The article helped me express an uncertainty that’s been floating back and forth in my mind for some time. I use my iPod Touch on a daily basis and I’ve been loving the multitouch trackpad on the new Macbooks. I love the swiping motions for window management and moving things around. At the same time I’ve started drawing by hand again (I loved drawing as a kid) and I realize that putting a pencil to paper is a rather complex but very fulfilling activity. Strangely enough I think that both the pencil and the touch-based iOS interface have a lot in common. In both cases, the actual physical device almost disappears letting you focus on the underlying application. The iPad or iPhone itself is just a thin frame around whatever app you’re using. The pencil is basically just a simple pointer but allows us to create an infinited range of images with it.

However in both cases, the expressiveness offered by the device is not enough. Pencils are not enough to express all the images we might want to create. That’s why we have pens, brushes, chalk, crayons and a variety of papers and canvases. The flat touch interface is also not enough, especially if we are confined to a small surface that fits in one hand. The question then is how we can take the simplicity of our current touch interface and extend them to a larger set of expressions and interactions?

Case in point is the camera interface on the iPhone. For a long time there was a software button that you had to touch to take a picture. But that meant sticking your finger in the middle of the picture. Normal cameras have a better interface: there is shutter button on the top that keeps your hands far from the actual image (even if you’re using a LCD screen instead of a traditional viewfinder). This deficient interface on the iPhone led to the Red Pop, a giant red shutter button and now iOS 5 turns one of the hardware volume buttons into a shutter button.

The Red Pop camera interface for the iPhone

Having a fluid, upgradeable, customizable software interface is nice and I like smooth gradients and rounded corners as much as the next guy. But our hands evolved to use actual physical matter and before computer interfaces we built a lot of interesting physical interfaces. Apple has hooked us on the idea of sleek, smooth devices with no extraneous. While it’s great to lose unnecessary knobs and edges the Apple design philosophy might not be best in the long run, especially if your device’s UI doesn’t neatly fit into the touch-drag-swipe system of gestures.

Ultimately it would be great to have “smart matter” physical interfaces – the flexibility and programmability of software with the physical usability that solid matter offers. Imagine some sort of rearranging material (based on some form of nano- or micro-technology maybe?) that can be be a simple smooth shell around your interfaces but can change to form buttons, sliders, knobs or big red shutter buttons as your application requires. But in the years (decades?) between now and then we need other solutions. The range of accessories and extensions available for the iPhone (including the Red Pop, tripods, lenses etc.) seem to suggest that enterprising young device maker could use the iPhone (and it’s successors and competitors) as a computing core to which they can attach their own physical extensions. With a more open and hackable platform (an Android-Arduino hybrid perhaps) we might see a thriving device market as well as an app market. Am I a dreamer? Hell yeah, but as the projects I’ve linked to show, I’m certainly not the only one.

Steve Jobs in 1982

I was hoping to meet him in person one day. But now I’m going to get back to work. Life is short.

OpenPCR joins a list of recent technological milestones including 3D printing, cheap embedded microcontrollers, ubiquitous computing and broadband Internet connections. The technological scene is supported by social phenomena like the open source movement, coworking and hacker spaces and organizations like Kiva and Kickstarter. The rise of increasingly powerful DIY technology and the surrounding social systems is pushing us toward what can best be described as the Age of the Maker.

Going from idea or innovation to self-sustaining product doesn’t require large factories or upfront investments anymore. As projects like OpenPCR and Coffee Joulies show it’s feasible to create a truly novel, popular product combining nothing more than talented, hard-working creators and willing customers. I’d like to believe that this is the beginning of a new industrial age, one that produces a similar improvement in the quality of human life without many of the bad side-effects of the last one. This revolution focuses on the individual and the small team rather on the factory. Sure, there are businesses and there is manufacturing, but the point of it all is not just profit. Profit is important, but a lot of people and groups I just mentioned are doing it largely because it’s fun and exciting.

Technology and the means of production are becoming increasingly democratic. What can be accomplished by small groups of focussed individuals leveraging modern technology is truly amazing. The software industry has already shown that small groups of people can create products and services that change the world. Today’s generation of makers and hackers are taking that a step further – showing that such world changing innovation doesn’t have to be limited to software.

