August 2008
8 posts
non-cellular Android
Someone should make an Android equivalent to the iPod Touch. I’d buy one.
not your momma's CSS
I’ve been working on an iPhone web app lately, and have gone out of my way to use wild new webkit CSS tricks instead of javascript or image hackery wherever possible.
Among these tricks is CSS animation. We can do animated menus and interface noodling with no more javascript than a simple CSS class change.
#menu {-webkit-transition:height .3s ease-in; } … <div...
Ubiquity
Ubiquity is the first new browser feature I’ve been impressed by since tabs. Maybe this will finally popularize microformats, which up until now seem like a crappy toy: all this kids beg their parents for them at Christmastime, and then don’t know what to do with them once they unwrap the package.
Ubiquity’s “natural language” reminds me of the Graffiti approach to...
Space Invaders "extreme"
Quick memo to any corporation whose intellectual property has been appropriated in the name of Art: “If it happens in a gallery, nobody cares.”
stuck in the 20thC again
Neko Case and Stephin Merritt will be speaking (separately) for a lecture series in San Francisco. City Arts & Lectures does not podcast, nor do they broadcast in Portland, so Case & Merritt might as well be opening for the Apology of Socrates for all the good it’ll do me — but I suppose then there’d at least be a transcript. Does anyone want to tape the damned shows for me?
Kindle 2
I’m not saying I know for a fact that Kindle 2 is coming in November (surely such a statement would require some sort of inside knowledge that could only come from a trusted friend, or some random guy you met at a party), but at any rate: I’m far less interested in Kindle as a device than Kindle as a platform. I hope Bezos is thinking about that.
The current conventional wisdom seems...
fishwrap seppuku
A feature on 5 ways the newspapers botched the web. This list is only the tip of the iceberg. I remember an alt-weekly trade show back in ‘96(?) where there was a booth promoting a system whereby readers could print out an entire issue of a newspaper from the convenience of their home computers.
Watching the various editors and publishers flounder with the Internet for years was incredible....
3 tags
Indie Games
I think this simple little 3-panel comic strip (and the accompanying news post) is going to wind up being one of the important pieces of “software writing” from 2008. There’s nothing terribly insightful about it, but it was the right thing to say at the right time.
Braid is turning into a notable success, which is crazy because it’s brainy, arty, very slow-paced, and on a...