Link tags: verge

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

This wide-ranging essay by Nick Nielsen on Centauri Dreams has a proposition that resonates with my current talk about evaluating technology:

Science produces knowledge, but technology only selects that knowledge from the scientific enterprise that can be developed for practical uses.

Then there’s this:

The most remarkable feature of how we got from the origins of our species to the complex and sophisticated civilization we have today is that, with few exceptions, none of it was planned. Technology was not planned; civilization was not planned; industrialization was not planned; the internet was not planned.

Refreshing The Verge: no platform like home - The Verge

Mandy is fighting the good fight for the open web from within Vox Media. Her publishing tools have been built with a secret weapon…

This practice — which I refer to unoriginally as progressively enhanced storytelling — also has the added benefit of helping us make our content more accessible to more kinds of users, especially those with disabilities.

Refreshing The Verge: Facebook video, Google AMP, and the (non)future of the web - The Verge

AMP loads super, super quickly and is simply a better experience right now. So can we add enough design to make an AMP page feel like The Verge?

What a depressing conclusion! But I guess it’s easier than, y’know, actually fixing the bloated Verge website, packed with megabytes and megabytes of invasive trackers. It’s no wonder people prefer the AMP experience. Yet the idea of improving the website isn’t even raised in this whole article.

Then again, this is the same guy who tried to lay the blame for The Verge’s abysmal performance at the feet of web browsers.

Declarative Design Tools | Jon Gold

Jon introduces a new tool with a very interesting observation: up until now, all our graphic design tools have been imperative rather than declarative…

With our current tools we’re telling the computer how to design the vision we have in our head (by tapping on our input devices for every element on the screen); in our future tools we will tell our computers what we want to see, and let them figure out how to move elements around to get there.

thoughtbot/design-sprint: Product Design Sprint Material

If you’re intrigued by the kind of design sprints I wrote about recently, here’s a handy collection of resources to get you going.

• Pre-sprint
• Understand: Gather existing knowledge, expose assumptions and unknowns
• Diverge: Illuminating all possible paths
• Converge: Choose the right path
• Prototype: Quickly build the right path
• Test & Learn: Test the right path

Publishing Versus Performance: Our Struggle for the Soul of the Web by Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey weighs on the post I wrote about The Verge. I still feel like there’s a false dichotomy being presented here though: either performance or advertising. But advertising can be performant too. There’s a competitive advantage to be had there.

Declaring performance bankruptcy | Vox Product Blog

It’s really good to see that Vox are taking measures to fix their atrocious performance problems. The Verge in particular is a case study in how not to serve up text and images on the web. There have been times in the past when I’ve wanted to link to an article there but then thought “I can’t in good conscience put a fellow human through that.”

The Convergence

A fun platform game with a twist.