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(Source: fuckyeahphish)
“At its core, Findings is a service that allows you to capture, store, search, and share small snippets of text from eBooks and web pages. It integrates Kindle highlights and web clippings (with more input options to come.) And it gives you the ability to share those quotes with your peers, as well as follow other people’s quotes through your timeline.” — stevenberlinjohnson.com: Introducing Findings (via Findings.com)
“early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.” — The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton (via Findings.com)
“A message had seemed to be a physical object. That was always an illusion; now people needed consciously to divorce their conception of the message from the paper on which it was written. Scientists, Harper’s explained, will say that the electric current “carries a message,” but one must not imagine that anything—any thing—is transported. There is only “the action and reaction of an imponderable force,” — The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (via Findings.com)
- A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
- A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
— I. Developer
“On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.”
“Steve and I were talking about children one time, and he said the problem with children is that they carry your heart with them. The exact phrase was, “It’s your heart running around outside your body.” That’s a Steve Jobs quote. He had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life. His legacy will last for many years, through people he’s trained and people he’s influenced. But what death means is you can’t call—you can’t call him. It’s a loss. I’ll miss talking to him.” — Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs - BusinessWeek (via Findings.com)
“Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!” — Ghost Busters (1984) - Memorable quotes (via Findings.com)
ITP Alum and all around smart guy Felipe Ribeiro wrote this interesting analysis and observation of the Occcupy Wall Street protests…
My impression of occupy wall street, having hung out there for the first time tonight, from about 6:15pm to about 9:30pm:
Anyone who is interested in emergent/meta anything (software development, feedback systems of any kind, consciousness, system theory), democracy/open source/ transparency or good governance in any sense would do well to spend time down there and see how things happen. I especially urge you to check out the General Assembly, I caught the one at 7pm tonight and was impressed by what I saw. There was an overt concern to represent “marginalized” voices, preferences were explicitly given to those who hadn’t spoken previously, and those who pertained to groups historically excluded from public discourse. To get around not having permits for amplified sound, they employed a system whereby the crowd repeated what was originally said, thereby allowing for an inclusive conversation with between 100-150 people, *without amplification*. This was extremely impressive, especially since this system was one that has been used in similar people’s councils in Spain and Greece (if a random dude near me is to be believed, haha). In essence, *ANYONE*, and I mean anyone, could speak, and many did. Being that they’ve been set up for over two weeks, they’ve got a system down for weeding stuff that didn’t fit the particular topic for that moment. I heard lucid and not so lucid commentary, but what surprised me the most was the willingness of people to sit outside on the concrete floor and abide by these rules in order to legitimate the outcome of what was discussed, and that everyone who wanted to speak got their turn. It’s democracy, figuring itself out in real time. Pretty rad.
To wrap - If you care about politics or otherwise think the system, writ large is, *at best*, suspect; meaning just about everything coming from both democrats and republicans is merely political theatre and will *never* truly challenge a system that is largely about the conservation and consolidation of power, then head down there and check out what is happening, in person if possible. Site with calendar, etc:
Otherwise, live stream:
or
http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
Interesting tidbit:
I found out why they are allowed to hang out in a park in the financial district of Manhattan, where, without a permit (which they do not have, nor would they be granted one, given the city’s stance towards rowdy folk taking over public space) they would be immediately forcibly removed: Zuccotti Park (aka “Liberty Plaza”) is a private park, owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a major commercial real estate holding company. Why Brookfield is allowing them to stay is anyone’s guess, I have my money on the fact that the original Occupy Wall Street battle cry came from AdBusters, based out of Toronto, the same city Brookfield has their HQ. So I think there’s a relationship there. But that is strictly conjecture. Wikipedia says this on their entry (the veracity of which I have not looked into): “On Earth Day (April 22) 2010, BLJC was listed as one of Canada’s “The Green 30” Organizations Based On Eco-Friendly Programs and Practices [1] based on an employee poll.” So whether they sympathize independently or there is an Adbusters connection, the OWS movement exists in its current form only because the owners of that park allow them to remain. The fact is, if Brookfield changes their mind, NYPD can kick them out under penalty of arrest immediately. Ironic, that if it were a public park, they would be forced to fight their arrests in the courts on the basis of the first amendment (after the fact), while being a private park owned by a mega-powerful corporation, they are allowed to stay, presumably on a whim, but without having to encounter force. Did Brookfield lose money to Wall street financial firms in some way, and they love the negative attention this movement is generating towards Wall Street? I’d be curious to know exactly why Brookfield is allowing this event to exist on their property.
That’s my rambling analysis for now, tomorrow there may be more.
felipe
“A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books… A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your questions answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” —
26 years ago today, the world lost E. B. White – remember him with his poetic letter to children on the love of libraries
(via curiositycounts)
(via curiositycounts)
“And let’s remind ourselves why web applications are amazing things. They work cross browser because they’re based on standards. You don’t need to update them. As a developer, you never need to worry about old versions that people won’t upgrade. They’re searchable and their content shows up in search engines, which do a far better job of figuring out what people mean than any app store hierarchy. Practically anyone can write them. And best of all, you can plug in multiple third party advertising, analytics, social connector, mashup, affiliate, etc. into your application trivially. While it’s true today that you need to wrap your Sencha Touch application in a native shell (such as PhoneGap) in order to get access to camera or accelerometer. But with the current industry trends, we don’t think this will be the case for too long.” — Introducing Sencha Touch: HTML5 Framework for Mobile - Sencha - Blog
Infographic by The Big Picture
So, it’s been a week since I got the Palm Pre, and I promised some people I’d write about my impressions at this point. So here are some things that I’ve observed about the Pre and WebOS. Unlike last week, I’m gonna start with the annoyances this time:
1. Sluggish/Laggy - I wouldn’t exactly call the phone “snappy”. It sometimes gets hung up on scrolling through lists, and there have also been times while playing games that the phone would just freeze. (Mojo SDK games only…not the fancy OpenGL games with the new PDK.) This happens most when I’m on the subway, so I think it may be related to the phone finding and attempting to join a weak Verizon signal while moving underground. Perhaps that’s a testament to Verizon’s network, but it’s kind of annoying. A homebrew OS patch (more on that later) was recently released that will overclock the CPU…and supposed this helps a bit. It’s certainly something that can be overcome with future OS updates. (From what I understand, the phone’s GPU isn’t being used to render the OS, which puts a lot more burden on the CPU.)
