Adactio: Links

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

CSS exclusions with Queen Bey

This great post by Hui Jing is ostensibly about CSS shapes and exclusions, but there’s a much broader message too:

Build demos, and play around with anything that seems remotely interesting. Even if that feature is in early stages, or only supported by 1 browser. And then talk about it, or write and tweet about your experience, your use cases, what you liked or disliked about it.

We can shape the web to what we want it to be, but only if we get involved.

Refresh – A fresh approach to the browser

Some interesting ideas for evolving the web browser. I’m very interested in the ideas about navigating our browser history—that feels like a very underappreciated goldmine with a direct lineage to the “associative trails” imagined for the memex.

Neodymium – Popula

Magnets: How Do They Work?

Magnetism might be the most romantic of all the topics in science to be metaphorically butchered by poets.

General Magic

A forthcoming documentary about the company spun out of Apple to create a handheld communication device …in 1990.

From mobile computing, social media, downloadable apps and e-commerce to touchscreens, emoji and USB, the products and services that now dominate the tech industry and our day-to-day lives were born at General Magic.

Brighton Guide

Fascinating snippets of information about some of the most interesting buildings in Brighton.

(The website was made by Lydia and Tash as a project for Code First: Girls)

A Talk with the Pioneering Internet Art Collective JODI -ARTnews

“It’s almost too easy now, and too unsatisfying that you only can put your work in a community full of advertisements and full of tracking,” she said. “I think there will be this urge, on the one hand, to have a local internet of small communities, and, on the other hand, a decentralized internet again.”

“You can still make websites nowadays,” Heemskerk said. “People think it’s complex, but it isn’t —you just register your domain and make your website and that’s about it.”

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain - MIT Technology Review

A near-future sci-fi short by Hannu Rajaniemi that’s right on the zeitgest money.

The app in her AR glasses showed the car icon crawling along the winding forest road. In a few minutes, it would reach the sharp right turn where the road met the lake. The turn was marked by a road sign she had carefully defaced the previous day, with tiny dabs of white paint. Nearly invisible to a human, they nevertheless fooled image recognition nets into classifying the sign as a tree.

GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button - Bloomberg

Paul Ford explains version control in a way that is clear and straightforward, while also being wistful and poetic.

I had idle fantasies about what the world of technology would look like if, instead of files, we were all sharing repositories and managing our lives in git: book projects, code projects, side projects, article drafts, everything. It’s just so damned … safe. I come home, work on something, push the changes back to the master repository, and download it when I get to work. If I needed to collaborate with other people, nothing would need to change. I’d just give them access to my repositories (repos, for short). I imagined myself handing git repos to my kids. “These are yours now. Iteratively add features to them, as I taught you.”

Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web

The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.

Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?

BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive

Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:

In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.

The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.

As a designer who used to love creating web experiences in code, I am baffled and numbed by the growing preference for complexity over simplicity. Complexity is good for convincing people they could not possibly do your job. Simplicity is good for everything else.

And not to sound like a broken record, but once again I’m reminded of the rule of least power.

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?

A wonderful—and humorous—deep dive into all things time-related.

Building a calendar sucks. Like there’s really cool shit you can do, since every calendar out there today is basically straight outta 2005, but at the end of the day you’re stuck dealing with all of the edge cases that all your dork friends have warned you about since the dawn of time. (Like literally, the dawn of time is a separate edge case you have to account for as well.)

This also contains a well-deserved shout-out to ISO 8601:

ISO 8601 is one of my favorite standards and/or RFC out there. And yes, you should definitely have a favorite.

I do have a favourite RFC—ask me about it sometime over a beer.

I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.

Design systems and technological disruption – The Man in Blue

Almost every technological innovation over the last 300 years has had side effects which actually increase the number of opportunities for employment. The general trend is that the easier something is to do, the more demand there is for it.

Cameron looks at the historical effects of automation and applies that to design systems. The future he sees is one of increased design democratisation and participation.

This is actually something that designers have been championing for decades – inclusive design at all levels of the company, and an increase in design thinking at all stages of product development. Now that we finally have a chance of achieving that it’s not a time to be scared. It’s a time to be celebrated.

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