Point and shoot
Gadi Amit, founder of the design firm which worked on the revolutionary design of the Lytro camera:
There’s a moment that happens during the best projects, when 10 people in a room realize that there’s something so pure about a solution that it works.
Point and shoot. Can’t get any purer than that.
Moonwalking with Einstein
Just finished reading a highly-entertaining but yet very informative book about a journalist’s transformation from curious bystander into winner of the United States Memory Championship.
The narrative nicely frames an exploration of the very complex topic of our memories and what makes us remember — and forget — things.
In the end, I think this quote best sums up what the book is about and why our memories are still so important in this age of externalizing our memories:
How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.
While I don’t necessarily agree that “we’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories”, I believe that our memories certainly play a major part in defining who we are, our values and our character.
And that’s where I’m starting to see the importance of memorizing scripture and the way it can shape our lives as Christians.
Not a feeble-minded copycat
David Pogue on Microsoft’s latest update to their mobile operating system:
“Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered.”
“Most impressively, Windows Phone is not a feeble-minded copycat. Microsoft came up with completely fresh metaphors that generally steer clear of the iPhone/Android design.”
“Microsoft’s work here deserves attention, praise and sales. Maybe it’s not quite as mature as the iPhone or Android. But the world is a more interesting place with Windows Phone in it.”
When was the last time you could say that about a Microsoft product? Things have certainly changed.
One thing matters
John Piper on learning from Steve Jobs:
Get the wisdom of the house of mourning. Learn from the shadow of your own funeral. One thing matters. Whether you make an iPhone, or use an iPhone, let every breath, every thought, every deed be one thing—the “work of faith”—the work of the Lord.
Dangerously clean
In fact, super-clean water tastes flat, heavy, and bitter. The opposite of what we like. The appealing freshness in water comes not just from it’s temperature and its appearance, but from a sprinkling of salts and minerals that give it a crisp taste.
So our bodies are tuned to enjoy water that is just the right amount of cleanliness. Not too dirty and not too clean. Fascinating.
Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
Greg Sterling comparing Siri to Google Voice Actions:
What Siri offers that is not equally true for Google Voice Actions … is broad and deep integration into the phone and a more conversational style of interaction. This is subtle but meaningful in comparing the experiences of using Siri and Google Voice Actions. Siri has personality whereas Google Voice Actions does not. Siri is also generally more intuitive. In terms of most features, however, Google Voice Actions and Siri are fairly comparable — though Siri does more things.
printf(“RIP Dennis Ritchie\n”);
I remember diligently referring to his classic book “The C Programming Language” when I was learning C.
Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs. … It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.
C –> Unix –> Mac OS X –> iOS
Think Different
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”
Steve Jobs
1955 – 2011
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
– Steve Jobs
Small, grey iPads
Lukas Mathis on the design of the new Kindle Touch:
If you were to design a piece of hardware that was only used for one single task, to read books, how would you design it?
If you look at the iPad, it’s clearly a device that is not meant for one specific task. It’s just a frame; the application you run on it defines what the device does. That’s why the iPad barely has any hardware buttons. What buttons would you add that would be useful to most iPad apps? Even the volume buttons are of questionable use; most apps don’t need them, or provide their own on-screen volume control.
But a device you use for one very specific thing, and one thing alone, is an entirely different proposition. Since you know exactly what people will do with it, you can design the hardware specifically for that task.
So why, then, do the new Kindle Touch devices look like small, grey iPads?
60 seconds
Things that happen on the internet every 60 seconds…
Infographic by Shanghai Web Designers