Painfully Obvious.

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Month: April 2006

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Derek’s tired of “user‐generated content” as a buzzword. In addition to what’s listed here, what pisses me off about this trend is that some startups think that they won’t have to provide any content at all. If your only source of content is the user, then your app’s value is strongly correlated to the size of your userbase. Which means that when you start your application will be worthless. How do you get people to sign up for something that has no worth?

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Complexity is slowing Microsoft down. How much of the Windows architecture is dictated by obligations to “compatibility”? (Why do we still use drive letters? “Because that’s how it was in DOS” is an unacceptable answer.) BootCamp makes me think that the next 18 months are going to be really, really good for Apple.

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It reminds me of something I heard once, and have taken as my own ever since: San Francisco is the kind of place where no one will tell you when you have a bad idea.

Matthew Honan
thought

In order to stop myself from shoehorning random not‐quite‐blog‐posts into the “link” post type, I’ve created a new type: thoughts. I’m really hoping this idea will take off — it’s time for us, as webloggers, to occasionally stray from the beaten path of absolute fact and express opinions! I’m going to be a goddamned pioneer. (In other news, my feeds now contain full post text and HTML, as they should’ve a long time ago. I beg forgiveness.)

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Stylable Text Fields in WebKit. Safari, which for eons has had the least‐customizable form controls among major browsers, will have the most‐customizable form controls when this code makes it into a release.

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Behavior

• Posted in Technology

This demonstration of NeXTSTEP, recorded in 1992, sent me on a stream‐of‐consciousness romp through the web. I stumbled upon this overview of NeXTSTEP, written around the time Windows 95 was released. As a UI dork, I find the nuts‐and‐bolts behavior stuff oddly fascinating: One section talks about the difference in…

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