onfocus

News filter by Mule. Their description: "It's a summary of the day's news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day."

A game designer lays out his existential frustration. I really like the idea of stepping back and stripping away the 'best practices' around an activity to find its core function. And then asking if that core function is meaningful. Excellent food for thought. [via torrez]

The Kleptones did some exhaustive research into the music that inspired Paul Simon's Graceland and put it all together into a fantastic mix and story.

This is a nice browser-based regular expression tester.

This handy browser app will format JSON so it's a bit more human-readable.

Not only words, but it's important to think about all of the digital artifacts of living. They're all moving toward the domain of companies in the name of convenience. This conversation explains some of the problems with that. [via waxy]

This list is about writing stories like those Pixar tells. But these are great rules that can apply to any form of communication.

Reading this article just reminds me that I'm still upset Google killed its Google Reader sharing features. The Reader bridge has been burned for me, but I agree they could do more inside existing services to improve Plus.

Impressive growth for a company with 12 people. Database sharding is some sort of evil magic, isn't it?

A great though depressing article by Mat Honan about the history and current state of Flickr at Yahoo!.

Toyota is making a small run of all-electric RAV4s over the next three years. It'll be the first all-electric SUV.

Another blow to native apps. The number of subscribers, money, and time that went into their native app is pretty amazing. They're shuttering their apps and moving everything to the Web.

A good infographic about media consolidation. This is why it's important to find, consume, and support independent everything.