I’m not an economist, but I’d argue that in many ways we’re seeing a reinvention of capitalism. Financial capital doesn’t have to be concentrated in the hands of a few – it can be widely distributed among the masses – millions of customers around the world. What is needed are people with ideas and skills that can bring that capital together just-in-time to create a product – the makers. And we now have the services required to bring the capital in (the Internet, Kickstarter, Kiva) and the cheap infrastructure needed to get the product out (UPS, FedEx, etc.). With OpenPCR, Arduinos, 3D printers and the we’re democratizing and distributing the means of production.

If you’re someone who likes building cool, interesting things there has never been a better time to be alive. The Industrial Revolution brought about mass production and cheap commoditized goods. But it also decimated independent artisans and craftsmen. Today we’re just getting ready to put all the manufacturing power of modern industrializaton back in the hands of individuals with ideas and skills. With today’s technology Leonardo da Vinci may have been able to build his flying machines.

What have you made today?

No, my current dilemma is far less technical. There are two books I really want to buy right now: Seth Godin’s Poke the Box and the just-released Anything You
Want by Derek Sivers. Both of them are available on Amazon in Kindle and hardcover, dead-tree form. The problem is that for both of them the ebook version is just about a dollar less than the hardcover version. For the Poke the Box, it’s just 30c.

From an author’s or publisher’s perspective I can understand why you’d want that kind of pricing. Perhaps you don’t want readers to feel like either version is a
second-class citizen. Perhaps you don’t want readers without a Kindle to be put off buying. Perhaps you want to tell your readers that either choice is fine and you, as publisher, are ambivalent on the subject of print versus digital. I think all of them are perfectly valid decisions. But as someone who isn’t pre-decided one way or the other, it makes the decision harder, not easier.

Here’s a (probably incomplete list) of all the things that I’ve been thinking about over the past few days regarding my choices, not in strict order: Oooh.. look Kindle versions! Now I can take them with wherever I go. But wait, the hardcover is less than a dollar more. If I get the hardcover I’ll have something nice and physical and DRM-free to keep on my bookshelf. And I don’t randomly start reading on my Kindle so I could probably just plan ahead and carry the book when I think I’ll read it. But the hardcover is probably going to be heavy and I have to move on a fairly regular basis. I don’t want to move too much heavy stuff, but then again I move once a year at most. The rest of the time it’ll sit on my bookshelf and I do like the look of a well-filled bookshelf. And if it’s in plain view instead of tucked inside the Kindle I’ll
probably reread it again at some point. But paper books are so last century and the Kindle is just gorgeous.

So on and so forth. You get the point.

In general I agree with Craig Mod: the future of books is digital and paper books will move closer and closer towards Collectors Item status. Instead of being cheap, mass produced blocks of paper, they’ll become careful, hand-crafted works of art. And I for one am quite happy with that. The problem is that there is this awkward growing-up phase as digital book technology matures. That phase is now. One of the results of that awkwardness is the indecision I’m currently facing. If these were mass market paperbacks that I’m going to read on a plane flight and never again I would get the Kindle versions in a heartback. But they’re not. They’re both books I think I’ll like, would want to keep and can see myself rereading. If the reading experience on the Kindle wasn’t as top-notch as it is, I would get the hardcovers. But the argument in favor of ebooks and ereaders has gotten good enough that the choice between the two is not an easy one by any measure.

For me the idea of books is intimately connected with the idea of libraries. I don’t just want to read the books and absorb them, I want to have a growing library of my reading as well. And though I could make some kind of digital ”have read” list, there is something about a physical library that tugs at my heartstrings. It’s the idea of having a set of books that in some way is a reflection of myself. They contain words and ideas that are now a part of me. Not all books I read would go into this library (most textbooks would not make the cut), but hopefully anything that I willimingly buy would. In an ideal world I’d be able to “rent” the ebook version for an absurdly low price (say 50c a day). Then I could read it and if I decided it was a “keeper” I would buy the dead-tree version for my library.

At this point I officially hand this question to the wisdom of the Internets. For a $1 difference, which version would you buy and why?

