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It's a user driven site. At millions of people it's obviously not entirely personality driven, but still the site is driven by the actual individual people who submit and comment. They generate not just the content but the tone of the site, which is what keeps people coming back. You can't treat them like a straight up commodity that can be swapped in and out.

I've been partial to our jobs page art since it went up a few years ago http://www.telltalegames.com/company/jobs/

The quote at the top of this article, from one of the people involved is literally "I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives," which makes me think that maybe they just don't understand how the internet works?

The sound studio we use to record dialog for our games has started using iPads both for occasional music stands, and (more importantly) for sharing the live running script and notations across everyone working to record. They seem to love it. It's definitely not being used for pure content creation, but you're right that as an accessory it has many applications.

I think Twitter officially supporting and converting URLs into a token at the time a tweet was written would do the trick fine. The 140 limit is what made them, but URLs are obviously a point of failure and frustration, hence the near constant hulabaloo over shorteners and redirects etc. It'd surprising to me that Twitter hasn't offered an official solution for URLs yet, to be honest. They saw people were using @ to reply, and supported it. They saw hash tags and retweets show up and supported them, too. But most users go to a third party to handle links.

The fact that you toiled at that design for a weekend is part of why your designer friend could turn something around so quickly.

When your designer knows the basics of how programming works, and when your programmer has a grasp of the tenets of design, neither person has to operate as if the other is some sort of stupid magician. It's so refreshing.

"Google ad service sees more traffic on Google device." AdMob wasn't always Google but they are now. "iAd traffic surges on iPhone OS devices! Android left in the dust!"

"This is the reason you want to still work here helping us make great stuff, instead of jumping ship because of perceived morale/culture death," for starters.

Selling it to Gawker for $5,000 is the opposite of returning it to its owner. There's no way around this really.

Didn't stop at least the front half of almost every iPod ever, or the hard ridged edges on the sides of the Magic Mouse, etc. I would personally probably prefer the next iPhone to continue the trend of rounded-off edges, too. I just wouldn't put it past Apple to not do that.

Doh you're right that the iPod did round off its corners for two or three generations - the one with the four touch buttons, and the first clickwheel designs. They sharpened the edges back up when they went to the "Classic" though.

The iPod is the exception because it started that trend, and Apple has brought everything in line with it.

Quick, which Apple product is this: http://www.photoshopnerds.com/images2/xp_icon_01.jpg

It's an... iPhone. No, an iPod. No, it's a Studio Display or iMac turned to portrait orientation. No, its a widescreen MacBook with the lid closed. No its the front-on view of a Mac Pro... It's an Apple TV from the top down which has been squished in Photoshop... It's an Airport Express base station. Or it's a 4G iPhone. Who knows!

Unlike the current iPhones, iPad's sides are hard edged as well. The "crease" from the border of the iPad to the back of it is a very hard, un-smoothed edge, as is the crease on the front (see the far right http://www.miproconsulting.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/... it's only bulbous because they need space for the guts -- the actual point where the back meets the border bezel is a hard edge).

Despite the way they got stereotyped with the bondi-blue iMac (ten years ago!), Apple tends to not actually like super bubbly or round industrial design, as evidenced in the shapes of all of their displays, notebooks, Apple TV, Time Capsule, and the current iMac family. Bringing their phones in line with the "its a metal border with four rounded corners, containing inset glass on the usable faces" would be 100% in tune with the rest of their current aesthetic. iPhone is currently the weird exception, especially with the plastic backs they have right now.

Also see: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/18/apple-ceramic-pa...

Do the touch APIs let you look at the actual dimension of a finger press, or is it just an x/y coordinate? I mean, does the information come across as a circle or as total surface area lit up by the touch or anything? I don't know the tech behind the Apple touch stuff at all.

Oh, you're talking about the future! That's far more awesome.

... but most commonly they are imported from Mexico.

If the project is an industrial design project, or a branding related project, using an existing identity and it's associated set of rules gives a project structure. The request to use a known brand is usually part of the assignment from the teacher.

This is like having a programming student code a Hangman game. The point of that, what you expect your student to get out of it, is totally different than an assignment where you say "design and program any game."

The very machine you mention can be found... In the past! Soft drinks, like milk and juice bottles, used to be reused and refilled. I guess it was cheaper to fire all deliverymen and not run refilling machines when bottles could be made out of thin, throwaway plastic instead.

Most soft drink bottles still say "non-refillable" on them, even though no refilling services exist, even if you wanted to.

Ugh sorry, I just accidentally downvoted this while trying to upvote it. Sorry again. Thanks for the link!

Firefox has been slowly winning Joe consumers in the past few years by simply doing it better. Faster, less complicated, no spyware, displays everything. Regular users don't give a crap about the ideology behind any of those decisions, they just cared that FF sucks less than IE in almost every measurable way.

From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.

I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now. Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many content creators on the other side.

If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who "just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or anything else - the impression they gave at least, was of practical and clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.

The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation, they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and annoying life" marketing campaign.

I love that this game series is still spawning theories like this, 20 years later.

