Teradome.

"I don’t think Yahoo needs to directly monetize Tumblr. Yahoo needs Tumblr because Yahoo doesn’t want..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:58:59 -0400

“I don’t think Yahoo needs to directly monetize Tumblr. Yahoo needs Tumblr because Yahoo doesn’t want to be the kind of company where people are like, “Oh, crap. Yahoo.””

- Squashed

Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:14:36 -0400

yahoo:

This may have been the perfect way to announce this purchase.

Photo

Thu, 16 May 2013 21:13:38 -0400

Don’t want to hum some music into existence? Just draw...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:05:05 -0400

Don’t want to hum some music into existence? Just draw something and snap it into TuneTrace instead.

Katz's at 125

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:23:08 -0400

Katz's at 125:

A great little story from one of my favorite local blogs, Vanishing New York:

Jake says, “I just couldn’t imagine it becoming a condo, or having someone else running it. I could not handle that. So it was an easy decision. If I wasn’t here, this place would disappear.”

What a mensch.

Share opinions about applevsgoogle on Polar This new(?) page...

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:17:53 -0400

Share opinions about applevsgoogle on Polar

This new(?) page layout for open voting on Polar is great.

I definitely enjoy the Polar app over Seesaw since the former is modeled more around sparking discussions and less about delegating decision-making.

Basically, Polar always seems like fun, and Seesaw always feels a bit like an intervention.

How to make a Brooklyn Parent Coffee

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:01:32 -0400

- 1 part coffee
- 1/3 part milk or cream
- 0.38472 to not that important parts maple syrup
- 3 seconds to add a splash of bourbon before the kid notices
- swirl to stir
- rub sore legs as necessary

This is good: Hummed Tunes Instantly Transposed Onto Sheet Music...

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:54:00 -0400

This is good: Hummed Tunes Instantly Transposed Onto Sheet Music - PSFK.

I clearly recall a recorder-like MIDI controller on display at Manny’s in NYC sometime around 1990 that you could hum into, and it would play the notes as if you were using the keys on a synth.

So while this is awesome, I’m still kind of shocked that the technology for applications like this isn’t even more advanced by now.

But yes, this is awesome.

Gaming’s new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide |...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:31:00 -0400

Gaming’s new frontier: Cancer, depression, suicide | Polygon —

Sympathetic to Green’s plight, Ramage was intrigued. A game about a child’s terminal cancer? A game about being the father of a dying child?

Green and Larson showed him their game, That Dragon, Cancer. Ramage sat down facing the bustling room, put on the headphones and played for a few minutes.

That’s all it took. He began weeping.

Massimo Vignelli on Grid-Based Design.

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:43:08 -0400

Massimo Vignelli on Grid-Based Design.

When early moving pictures were first shown, they were mostly...

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:01:00 -0400

When early moving pictures were first shown, they were mostly silent snippets of life: beaches and oceans, city streets, trains pulling into stations. It was said that viewers were so shocked by the experience of feeling like the train was coming at them that they ran out of the theater in fear.¹

This is the 21st century version of that.

Man, the 22nd century is going have such a laugh at us.

A myth maintained by its promoters. In fact, the audience was simply overwhelmed by the impact of this new medium much like this guy — he certainly doesn’t think was actually teleported onto a roller coaster. ↩

This video is funny because it is 100% truth. We have an online...

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:42:58 -0400

This video is funny because it is 100% truth.

We have an online music service that plays music videos and it’s called Vevo. Know who was on the front page of it when I first saw this back when?

Carly Rae Jepsen.

Also: Vevo now has a TV mode where it will play video after video without user input. I’m sure you can guess what kind of music is getting programmed into a generic TV channel without any user influence.

OK, that’s unfair — record labels are users too.

Disclosure: I worked for sputnik7.com back in the day, whose main product was video stations —- streaming videos and live chat in Netscape 4 with RealVideo and Java, so eat that, Vevo — and Palm Pictures was a majority investor. But indie label influence led to an indie label lineup. Our programming would still beat the pants off these guys’.

ibmblr: 13 of 242 frames from the world’s smallest movie I get...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:47:00 -0400

ibmblr:

13 of 242 frames from the world’s smallest movie

I get a real 50s vibe from this whole thing. If Raymond Scott were alive, he’d have written the score.