(And no, I am not going to scrounge around for a “free” PDF copy. That defeats the point of everything I just said. I want to give the authors my money, but I want to make a good investment myself as well. The two purposes can be aligned, I’m just not sure how.)

Given my personal preference for minimalism, it is a bit odd that I’d critique an app for doing too little. But I’m coming to realize that pure minimalism is the wrong approach to take towards modern software. We live in an era of incredibly powerful, well-connected machines. And yet most of our day-to-day software does little more than the equivalent software of years past. It’s one thing to say that our software should do a small number of things well instead of bombarding the user with lots of unused features. But it’s another thing to say that we shouldn’t be trying to press the boundaries of what our software is genuinely and usefully capable of.

iAWriter strikes me as a particular example of this trend. It may be a very well designed (and perhaps even beautiful) text editor, but at the end of the day it’s still just a text editor. Sure it has some plus points: it supports live Markdown rendering, but the implementation is personally unsatisfying — if you’re going to render Markdown, why keep the plaintext Markdown characters? It also ignores the fact that most of the text we seem to be writing nowadays is for sharing. All the bloggers going crazy over it seem to miss the fact that it doesn’t connect to their blogs in any way, leaving them to manually copy-paste or come up with some elaborate (if clever) hack job to go from editor to web page. Let me reiterate: iA Writer is a beautiful text editor, but that’s all that it is. And that’s a shame because I’d like to see great engineering and designing talent go into helping me do my job better rather than just making me drool. The one part of that I feel genuinely makes it a better editor is focus mode: that’s something I’d like to see get into other text-based applications.

In contrast to iAWriter is Instapaper. It’s admired by a lot of the people who seem to have taken a liking to iAWriter. But the big difference is that Instapaper actually moves consumer computing forward. I can click a little bookmarklet on any text-heavy page on the web and instantly the text gets extracted and sent to a variety of reading devices. It fundamentally changes the way I do reading on the web, it’s not an incremental upgrade or an aesthetic redesign. It actually does more and better than any software tool before it. That’s the direction I would like to see our software going.

As I think about more about the state of consumer software it becomes abundantly clear that I am very much a power user. Ben Brooks loves iAWriter because it helps him focus on writing instead of being distracted by things like tweaking the user interface. He says that the end product of that focus — better articles — is what matters even if he has to do a whole lot of copy/pasting and manual editing to get there. All he cares about is the end product, not how he got there. For me, that’s not enough. I want a good, polished end product, but as a creator I want a great workflow, tuned to my specific needs. That’s why I use Emacs, Jekyll and LaTeX for a lot of my longform writing. (I’m considering sitting down and integrating WordPress into the flow too.)

In a more general sense, we don’t want to be making separate programs for power users and non-power users. We shouldn’t have Emacs for me and iAWriter for Ben Brooks. What we need is for everyone to be a power user. Not in the sense that they all use Emacs and Linux, that’s superficial. But users need to be able to tune their workflow and tools to their specific needs. Ben should have an editor that has beautiful fonts and focus mode and let’s him one-click publish to the web using whatever platform he likes. But to do that users need both the tools that facilitate such power use and the skills and mentality to make their customizations. Unfortunately I’m not very optimistic about either, not at the moment anyway. Feel free to make me feel more hopeful in the comments.

Blogging is dead you say. Good riddance I say.

You see, the rise of self-publishing has brought with it a curious dilemma. Now that everyone can publish, we have been hoping that everyone would publish. There was the hope that the World Wide Web would become humanity’s common forum. A living, evolving and simultaneously permanent record of billions of voices, all saying something worth listening to. But caught up in the euphoria of being able to give every person a voice we failed to stop and ask ourselves — who was going to sit and listen to all the voices? Who would pay attention to all the words? Was everything even worth giving an ear to?