This is a great reminder of what's stayed the same more than what's different. Or, at least, how gradual the change has been. The jump from 9.x to 10.0 is surprisingly subtle compared to the jump from 9.x to Snow Leopard.

If you boot up an Apple II without a disk in the drive (or something incredibly simple like that), it drops into AppleSoft Basic. That's how I learned that one could program a computer. For sample code I could turn to a number of magazines about my computer, or the manual that came with it. No questions or outside research dependent on anyone else (including the Internet) were required. This was when I was of single-digit age. The barrier to entry was tiny (type "10 print hello world" at the command prompt). Nothing like that exists for a curious child at this point unless their parents take the initiative, or the child waits until they're older.

The posted link's dated 2007 and yours is dated 2009, though, unless I'm mistaken.

Or allow greater back catalog access. "want to watch that whole season you missed?" it would compete directly with Netflix and Amazon on demand that way.

You pay a guy to build your deck. He does a shitty job. That's the web developer you shouldn't have hired in the first place. You then pay someone else to come and paint it. That's the SEO guy you're now paying to band-aid your busted crap and make you feel like it's all okay.

If you're bringing in SEO as a band-aid until you can hire an honest to god full time developer/designer or build up a real web department, or whatever, that's probably okay as long as you're admitting that.

If you're bringing in an SEO guy to do nothing but turd-polish, and you're calling it "optimization," something's wrong, and from experience and conversations I've had about SEO with friends, unwilling-to-admit-that-we're-polishing-a-turd seems to be an extremely popular reason to bring in SEO guys.

True, you haven't been conned, you've just made two shitty hiring decisions in a row -- paying sone designer or developer who didn't build you a good site, and then paying a snake oil salesman to try and make your troubles disappear.

Calling them "screenshots" and using the word "development" both in the present tense when talking to potential customers is telling them implicitly that not only do you have the skills and competency to deliver this functional piece of software, but that you are already in the process of doing so. Unfortunately none of that is actually proven explicitly by what you're showing, as all of the functional coding implied doesn't actually exist.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, if all you've done is paid a designer to give you some visual and functional mockups, well, that means absolutely nothing about your ability to actually code and deliver the product.

Also the fact that they could write the code to support the designs isn't the issue. The issue is that they didn't, and didn't say so. It's giving the impression that they are operating at what seems to be an amazing speed supporting what presumably appears to be a fully fleshed out user experience, etc, when all that exists might be a design/pitch doc and some jpegs. Programmingprowess is implied. Frontend to backend functionality is implied. Progress is implied. When you leave things implied, then blame your customer for not catching the fact that you weren't explicit about details and therefore you weren't lying to them after all, you're doing it wrong.

It's like that episode of Arrested Development where they go to show clients a model home, only to have one of the walls fall down to reveal nothing inside but a bunch of air, and two people who thought they were hiding inside making out.

They may not be lying with this approach -- they do have screenshots, the same way the guys in that sitcom really did have four walls and a roof -- but they're also setting themselves up for a pretty killer "I don't think you've been entirely honest with me" conversation with a client if one of those walls happens to fall over a bit and reveal what's inside.

Tweetie 2 is one of the few apps with reasonably robust settings exposed to turn off or selectively use auto rotation.

You might be a fantastic writer, but without a good editor, and (in the case of one-offs like books) probably a good publisher, nobody will see it, or know it.

The analogy of editor/publisher to aggregators/search engines seems pretty fair. If nobody deems your content worth aggregating to HN, maybe it isn't? People who read HN trust it the same way I imagine people who have read the NY Times or National Geographic their whole life trust it.

When the web first started appearing as a news and editorial destination, it seems that people were quick to proclaim the death of curated content, because with infinite space and no need for physical resources, the constraints of binding your words together in 80 stapled pages of dead tree were history -- everything can just link to everything else, and when that fails, search! Turns out that the problem was never that a magazine could only be so many pages long, but that people only have so much time to be bothered with content they want to see.

Online the content and the editorial dept don't need to share a building -- in some cases its probably still better if they do, and in others its probably better that they're se separate as possible. I don't think there's any less value on content, or on editorial curation of what content gets in front of people. Sites like HN, Digg, Amazon and Hulu are popular destinations because they offer tailored and curated gateways to content people want. The curators have always been the bosses of the content creators, but now that they don't have to live under the same roof -- now that anyone can curate anyone else's content, as long as their curation/editorial skills are deemed good enough by the public to get them enough readers/viewers -- the balance of power has gone a bit wacky.

When Hulu's CEO called the TV networks "content providers" in that well-linked blog post a little whie back, few people batted an eye, but that was a huge slap in the face to those guys. If you're just the content provider, that means, on the org chart of the consumable content world, that Hulu is your boss -- they're your editor, your publisher, curating your content and choosing what lives and what dies. Hulu is supposed to be their dorky portal for cheapskate college students and bored secretaries! Why are they calling the shots now??

It's tiring to see people like Murdoch bellowing at top volume about their content being stolen when the content is the one thing people are still clamoring to consume by any means necessary. It's the editor's desk that's under attack and that's what's really freaking them out.