onfocus

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]

A nice collection of railroad company logos from 1845-2000. [via kottke]

Kurt Vonnegut to the member of a school board that burned his books: "If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own."

Nice to see MetaFilter at the top of this list--we've been working on site bandwidth. And I agree on the jQuery problem. There's a bandwidth cost associated with easier development.

Looks simple, sharp! Nice update.

"I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year." Great idea, a physical copy of your Pinboard/Delicious links.

"After using all the UI richness available for such a long time to make beautiful and differentiated products, app designers have realized that the user's work, not their own, is the star of the show."

I agree that cutesy error messages are irritating. I'd rather see a more serious "we're on it" notice.

Great collection of miscellaneous tech tips. I have a bunch of these in a text file too. I should make them public like this.

Not only a fun site to browse, but a good example of taking group Flickr content elsewhere for a new experience.

"I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery." Me too. Quantity of traffic beats quality in many people's minds so I'm not optimistic.

Nice demo. I'm not sure I buy it yet. You still have to download the entire font to use a single icon. If you're using a large number of icons it might make sense.

Hello Brightness shortcut icon! This is great.

"Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students." A UC Davis professor is asking the chancellor to resign after the OWS pepper spraying incident.

We've been using alpha and beta versions of jQuery Mobile at Fuelly for quite a while now. It's great to see it reach this milestone.

ThinkUp is a great way to archive/search your entire Twitter history and get some nice metrics in the process. Congrats on 1.0! (Don't miss Anil's post about ThinkUp and Software with Purpose.)

Nice collection of designs patterns and examples for mobile devices.

This is a nice alternate theme for Google Reader. Better type. Better separation and texture. The best part is that it tones down the in-your-face-red G+ share button.

"The global brain is still in its infancy. We can raise it to help us make a better world, or we can raise it to be selfish, unjust and short-term in its outlook." Fantastic article by Tim O'Reilly describing a more practical form of global consciousness.

"Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade." Bret Victor on imagining more tactile experiences with technology.

Draw something. Get a matching unicode character back. Fun!

Nice tutorial about using shading and texture in web design.

Nice breadcrumb design with CSS.

Congrats to Jeff and team, they completely changed the way designers work with type on the Web. This makes sense, and I hope Adobe lets the Typekit folks take the lead.

Adobe also purchased PhoneGap, a service that turns HTML5 Web Apps into native phone apps.