On Expression There was a germ of something there. And it’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you don’t hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there. So I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said “Hey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in." Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview connectionexpression
Constrained by the medium The inevitable reciprocation that occurs between the act of drawing and the thinking associated with it. The hand moves, the mind becomes engaged, and vice versa. We might ask: How much does the medium of expression actually constrain a design process? A medium has a way of constraining our choices, and this influence may not involve conscious choice at all. The planner, in the end, sees and understands only those things for which they can provide expression. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking Michaelangelo's hammer constraintsexpressionmedia
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
This used to be our playground An Essay by Simon Collison colly.com There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home. A shifting house next to a river of knowledge wwwexpressionidentityblogging
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump An Article by Craig Mod craigmod.com It begins with craftPenn StationEdgesThe business case for craft
It begins with craft Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse. Not all software, but a lot of it. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago. In some ways this is hyperbole. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome. Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications. A truth recently amplified by the covid pandemic. And I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. That elevation begins with craft. Apps Getting Worse performancecraftsoftware
Penn Station In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm. softwaretransportation
Edges Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down. Even as I type on this improved Magic Keyboard, I can’t help but wonder: Did they really test this thing? I had three butterfly keyboards die on me, twice in the field. Not fun. Hardware failures live long in the mind.
The business case for craft macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit. In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe. And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks. More profitable and a better buy craftbusinesswww