07.11.13 |
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Technologist Alex Kessinger on using feed readers effectively:
Reading efficiently can mean a number of things to people, and that’s fine. Some people want to read to stay up to date, others want to cover a lot of ground while not spending too much time reading. The idea is that reading efficiently covers the whole spectrum of reading goals.
Efficiency is a formula. How much did you consume, in what amount of time, and what do you have to show for it? If you read a ton quickly, but you can’t recall what you read, then you are wasting your time. If you want to have a high recall, and thus consume a small amount of material slowly, that’s fine, but this is a balancing act. You need to decide what your goal is before you can do anything to optimize for it.
Well said. This long series of posts inspired me to shake up my RSS feed reading habits. It might be a good topic for an upcoming blog post here.
07.08.13 |
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It’s an older article but is worth revisiting now that the dust over Microsoft’s DRM stance has somewhat settled. AnandTech’s Anand Lai Shimpi goes into some expected serious depth here:
Differences in the memory subsytems also gives us some insight into each approach to the next-gen consoles. Microsoft opted for embedded SRAM + DDR3, while Sony went for a very fast GDDR5 memory interface. Sony’s approach (especially when combined with a beefier GPU) is exactly what you’d build if you wanted to give game developers the fastest hardware. Microsoft’s approach on the other hand looks a little more broad…It’s a risky strategy for sure, especially given the similarities in the underlying architectures between the Xbox One and PS4. If the market for high-end game consoles has already hit its peak, then Microsoft’s approach is likely the right one from a business standpoint. If the market for dedicated high-end game consoles hasn’t peaked however, Microsoft will have to rely even more on the Kinect experience, TV integration and its exclusive franchises to compete.
06.05.13 |
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Developer “m50d” on Github:
A cup of coffee might not be worth £2. But happiness is, and that’s what I’m buying. If you want me to buy your thing for £2, it had better bring this much joy into my life. Otherwise, I’d rather have another cup.
06.05.13 |
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The New Yorker’s Matt Buchanan:
When I spoke to Google designers across a number of products over the past couple of months, they rejected the idea that this was a top-down revolution. They described it instead as a conversation across the company. While an ascendant Larry Page “put the emphasis on beauty and gave us the freedom to go beyond,” said Gilbert, there’s “no organizational authority making it happen.”
Whatever the real story, from grass roots to a top-down skunkworks factory, it’s working. A year or two ago I wrote off Google’s design chops, especially on an aesthetic level, as dull and uninspired. No longer.
06.04.13 |
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Even though I consider myself quite technically proficient, I’m still often guilty of forgetting passwords all the time, and sometimes using duplicate copies all over the place. Enter 1Password, recommended from endless coworkers, bloggers and tech sites.
I broke down and bought it for half off over the weekend. Hopefully you will soon as well.
05.13.13 |
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iOS developer Dave Addey:
Apple’s iOS hardware business model – currently its largest revenue stream – is based on making a large margin from a premium hardware product. Their trick is hiding this fact from customers, and selling the iPhone and iPad not on their hardware specification, but on what you can do with them. And that, in every Apple advert, is all about the apps…
…This business model means that it is in Apple’s interest for the hardware to be as expensive as possible, and for the apps to be as cheap as possible.
True, and Dave has a lot of smart suggestions. But I don’t expect Apple to offer much of anything in terms of change, especially when iOS is still the considered the premier platform for third party developers. The numbers of the tech savvy begging for paid upgrades and trial periods are dwarfed by those that rarely make big purchases on the App Store.
04.08.13 |
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Author Ryan Holiday:
We’re just regressing.
It’s the one thing I find most disheartening and perhaps most frustrating about this trend. It’s something that needs to be heard, particularly by the people who wrote off these services as Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 relics—the type who said, “Well, nobody used RSS, so good riddance.”
The collapse of these services, to me, represents an alarming reduction of key services designed to improve online information from the user’s perspective.
04.02.13 |
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading through this extended profile of developer Patrick Welker’s setup, as interviewed by tech writer/blogger Shawn Blanc. We share a lot of software in common, and I dig his hardware setup, though mine is far more compact and travel friendly due to my style of work.
04.02.13 |
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Designer Khoi Vinh:
This inverse relationship between active user input and automated output is wonderfully consistent with how real people use mobile software. Unlike desktops, mobile devices are more often than not complements to other, real world activities, where ‘computing’ is not the main activity. Phones and tablets are used in situ, and so their software cannot afford to demand high levels of input effort.
03.26.13 |
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Well known designer Craig Mod shares an interesting solution for revamping the default Twitter.com look with a combination of a Fluid app instance and lots of custom CSS. There’s a chance that Craig broke down and settled on a native app like Tweetbot or Twitterrific since his post; I doubt any power user (including yours truly) would ever be fully satisfied with what the plain site has to offer. But for casual users it’s a really simple workflow, one that’s especially appealing to those that already mostly view Twitter through the website.