And somewhere along the road we grew tired of all the voices. What was supposed to be a beautiful song sung by an enormous choir turned out to be just a raucous cacophony. Sure, there were some heart-wrenching diaries, some journals of hard-earned wisdom, some chronicles of advice worth listening to. But by and large, we didn’t get what we were looking for. Blogs became corporate mouthpieces. They became lists of pointers to other blogs. They become endless collections  of bullet points as if there were always “5 ways” of doing something or “7 tips” that would make life better. As Twitter drove the upper limit for expression down to 140 characters and people lamented the death of print, we were ready to throw up our hands and say that humanity’s attention span (for both reading and writing) had been permanently truncated. The blog was dead, because what we wanted wasn’t to pour our heart out to the Internet. What we wanted was just brief banter with groups of “friends”. Along with print, blogs were the other great casualty of 21st century social media.

But like all sweeping generalizations, we know that isn’t quite true. As Brent Simmons asks, “If blogs are dead, what are we reading in Instapaper?” If blogs are dead, why does Jekyll exist? If blogs are dead, then why the hell am I spending 2-3 hours a day, 3 days a week typing at a keyboard when I could be reading in coffee shops and looking all erudite? (That last one was a rhetorical question, don’t answer it)

Blogs are dead. And they’ve already been reborn.

What died is the idea of all human voices singing together in a chorus. Because we don’t all sing well and even if we did, it would be terribly boring to sing the same song. Instead we’re now partaking in a million different conversations on a dozen different platforms — blogs, tumblelogs, linkrolls, Facebook, Twitter, Github. The blog is being redefined as just one of a myriad number and types of platforms. The blog is a becoming platform for longform text — for ideas and expressions that can’t (and shouldn’t) be compressed into 140 characters. They’re becoming thought platforms, not just voice platforms. Blogs are turning to good writing, good design, great ideas expressed in hundreds of long words rather than short bullet points.

Blogging is dead, because writing something worth reading is hard. Blogging is dead, but self-expression isn’t. So if you have something to say, by all means say it. Just remember that you’ll have to say it well and loud if you want to be heard. Good luck.

A few weeks ago Readability announced a satellite service in the form of a URL shortener called Rdd.me. This service not only shortens the URL but also injects some JavaScript that places an unobtrusive bar at the bar at the top of the page that gives you a link the cleaned up, readability version of the site. Even though I dislike the idea of a URL shortener in general (I would like to see where I am going, thank you very much) I think Rdd.me is actually a good complement to Readability

.

The implementation is well done and I really like the fact that they don’t automatically apply the Readability view for you. A growing number of websites out there are actually well designed and I like being able to see the variety and creativity. However for the times that I do want something cleaner Rdd.me does a really good job. I think the service caches the Readability view version of the page because it seems to load faster than applying the browser plugin. I like the feeling that Readability is actively trying to make the web reading experience better for me and giving me the control I need to customize my experience. I am starting to use Readability even for reasonably well-designed sites (if the font is too small or the colors seem off). But that’s a personal preference and I’m glad that Rdd.me keeps that decision in my hands.

One thing that I do think is lacking with Rdd.me is integration with Twitter clients. If Rdd.me (and by extension, Readability) is going to make a dent in the URL-shortening game it needs popular Twitter clients to offer it as an option. I don’t know of any clients that actually do offer it at this point, but I would really love to see it available. As someone who wants to help the reading revolution along I would rather use Rdd.me than Bit.ly or any of the others (since I don’t really care about “tracking” who visits my shortened links). So if you’re working on a Twitter client (or know someone who is) please have Rdd.me as a URL shortening option.

I have to admit that I haven’t actually used Rdd.me myself. I don’t share that many links via Twitter and I prefer posting the full URL if I can. If it’s too big I generally just use default shortener because it’s faster and I have more important things to do than a copy-paste dance. I’m sure there are a lot more people like myself who are casual linkers on Twitters and will go for the default, least resistance option. That’s why getting Rdd.me into Twitter clients is essential.

Rdd.me is one of those services that fulfills a nice little niche and does it well enough that you don’t have to write long pieces detailing its functionality. It’s a simple tool that does one thing well and makes the UNIX user in me happy. The next time you need to shorten a URL and don’t mind doing some copy-pasting, Rdd.me is highly recommended.

I don’t consider myself much of a news junkie (though a lot of the current tech articles and blogs I read daily could be considered news). I don’t have very strong opinions about the way the news conglomerates are trying to adapt nowadays (though paywalls do leave a bad taste in the mouth). However, I do agree with how Mandy identified the current situation as “breaking ranks” and why that’s really important. I believe that the most important things happen when this sort of rank-breaking takes place — when an idea or product starts moving in a direction that takes it away from what we consider its natural surroundings.

