Links for Monday September 29th 2014

  • Yahoo Directory to close down
    I am internet-old enough to remember when the Yahoo directory was the best way to find websites on the internet. A hand-categorised-by-actual-humans list of the most useful websites on many topics was superior (for a while, anyway) to what was produced by the early-stage search engines. I used it pretty much daily. A significant chunk of my first ever internet job was devoted to making sure that our client's sites actually got listed in the Yahoo directory. I am, therefore, wiping away a little nostalgic tear.

Links for Friday September 26th 2014

  • ntlk’s blog: Why can’t you track periods in Apple’s Health app?
    As this article makes clear: there probably isn't a good reason why not, and there are loads of reasons why it would be useful. I would home this is an oversight that will be rapidly corrected.
  • 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging – Anil Dash
    I sort of wish I had kept up the habit of writing "proper" posts on this site, or any other. I'm not even honestly sure that I can point to when I stopped. Honestly, I'm not sure I ever really started – I've never had a topic to explore, never tried to set my blog up as about anything – it's just, y'know, an agglomeration of stuff. Which explains why it has a double digit audience on a good day. But then, it's really not for the audience, so that's fine – it's an aide memoire for me. Anyway – some solid advice here.

Links for Wednesday September 24th 2014

Links for Friday September 12th 2014

  • What if Steve Jobs had been running Apple’s Event on Tuesday? – Jiggity’s Essays
    I don't agree with the article's presupposition that Steve's way would have been better, but I will say that I think that the write has very neatly nailed to difference between Jobs' keynotes, and the modern ones, and he has nailed something very important about Steve's way of explaining these things – the emphasis on the human connection, on what these devices will let us do to enrich our lives, rather that the technical specification and Jony Ive's design-porn angle.

Sad Days

I’ve been noodling about in odd moments with a bit of writing with the working title “The Death of Retrofutures” – about how we don’t imagine the future in the same way we used to, and how I think that’s a shame.

Today, I see that BERG is closing down.

I am incredibly sad to see this. BERG are, or were, one of the touchstones I use to describe the best sort of work there is to be done down the internet mines, the sort of work that I really seriously admire, and, on my better days, aspire to do. They were a firm concerned with invention, with taking these technologies that shape our lives, interrogating them, and really thinking about how to use them to do something that actually improves people’s lives in some small way. They really did get on with the job of imagining the future, and we’re all poorer for them not being in operation.

I wish all those employed there every success in their future endeavours – I can’t imagine anyone on that team will have any trouble finding something new and interesting to occupy their time.