If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5.
Andy Baio on the aforelinked Please Rob Me.
Heart-wrenching profile by Chris Jones:
We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down — Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve — transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.
There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.
The rise of location-based social media holds a lot of promise and benefit for participants. But a legitimate concern about them is that they make it too easy to track where you are. For some people, that’s more information than they want out there.
Well, three guys - Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld, Boy van Amstel - have taken this fear to its logical extension, with their site Please Rob Me.
Gawker:
On one side, a Times source explains, you have print circulation, which thinks it should control the iPad since it’s just another way to distribute the paper. They’d like to charge $20 to $30 per month for the Times’ forthcoming iPad app. […]
On the other side, you have the Times’ digital operation, which is pushing to charge $10 per month for the iPad edition and is said to be up in arms over print circulation’s pricing.
Love, love, love that the writers make HTML5 sound like an Apple-backed web video technology. Because we all know HTML5 is but a video player. It’s only HTML, after all.
More seriously, though, I just don’t understand all this hand-wringing. YouTube has an HTML5 video player beta out, and Hulu can’t be far behind. The web is already moving away from Flash for video; Apple’s only further encouraging that move.
“But what about my beloved Flash games?” you might say. They wouldn’t be playable on the iPad even with Flash enabled, Neven Mrgan notes:
Attention folks expecting “the full web”, including today’s Flash games, on a touchscreen device: no keyboard, no mouseover. Think about it.
And designers using Flash for essential site elements will face increasing pressure to adopt web standards, to the benefit of everyone.
Even if the reasons for doing so are entirely selfish, Apple is trying to relieve the web of its dependency on Flash, and I applaud the effort.
I like this bit about the Harper’s paywall:
Paul: I honestly, HONESTLY do not say that we are doing it the right way, but I don’t believe people know the right way. We are doing it in an INTERESTING way.
Loved this bit:
I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! […] Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer.
Jeffrey Zeldman:
Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.