- Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes (WSJ Blogs) — Playboy: We were warned about you: Before this Interview began, someone said we were “about to be snowed by the best.”; [Smiling] “We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.” (via Kevin Rose)
- The Tao of Programming — The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. (via Chip Salzenberg)
- In Defense of Distraction (NY Magazine) — long thoughtful piece about attention. the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (via BoingBoing)
- 31 Days of Canvas Tutorials — a pointer to 31 tutorials on the HTML5 Canvas.
"HTML5" entries
PhoneGap basics: What it is and what it can do for mobile developers
Joe Bowser on using PhoneGap to develop across mobile platforms.
Joe Bowser, the developer of the Android version of PhoneGap, on the pros and cons of developing with the PhoneGap cross-platform application framework.
Publishing News: Goodreads chases the recommendation Holy Grail
A new kind of book recommendation appears at Goodreads and HTML5 had a very big week in the media world.
Goodreads put its Discovereads purchase to good use. Also, Hearst and The Boston Globe are doubling down on HTML5.
ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app
Financial Times goes all-in on its web app, Flickr puts up fences, and daily deal fatigue sets in.
The Financial Times says subscriber data trumps Apple's reach, Flickr introduces geofencing to keep things private, and the cracks in the daily deal world start to show.
Four short links: 25 August 2011
Jobs Quotes, Tao of Programming, Distraction, and Canvas Tutorials
Four short links: 22 August 2011
Cooked Brands, HTML Bootstrap, Browser Security Headers, and Swarming Robots
- Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson (Scientific American) — Paris, as much as I love Paris, feels to me as though it’s long since been “cooked.” Its brand consists of what it is, and that can be embellished but not changed. A lack of availability of inexpensive shop-rentals is one very easily read warning sign of overcooking. I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best. London, after the Olympic redo, will have fewer affordable retail slots, I imagine. (via Keith Bolland)
- Bootstrap — HTML toolkit from Twitter, includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more. Open sourced (Apache v2 license).
- Extra Headers for Browser Security — I hadn’t realized there were all these new headers to avoid XSS and other attacks. Can you recommend a good introduction to these new headers? (via Nelson Minar)
- Swarmanoid — award-winning robotics demo of heterogeneous, dynamically connected, small autonomous robots that provide services to each other to accomplish a larger goal. (via Mike Yalden)
Top stories: July 11-15, 2011
The HTML5 paradigm shift, Java's missing community leader, and the "programmable self"
This week on O'Reilly: We took a deep dive into HTML5, Mike Loukides looked for Java's next community leader, and we learned that quantifying the self is a step toward programming the self.
What is HTML5?
Once you really understand HTML5, you'll change the way you think about the web.
HTML5, when used both as the 21st century web suggests and as the original HTML specification allows, is best at interconnecting things.
Getting started with HTML5 apps
Zachary Kessin on the skills you need to build apps with HTML5 and JavaScript.
"Programming HTML5 Applications" author Zachary Kessin discusses the tools, technologies, and knowledge that help developers build HTML5 apps. Plus: Learn the most common app development mistakes and how to avoid them.
JavaFX 2.0: Making RIA with Java
JavaFX 2.0 looks to make rich Java web applications easier
Jim Weaver, founder of JMentor, explains why JavaFX could become a viable contender in the Rich Internet Applications world.
Four short links: 4 July 2011
God Games, Digitised History, git Database, and App Framework
- Let There Be Smite (Pippin Barr) — simple diversion for the 4th of July. It won’t be easy for God to save America. (via Pippin’s blog)
- Basel Wear — to answer the question I know was burning on your lips: “what *did* the Swiss wear in 1634?” Impressively detailed pictures from a 1634 book that is now online. One of the reasons I’m in favour of digitizing cultural collections is that we’re more likely to encounter them on the net and so ask questions like “how did people dress in 1634?”, “why did everyone carry keys?”, and “what is a Sexton?”
- databranches: Using git as a Database — it’s important to approach your design for using git as a database from the perspective of automated merging. Get the merging right and the rest will follow. I’ve chosen to use the simplest possible merge, the union merge: When merging parent trees A and B, the result will have all files that are in either A or B, and files present in both will have their lines merged (and possibly reordered or uniqed).
- Joshfire — open source (dual-licensed GPLv2 and commercial) multiplatform development framework built on HTML5.