Creo ergo sum

On why touch-based control systems are so hard to use:

I think it’s probably the lack of physical context. When you rest your hands on a physical keyboard you know when your fingers are misaligned or resting between rows or columns of keys without looking. Touch screen interfaces rely on manual visual alignment. Buttons on touch screens also lack the light resistance and satisfying snap you get from physical buttons. It’s impossible to identify the state of an onscreen button by touch alone.

The entire interview is wonderful. Here’s a small part of it:

We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Michael Lopp:

A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. There is a healthy part which is attempting to normalize and to create predictability, and there needs to be another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality.

Failure to create some form of predictability will result in chaos. Failure to create some sort of well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company guarantees that a fast-moving, ambitious, risk-taking and ruthless someone else - someone outside the company will invade, because they know what you forgot: hacking is important.

Our world is changing at such a rapid pace, even we sometimes cannot follow it. Leo Babauta of Zen habits presents nine skills we should teach children, so they will grow up to understand the future and succeed in it:

What we want most for our kids, as learners, is to be able to learn on their own. To teach themselves anything. Because if they can, then we don’t need to teach them everything — whatever they need to learn in the future, they can do on their own. […]

Add Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues to this list and you really have something great to start from.

Jason Fried:

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

My friend Scott Kellum, design director at Treesaver, has now sent me this refactored code for hiding text, which I hereby christen the Kellum Method:

.hide-text {
text-indent: 100%;
white-space: nowrap;
overflow: hidden;
}

In practice, this is a faster method than the “-9999px” one, but equally efficient.