Who doesn’t love a good rant? Humanity isn’t static—you can’t just be okay with all development up until the invention of the sarong, and then declare all post-sarong technology to be “unnatural.” Sure, cavemen didn’t have shoes. Until they invented fucking shoes! (You know what else they didn’t have? Discarded hypodermic needles. Broken glass. Used [...]
Almost exactly one year ago, John Gruber criticised the tendency of reviewers to grade to a curve in the context of tablets. Unfortunately, it’s been a year and things haven’t changed much. Consider Vlad Savov’s recent review of the Sony Xperia S for The Verge.1 Savov gives the device a 7.1 making you think this [...]
Businessweek has a story in its latest issue about Sony. It was on the front page of Daring Fireball and linked to a couple of times in my Twitterstream. As a long time Sony fan, I was interested to see what it said. The article is terrible and I have no idea why anyone has [...]
I woke up this morning to read this piece by Latoya Peterson regarding the New York Comic Con panel ‘East Meets West: Art Direction for a Worldwide Audience’ (the piece was originally published on Racialicious). The panel featured Isamu Kamikokuryo, the art director of Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, the art director of Deux [...]
Good web software has a lot of upsides: speed, compatibility, network awareness and seemless updates. Those seemless updates have a downside, though. I use Google Maps three or four times a week. I also live in Japan. Until Saturday, when viewing Google Maps in English, the application displayed placed names in both kanji and romaji. [...]
People that run these create a startup in 48 hours things? They’re snake oil salesmen, pure and simple. They’re selling to software developers a get rich quick scheme in slightly more respectable clothing. There is no substitute for hard work and no short cuts to success. You want to build a business? Great. Be prepared [...]
I use Google services every day. Most of them lack any sort of paid option, so I cannot say I am a loyal customer but I am a loyal information-giver-so-Google-can-better-target-ads-at-me…er. I even click on those ads! And I don’t complain! (I have no in-principle problem with a service being subsidised with advertising.) But today I’m [...]
In response to the Windows 8 video that came out today, John Gruber has a piece at Daring Fireball entitled Why Windows 8 is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad. Gruber praises Microsoft for displaying innovative new thinking when it comes to touch-based devices but is critical of the fact that the touch-based [...]
On 24 March, Google UK & Ireland (of all places) launched a website for a magazine it has produced called Think Quarterly. According to the website, Think Quarterly is a magazine which Google distributes to some of its business partners in order to ‘communicate’. Why Google would want to do this is not clear to [...]
If you wanted to distract yourself from Japan or Libya, Twitter has thankfully obliged. In today’s episode of Tweets of Our Lives, Evan Williams blogged about his thoughts on leaving Twitter. There’s something to be said for Williams’ talents as a programmer and, probably moreso, as a program manager. He’s helped found Blogger and Twitter. [...]