2. Tiny screen - Tiny. Did I mention that it’s tiny? It has the same resolution as my iPhone, but damn is it noticeably smaller. I have decent eyesight, and there are times it’s just painful. How the webkit browser doesn’t have a menu option to adjust the font size is beyond me. Considering the hardware, I think it’s unconscionable that EVERY app doesn’t have the ability to adjust font size! (Tweed does, as does the fantastic ebook app pReader.)
3. No scrollbars. Anywhere. - I understand how this adds a minute amount of screen real estate, but it’s a bit odd to not know where you are on a page in an app. It’s no dealbreaker, it just feels kinda weird.
4. Contact suggestions - Contact searching is a bit unwieldy. I wish the phone were more aware of the type of contact details I want in an app so that I won’t get IM contact data in, say, the email app when it’s popping up suggestions.
But there are some good things as well…
1. Verizon - Oh my God. 3G everywhere. No dropped calls. 5 bars in places I used to never get a single bar. Case in point: we went to the Natural History Museum today to meet some friends. If you don’t know, the AMNH is crazy on the weekends, so finding people can be difficult. My wife was doing all the coordinating with our friends, but once we got inside her iPhone was useless. No signal at all. Fortunately for us I had five full bars on my Pre. We called our friends and found them in no time. And this relates to what I’ve found about the Pre overall…as a communication device, it blows the iPhone out of the water. And I don’t just mean call signal and quality. (Although my wife has told me that I don’t sound nearly “as far away” as I used to on calls.) It’s a bunch of things. WebOS allows you to add contacts directly to the launcher…which means you can access a page of your most-used contacts and initiate a call/email/sms from anywhere. The messaging app is great…I’m actually using IM on my phone! I’ve NEVER used it on my phone…but it’s just so easy. The email client, as I mentioned before, is pretty nice too. The unified inbox works well, but I really like the email notifications in the notification tray. I can see the basics about new email messages without having to open the mail client (or even unlocking the phone). In terms of communicating, WebOS just gets out of my way far better than the iPhone ever did. It tried, but feebly. App notifications were too obtrusive, and don’t get me started on the icon badges. (Hey there’s a “3” on the email icon! Uhh…I guess that means I have 3 unread emails in my “primary” account. What about my other, equally important, accounts?)
2. Battery Life - So far the battery life has about the same as iPhone. I bought a higher capacity battery online, and the first day I had issues where it seemed to be dropping 1% per minute, but after a few charges the battery is performing admirably. Now, I can’t say I’m terribly happy that the battery life is the same as my iPhone because I was never really able to get through an entire day (8 hrs) without having to recharge. The plus side, however, is that now I have TWO batteries, and I can keep a spare in my bag. Advantage: Pre.
3. Media sharing - I can finally upload photos and videos directly to YouTube & Facebook without having to launch their apps. I don’t know if this is possible with an iPhone 3GS, but it’s new to me! Also, the camera has a flash. That’s handy.
4. Homebrew apps - OK this is a biggie. There is a pretty vibrant homebrew app community, which is nice. Many of the official apps via the Palm app channel started as homebrew. From what I understand, Palm is actually OK with the homebrew community! I only wish there was a working commandline Terminal. (There’s one, but it’s been broken since the last OS update). In addition to applications, the homebrew community provides a series of OS patches that essentially let you make changes to core OS features. I’ve installed 18 patches, giving me features such as adding more apps per-page, adding the date to the time in the OS title bar, changing the carrier text (“Verizon Wireles”) to the current wifi SSID if connected, a bunch of browser tweaks (no auto-refresh, fullscreen, etc.), a character counting bubble in the messaging, and many more. In all there are more than 260 available patches. To get anywhere near this kind of configurability on the iPhone you’d have to jailbreak it.
5. Ease of development - Along the lines of homebrew, I’ve found that developing apps for the phone is really easy. I haven’t created a full-fledged app yet, but I will. What’s great about it is that unlike the iPhone SDK, there’s no annoying-as-hell certificate system that takes 10 yrs to figure out and can keep you from testing on actual hardware. You also don’t have to pay $99 a year for the privilege to do so. (OpenSource app devs will always be free, Palm is waiving the $99 fee for the foreseeable future to spur development.) Additionally, as a developer you can give your beta app to as many users as are willing to install and test it, which is huge…and again you don’t have to go through Palm to do this if you don’t want. Of all the mobile OSes, Palm seems to be the most adult about the whole thing…they realize that users who are willing to get apps from outside the official channel know the risks and are perfectly capable of making the decision whether to install an app on their own damn phone.
At this point I’m still leaning towards keeping the phone. If anything, I’ve learned that picking a phone is all about priorities and tradeoffs. With the iPhone, I sacrificed a good telecom network and communicator experience for a large app library and tight OSX integration. With the Pre it seems I’ll be sacrificing the huge app ecosystem for a better communications experience.