Suggested reads for April 8, 2018

• Apps aren’t dead, they’ve just evolved
• Silicon Valley should welcome the scrutiny
• Five Things Nobody Has Told You About The Apple iMac
• Zuckerberg and the Imaginary Cosmopolitan
• Diagnosing the Italian disease

 

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suggested reads for April 2, 2018

OK, I know … today’s Easter Monday and the sun shines and the weather is fantastic (at least here). Perfect day for going out and have a wonderful offline time. But if you’re not in such position – or mood – and want to relax at home reading something, here are my ‘classic’ five link list of posts worth a mention…

• IBM’s Quest To Design The “New Helvetica”
• Why IBM Created Its Own Typeface After A Century Without One
• Researchers can determine what smartphone a photo was taken on by analyzing it
• Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
• Firefox is on a slippery slope

Move Slowly and Fix Things

Designers and programmers are great at inventing software. We obsess over every aspect of that process: the tech we use, our methodology, the way it looks, and how it performs.
Unfortunately we’re not nearly as obsessed with what happens after that, when people integrate our products into the real world. They use our stuff and it takes on a life of its own. Then we move on to making the next thing. We’re builders, not sociologists.
This approach wasn’t a problem when apps were mostly isolated tools people used to manage spreadsheets or send emails. Small products with small impacts.
But now most software is so much more than that. It listens to us. It goes everywhere we go. It tracks everything we do. It has our fingerprints. Our heart rate. Our money. Our location. Our face. It’s the primary way we communicate our thoughts and feelings to our friends and family.
It’s deeply personal and ingrained into every aspect of our lives. It commands our gaze more and more every day.
Jonas Downey

Suggested reads for April 23, 2017

• Tim Berners-Lee: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it
• Kai Brach’s Indie Magonomics – making a sustainable indie print magazine
• Does software performance still matter?
• In praise of cash
• Erin Books’ Getting Great iPhone7+ Portrait Mode Shots Guide

Not Knowing is Power

Our growth, both personally and as a society, is dependent on knowledge. And yet. Our brains are only so big, and our physical capabilities limited. Are we meant to know everything? Do we really need all this information just because it is available to us? Is this where we break?
Tobias van Schneider

Suggested reads for April 2, 2017

• A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages
• Apple’s iCloud is a multi-cloud beast
• The benefits of learning how to code layouts with CSS
• The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb
• Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people

The last two articles proposed are really dear to my heart and feelings on how the web has to grow to be a better version of ourselves… and the last one is one of the most intelligent and greatly written post on the topics I’ve ever read.

Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people

5. Engage in dialogue with people who are different from you.
One of the hardest things is to understand the other side. The rift between groups of people, conflict, and controversy is what clickbait thrives on. Squelch it. This is probably the hardest one to do, because we are hardwired to block out people we disagree with. Get off Facebook. Talk to people in good comment sections. Visit sites with comments. Encourage your favorite publication to moderate comments. Volunteer to be a moderator.

This does not mean subjecting yourself to pointless, toxic arguments with people who can’t be convinced. It does not mean ruining your mental health in comment sections that are not civil. It means, little by little working to change minds, and engaging with the internet around us.

We are a LONG, long ways away from the destruction of the internet as a giant billboard. It takes time to turn a huge skyscraper into an gutted shell of a building, and it will take just as much time to turn our current internet from a loud, obnoxious, toxic mall, back into a public forum.
Vicki Boykis, Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people

suggested reads for February 19, 2017

• The invasion of Sharing Buttons: Why less is more
• I Used to Be a Human Being — a long and insightful article on our disturbed relationship with the endless flow of notifications;
• Le Cobusier’s color theory explained
• Five Newsroom Tips for Better Website Content
• The Coming Revolution in Email Design
  

  “Email, the web’s much maligned little cousin, is in the midst of a revolution—one that will change not only how designers and developers build HTML email campaigns, but also the way in which subscribers interact with those campaigns.”

Suggested reads for February 12, 2017

• Competing with the iPhone’s specs is harder than it seems
• Rediscovering Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1987
• User Onboarding: A Comprehensive Guide
• Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer
• Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded

Are We at the Start of a Tech World War?

To borrow from Bernie Sanders’s stump speech, the richest 1 percent in America have almost 40 percent of our country’s wealth, while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of the debt. This is largely the result of technology. And just wait until our work force is truly affected by the rise of robots and automation.
— Nick Bilton