A great read. Not for Bret’s slightly extreme views of the current state of touch interfaces, but for the deep understanding and insightful explanation of how we interact with the world. Made me think. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

What can you do with a Picture Under Glass? You can slide it.

That’s the fundamental gesture in this technology. Sliding a finger along a flat surface.

There is almost nothing in the natural world that we manipulate in this way.

That’s pretty much all I can think of.

Dave Caolo, on the decision to screen lost interview footage with Steve Jobs in 1996:

This is unsavory to me. I don’t begrudge Cringely’s right to make a buck, but this feels like he’s knowingly profiting on the man’s death and I don’t like it.

Very good post by Merlin Mann on priorities. Read the whole thing.

 You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

He continues:

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.

This might be the one food app I actually end up sticking with. Looks brilliant:

The Eatery is a new “photo sharing” app that’s focused more on health than photography. Instead of being judged on aesthetics photographs are rated based on whether people think the food is healthy or not. Your “photo habits” are also crunched and turned into useful infographics and statistics about how and when you eat, giving you helpful information that you can use to change your eating habits.

via PetaPixel

Gary Ng, via DF:

  

When you’re typing quickly, the light grey dictate key becomes the space bar. If you pause or hesitate your speed ever so slightly, magically, it morphs back to the dictate key again.