here’s my pull quote:]Children don’t seem to be having problems grasping those concepts, even if Jakob Neilsen thinks they should. They’re not confused by interactive data-surfaces; they’re frustrated when actual, printed content in the physical world doesn’t respond the way they now expect it to.
Intuitiveness has become unhelpfully conflated with familiarity. The reasoning is simple enough: things that are already familiar don’t have to be re-learned, so we assume that they’re more “intuitive”. That’s a big assumption, but we treat it as if it’s fact.
Sometimes, familiar things aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and a new, unfamiliar thing might be more so. Another possibility is that a new thing might be equally intuitive, but also have other benefits which justify its initial unfamiliarity. In either case, intuitiveness cannot be divorced from context.
[Spot on.]
Source: Marco.org
When Everyone is an Eye-Witness, What is a Journalist? | Storyful Blog:
Yet, from the vantage point of the social web, there was no apparent need for a third person to mediate. In the blatant first-person world of YouTube and Twitter, we all get to decide the meaning.
That concept strikes fear into the heart of those who believe there is eternal value in journalism. Even those of us who have mastered the tools of the social age have a deep ambivalence about where they are taking us.
On the night of the Boston bombings, my Twitter timeline was filled with the ambivalent cry of those who saw danger and opportunity around them. In the words of one angst-ridden tweep:
“Today reminds me how Twitter has become one of the greatest tools as well as one of greatest threats to true journalism”.
I share the sentiment. But I also despair at the failure of the guardians of ‘True Journalism’ to develop a coherent response to that contradiction. Perhaps the problem is that too many journalists still believe they are the rightful ‘owners’ of breaking news.
[Mark Little nails it.]
Make intersections safer by removing stoplights:
Cars were moving too fast through an intersection in the town of Poynton in England, so they took out the stoplights & walk signals and replaced the intersection with an unusual double roundel design. The result is a mixed-use space with slower moving car traffic and safer pedestrian traffic.
[Been talking about this for years. Once pointed out, this seemingly counter intuitive move works every time. I apply the same thinking to many situations. Rules that run counter to desire fail. In this case, they did a brilliant job.]
American Airlines earned an enemy:
So that’s the end of our two week nightmare battling American Airlines. A bag lost to gross negligence of American Airlines and that asshole of a passenger who took it in the first place (who takes a wrong bag, filled with baby clothing and toys, fails to report it for almost a week, then doesn’t return it at all?).
Never did someone express a true emotion of empathy at American Airlines. Never an offer to put someone with authority and competence on the case to get to the bottom of it. No offers of even token gestures for our sour experience. No nothing.
American Airlines, you are a terrible company. I hope that your disdain for helping customers in trouble catches up to you one day and you go out of business.
[Well… it doesn’t get worse than that for customer experience does it?]
Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon S3 – Two Trillion Objects, 1.1 Million Requests / Second:
There are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second.
If you added one S3 object every 60 hours starting at the Big Bang, you’d have accumulated almost two trillion of them by now.
[Given that… would you please fix that leaky faucet? These things add up.]
That abundance is each of ours. How we organize what we watch should be up to us, not to cable systems compiling their own guides that look like spreadsheets, with rows of channels and columns of times. We can, and should, do better than that. Also better than what YouTube gives us, based on what its machines think we might want.
Today Google is the box we need to think outside of. So let’s re-start there.
[You have to read the whole thing… Doc at his brilliant best.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
Just How Did Apple “Journalism” Get This Bad? | Macgasm:
I swore that I wouldn’t write stuff like this. “No, Ian”, I said, “skewering the stupid is pointless. You only end up bitter and twisted by maintaining the necessary level of vitriol required.” But sometimes… you’ve just got to do something.
When I learned to be a journalist, we had one rule: We did what was the right thing for the readers. That sometimes meant annoying companies like Apple, if “doing the right thing for the readers” meant giving them details of an unannounced Mac. Sometimes it meant giving large advertisers bad reviews. But whatever it meant, it always meant giving them the truth: facts we found out, put into context so the readers could understand what was going on better.
By those standards, David Gewirtz’s piece over at ZDNet entitled “iOS developers abandoning sinking Apple mothership: biggest drop ever” isn’t just bad journalism. It’s beyond that. It’s anti-journalism. Where journalism is about fact, Gewirtz brings us speculation. Where journalism adds context to make things clearer, Gewirtz removes it in order to make things more difficult to understand.
[It just keeps getting worse. I’m beginning to think the tech news is simply the very bottom of the barrel. At least some folks in the business see it.]
Third paragraph from Jungah Lee’s report for Bloomberg, “LG Display Profit Misses Estimates on Stalling Apple Sales”:
“Apple is losing dominance and will likely delay launching a successor to the iPhone 5 until at least September,” Harrison Cho, an analyst for Seoul-based Samsung Securities Co., said before the earnings release. “LG Display might have to wait until the third quarter to see strong profits as Apple’s new devices are mostly expected to be out in the second half.”
Samsung Securities. That Samsung. Jiminy christ.
[People it really is that bad. And again. Think about how topics this kind of fact checking is *not* performed for… how often is the news biased without disclaimer or just plain old wrong? A lot more than people think.]
Source: Daring Fireball
turnings :: daniel berlinger 