Hacked
The Tumblr account which I use to run The Pilcrow was hacked a few hours ago, hence the spam post (in case you saw it). Bastards.
The problem is now fixed and won’t happen again. My apologies.
The Pilcrow
A Journal by Paulo Zoom
A Journal by Paulo Zoom
The Tumblr account which I use to run The Pilcrow was hacked a few hours ago, hence the spam post (in case you saw it). Bastards.
The problem is now fixed and won’t happen again. My apologies.
Speaking of magazines I’ve (pre-)ordered, you could do worse than supporting Distance on Kickstarter. Distance is a new quarterly publication featuring long-form essays about design and technology
, published by Nick Disabato of Cadence & Slang’s fame.
There’s a lot of writing about the hows and whats of design, but we wonder where the whys are. So much of the writing about why we design, and the ramifications of our work, lacks the research and analysis that is critical to any serious discourse. We want to change that.
The Kickstarter project is already funded and ends in a little more than 48 hours, so hurry up if you want to help. The first issue costs $20 and will begin printing soon.
New good looking 112-page print magazine about people who make digital products:
Welcome to Offscreen, a new, collectible print magazine with an in-depth look at the life and work of people that create websites and apps. We want to tell the less obvious human stories of creativity, passion and hard work that hide behind every interface.
Besides six interviews with creative minds of successful websites, apps and other digital products, each issue includes essays, profiles, workspace photos, and more.
Ordered one for myself. Issue #1 is just $18.
Today, in five hours, two different Kickstarter projects — Elevation Dock and Tim Schafer’s1 designed Double Fine Adventure — reached $1M in funding. I backed Tim’s game, hoping for an iOS or Mac version.
It’s a major highlight for Kickstarter, which has been breaking the publisher barrier between creators and consumers for some time now. I believe the world will now start paying more attention to what they and others are doing, disrupting traditional business models and putting more power in the hands of people like you and me.
As Cabel Sasser put it:
Kickstarter. Steam. App Store. Food carts. Netflix. Square. I like this trend. DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS.
In other words, Kickstarter will make $100.0002 with just these two.
Update: Kickstarter posted a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day’s events.
Tim Schafer is the designer of Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. ↩
Kickstarter takes a 5% from all successful fundings. ↩
A few years after trying CSS Preprocessors for the first time (back then, the only one was SASS), I recently began using them again1. It took me just a few hours to reach the same conclusions that Chris Coyer reached.
For a long time I thought: I write CSS everyday. I know CSS pretty well. My workflow is fine. I’m productive. Why does anything need to change?
The real answer is that nothing needs to change if you don’t want it to. If you’re perfectly happy doing what you are doing: godspeed.
I can tell you that after making the jump, I am actually more productive. And I write better CSS. And the projects I work on are in better, more maintainable shape because of it. And in some cases, faster.
Much like him, I’d advice to learn straight CSS before using any preprocessors.
I think understanding CSS is far more important than some specific preprocessor way of doing things. In fact, if a CSS newbie asked me if they should learn SASS as they are learning CSS, I’d probably say no. Learn how CSS works and then later see how preprocessors can help you.
(This interview is in portuguese)
A few months ago, Pedro Telles, the host of showcasePT, a podcast about portuguese people doing techie things, invited us for an interview about Listary, which is now posted.
I had the pleasure of spending 30 minutes talking about my background, the goals behind Listary, how people may use it, the crowded productivity market, the reliance on Simplenote, why we don’t sync with Dropbox yet, and more.
You can stream or download:
Doing a podcast is quite fun.
While exchanging emails with a friend about doing our own thing, I asked myself:
Why the hell do I make Listary? Why am I putting so much time and effort into something that, in the end, doesn’t make enough money?”
This is what I concluded:
Works for us.
There’s a new iPod touch TV ad from Apple. It’s interesting. Here’s what it shows:
It’s a great ad, but what’s most interesting about it is that the Music app shows up for just one second (00:23s), and very late in the ad (30s long). Music doesn’t matter much anymore.
With previous ads, Apple made clear that they see the iPod touch as a great portable gaming device. But now, with iMessage, this could perfectly be and iPhone ad. More than a game console, the iPod touch is the almost-iPhone-but-without-a-contract, the perfect christmas gift.
I wonder if and when we’ll see an iPod touch 3G.
(via @bdc)
Merlin Mann:
There’s a very unkind phrase that I’ve actually applied to myself. The phrase “poser” or “poseur”.
This is where you take on all the trappings and all of the affectations of something, and where you end up doing some pantomime version of something that’s theoretically interesting to you.
That could be an artist, it could be an activist, it could be a programmer, but it could be something where you have watched enough of this one kind of thing to be able to mimic it to your own level of satisfaction, that you feel like you look like that kind of thing.
But no matter how good you get at looking like you do a certain kind of thing, or looking like you are making certain kind of thing, it’s absolutely no solution for being able to produce that thing.
Go listen to it. It gets better halfway through.
Starting next January, I’m joining the teaching staff of a postgraduate course on Web Design, here in Portugal, at ESAD1.
It’s a year-long course that will teach the web to a small group of students, three days a week, with evening classes. We will teach the web of 2011, with an up-to-date curriculum comprised of topics such as digital culture, the history of the medium, designing for the web, HTML/CSS and programming. Students will work on their own project and we’re planning to invite a few special guests to come over and talk to our students.
I was absolutely thrilled and humbled when Tiago invited me to be part of the staff. I’ll be teaching a bit about the history of the Web, and more on programming topics, specially about best practices and progressive enhancement. That’s what’s on the curriculum.
But there’s a bigger and more important message that I want to pass to our students. It’s this feeling that we are all part of the web, we shape it with our work and our discussions, and as such, we should care about the future of this wonderful and very young medium. And the best way to do it is by caring about the quality of what we do. Simon Collison wrote it best in the first issue of The Manual:
In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennet proposes that craftsmanship is a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Sennett sees this as a core value, one available to every person working on the web. So the question is: Do I want to simply make a living and move from project to project building websites a getting things done, or do I want to imbue my every process with the skill, integrity, and value of a true craftsman?
If I can get a single student to fall in love with their craft, learn on their own, and care about this industry, I’ll be fulfilled.
The applications for the postgraduate are open, and close in a few weeks, on December 4th. You can know more about it at the official website.