Ceding the Crown

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:14:00 -0400

Ceding the Crown:

“They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.”

Exactly.

Consumer tech reporting lives on there being lots of choices in the market and the consumer needing an authoritative voice to say “we’ve looked at all of them and this one is the best.”

But in the wake of Apple, not only have their devices consistently been the best, but their devices have increasingly subsumed other devices as the iPhone becomes more and more functional. Now that the iPhone has become our portable game system and mp3 player and organizer and and and, it’s also dragging in other devices into its ecosystem like TVs and… even watches?

When once on the chart towards a mainstream breakthrough, tech outlets have been bounced away into niche audiences. What’s the deal on this new phone? It’s fantastic! Well, it’s not as good overall as an iPhone but if you care about having a 40 MP camera it’s wonderful. But the app market sucks and the battery’s just meh. But hey! 40 MPs!

This must be infuriating to them.

A modest proposal for quoting (once known as "retweeting") users on App.net given the greater character limit that is afforded by the system.

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:04:11 -0400

Original

george: These pretzels are making me thirsty!

Quote

jerry: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george

Re-quote

kramer: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george

Re-quote if you just have to add the person you heard it from because it would hurt their feelings if you quoted it and didn’t give them some small amount of credit for having exposed you to it

kramer: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george (via @jerry)

EVERYBODY GET ON THE DAMN RE-QUOTE WAGON

newman: “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—@george (via @jerry @kramer @elaine @soupnazi)

Mixel is no longer an collage-art remixing iPad tool, but a...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:42:00 -0400

Mixel is no longer an collage-art remixing iPad tool, but a photo grid composition iPhone app. A casualty of its own excellence.

Years ago, a good buddy of mine started a drawing-related webapp that was meant to be a community-focused game and just good fun and appeal to everyone, but I had worried it wouldn’t take off.

As an undergrad art-school survivor, I’d observed two things with great confidence:

People usually do not take criticism easily.
People always think their art could be better.

This is what you are taught in an undergraduate art school setting: how to listen and use criticism, and how to keep creating in order to improve your skills. Ignoring the naturally (over-)confident, and the naturally gifted, these things must be learned.

So when this startup was launched, I was concerned that it would only resonate with people who “knew they could draw” and if talented artists came on board, it would only make the average user more self-conscious of their skill level and less likely to participate.

I get the sense that Mixel ran into this too, and a core set of users became the active community and it didn’t grow much from there. They’ve taken a step back and become much more like the successful art apps of the iOS world like Instagram, et al: A simple scope of creation, a lot of hand holding (that you can skip if you’d like), and features of the app itself that make looking good easy. This can be photo filters, or pen effects and smoothing like Paper for iPad provides. These apps have the ability to make anything you drop in it look better, and that’s the point.

I had high hopes that Mixel would be the thing that crossed that psychological barrier and succeed at a large scale, but I guess some things never change.

I absolutely love these sorts of projects. There’s...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:19:12 -0400

I absolutely love these sorts of projects. There’s something utterly beautiful about being able to shift your perspective to what it was like being a small child:

Peter Opsvik designed the adjustable Tripp Trapp chair after watching his son, Thor — too big for a high chair but too small for an adult chair — struggle for a place at the family dining table; as part of the design process he produced oversize versions of the Tripp Trapp and a standard table and chair to help his team empathize with an average three-year-old child. More than seven million Tripp Trapp chairs have since been sold.

See also: various sequences from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

via MoMA | Century of the Child, ht @monkeyprime

Maily is being touted as “your kid’s first...

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:36:41 -0400

Maily is being touted as “your kid’s first email.”

First impressions: while this video (and app) is all kinds of adorable, I don’t think that email is usually right for the 4-year-old group. For those of you who might think “but it’s just like getting them excited about regular mail!” remember that the regular mail only comes once a day.

That slot-machine behavior of checking email to see if new email has appeared is a real thing. It’s up to you to decide if your child can handle it, and if you think it’s something that needs teaching this early.

chriskelly: This really just boils it all down.

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:52:47 -0400

chriskelly:

This really just boils it all down.

"The advantage of our business model is that we don’t have to think about money very much; our..."

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:15:55 -0400

“The advantage of our business model is that we don’t have to think about money very much; our revenue comes from making great products; not anything else.”

- Phil Libin, Evernote CEO