29 Things I, as a designer, wish more tech startups knew
A very good list from Stephen Anderson about what tech startups should really know about when they do design
Links
Hunting down my son's killer
Amazing story from Matt Might, I'm not going to spoil it but it's definitely worth reading.
Superscrollorama jQuery library
A lovely little jQuery library all about animations when scrolling down a page. It's a little bit overdone at the moment, but some of the demos are pretty cool.
Keynote Mockup Templates
Keynotopia have released a set of free templates for mocking up mobile, web and desktop apps in Keynote. Even better, they're free with a tweet too!
15 'old people' icons that don't make sense anymore
Scott Hanselman writes about icons that are based on things we don't use any more. For example, the good old floppy disk means save and clipboards meaning paste
Will Self: The Internet is a false friend
This YouTube video by the English National Opera interviews everyone's professional curmudgeon and novelist Will Self about the internet and recommendation engines.
How text editing on the iPad should be
iOS Developer Daniel Hooper invents a new way of editing text on the iPad, still one of the trickier things to do with the iPad. Personally, I think this is a great way to solve the problem even if it's only a power user feature.
Blind man 'excited' at retina implant
A British man who has been totally blind for many years has had part of his vision restored after surgery to fit a pioneering eye implant. The device, which was fitted behind the retina, has enabled Chris James to perceive light and even some shapes.
How Would Roy Chubby Brown Fans Fix Broken Britain?
This article on Vice Magazine borders on the very thin line between 'look how hilariously ill-informed some people are, haha' and 'look how hilariously ill-informed some people are, *sadface*'
Startups: Bands for Hackers
Okay, this article may include one very laboured metaphor, but the important piece is probably the end paragraph: 'The best startups are made by those who care about their work, not their profits.'
DIY is a community of creative kids
New start-up/community from Vimeo founder Zach Klein based around the idea of kids sharing creative projects that they've made so they can show it off to friends and family. Nice little idea, will be interesting to see how it progresses.
Flying object propels itself by flipping inside out
Video on the New Scientist website of an unusual flying object filled with helium that moves through the air by turning itself inside out in a science-fiction-slash-sea-animal way.
BBC News review the Raspberry Pi
Rory Cellan-Jones investigates the recently released Raspberry Pi, a micro-computer designed to encourage children to learn programming. It comes preloaded with Scratch and Python, but of course it should have included Ruby too!
Dear Python, Why Are You So Ugly?
Ruby sites are aesthetically better than Python sites this article claims. I think there's cherry-picking going on here but on the whole I agree. There are noticeable community attitudes to design that may even go down to the core of how the languages are constructed.
Why Dropbox Avoids Industry Buzzwords Like 'The Cloud'
Article on why Dropbox avoids horrible buzzwords like 'The Cloud' in its copy. It's confusing for users so why not cut all the jargon and for everyone non-technical, it's not how you do it but it's the way you do it.
Learn Code The Hard Way
Well respected programmer Zed Shaw has written several books with accompanying exercises for learning several programming languages. If you want to learn Ruby, Python, C or SQL then you won't go far wrong learning the Hard Way.
Design Is a Job by Mike Monterio
I've not read this A Book Apart book yet, but I love Mike's cantankerous style as heard on the podcast Let's Make Mistakes and his infamous presentation Fuck You Pay Me so I imagine this is more of the same. Can't wait.
That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends.
Great story by Joe Peacock on the perils of being a weird teenager. You want to know what's weird? Spending hours of your life doing things that everyone else is doing because it's cool.
A Startup Founder's Hourly Rate
An article that starts with a quotation of I’m going to teach a course for first-time startup entrepreneurs called stop fucking around and get back to work. is definitely worth reading.
Opera confirms WebKit prefix usage
Opera are forced into support -webkit- CSS prefixes as it seems that a lot of web developers aren't using the equivalent -o- prefixes. I can definitely see this becoming a nightmare to debug.