Case in point is the iPad (which I’m still agonizing over buying, by the way). I see the iPad as indicative of the way people use information breaking ranks with the way people use computers. The form factor, the app store, the interaction model everything is sharply different from what came before it and yet is more in-tune with what’s important — letting people use and interact with data and information without technology getting in the way. It’s unconventional, slightly alien and a fair number of people wish it would just go away.

Even on a personal level, progress is made when ranks get broken. Lately the way I need to work in order to get stuff done has come into conflict with the general environment I want to work in. I want to work in the sunny, spacious and generally aesthetically pleasing college library. But the library is generally filled with people and as a programmer and writer I work best in solitude so that I can concentrate without distractions. The way I want to work is breaking ranks with the way I need to work. The solution in this case is to go to the library in the morning — when it’s sunniest and yet there are few people. I can find a nice quiet spot and get work done. I carry my Chrome Netbook with Ubuntu to do my writing and some light hacking (more on that in a later post). In the afternoons and evenings I retreat to my room for music without headphones and my desk Linux machine to get to more heavy duty hacking. It’s been working out pretty well so far.

Progress and improvement, whether it’s personal or large-scale social and technical, is a combination of both slow, gradual improvements and larger quantum leaps. When situations get to breaking points small tweaks and improvements won’t do. You can’t drag print media to the Internet by just digitizing content. You can’t get a sizable increase in your productivity if you stick to your old habits and routines. When the breaking of ranks starts, you have to take equally ambitious measures to ensure that the breaking is for the better and that what comes out of the process is more than what went in.

There will always be someone telling you that you’re not hip enough, famous enough, edgy enough or whatever enough. That’s their agenda. What’s yours?

Shun the non-believers.

And it’s not just for expert chefs. It’s for hackers, artists, writers, even students. Anyone who makes things, does things and wants to make a mark on the world. And that means all of us.

Here’s the thing. One day some enterprising young college student with a blog will see what you’re doing, or hear about you or somehow stumble upon your work. Said student will then will then want to write a blog post praising your work because he thinks it’s cool and wants everyone to know about it. The college student will then go to Google, type in your name and expect to find to find a reasonably detailed website or blog so that he can learn more about you and put a link to it in his post. However if there is nothing to find except some random third-party accounts of who you are and what you’ve done (or worse yet, a Facebook page) this enterprising college student will simply go away. And a few dozen (or hundred) people who could have known about your work, won’t.

This isn’t the 1990′s anymore. Having a stable web presence doesn’t mean having to craft HTML by hand or being your own sysadmin. It just means knowing how to sign up for a WordPress account and having reasonably decent writing skills. Yet people who really should know better and would benefit greatly from a web presence are completely oblivious to how the Internet can help them.

Weak ties are important. It’s great to have a close group of personal friends and associates whom you meet everyday and with whom you have a lot in common. But having a large network of weak links — people who you are connected to, but who are not in your “clique” is also important. These weak ties are people who you meet at random at a friend’s barbeque, the person sitting in the seat next to you at a concert, the person who hears about you, thinks you’re interesting and joins your Twitter conversations. According to a classic paper published in the 70s people are three times as likely to have found their current job via a weak link than through formal methods (headhunters or classifieds). Weak ties also help spread trust and support and could be a factor in the success of social movements.

Luckily for us, the Internet and the web make forming and leveraging weak links easier than ever. Ask and thou shalt receive, all you have to do is reach out and you have a world of connections waiting for you. So please put yourself out on the web for people to find you. Make it easy for these weak ties to be formed, for people to come out and help you with what you’re doing. You don’t have to be looking for a job or starting a social movement to get benefit out of weak ties, the best part of the story is that you can get benefits and opportunities when you least expect them. You’re not limited to the people in your office or neighborhood and you don’t have to be rich and famous to have a worldwide loose network.

The game has changed, the rules are a bit different, but in many ways it’s a lot more fun. Go get yourself a web presence and come join us on the field. There’s always room for one more.