onfocus

Excellent analysis of the difference between Posterous and Tumblr. "Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product." [via Emptyage]

I need to try this. [via boingboing]

Fun article about the ubiquitous Zapf Dingbat snowflake. [via torrez]

Anil collects more thoughts on the coming storm of apps vs. open web. "This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear."

"...it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late." Tim O'Reilly on the coming platform storm. [via anil]

"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens." I found this a while back but couldn't remember the name or how to get back to it because the keywords are saturated. My Google-fu was hot today, and I'm bookmarking for future reference.

This Java class is full of helpful functions for escaping and unescaping strings, and it can be used within ColdFusion (if you're into that).

"Cultivating a Late 19th-Century Style at Home." This seems to be an IRL manifestation of that thing.

Aha! This answers a question I didn't even know I had, but I've been unconsciously wondering. I thought this "look" came from the image-collecting Tumblr crowd. But apparently it's a thing IRL.

"The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work." Derek on SEO. In summary, hire a good designer not a self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimizer and design for humans not algorithms. Couldn't agree more.

It'd be great to hear her speak and the W+K space is cool.

"The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products." I wonder how many people they have dedicated to this. Because they're going to need more.

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

"...the rev mechanism is very powerful and very tricky, because while it doesn’t change the semantics of a link relation, it does change the relationships between the parties, with many consequences that aren’t obvious." Good arguments against using rev-canonical for short URLs. (pssst, Flickr!) [via delfuego]

An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications. Like Growl for web apps using an open standard. (Does Growl do this?)

Search for icons or browse icon sets they've indexed.

Cell phone nostalgia! I had the Ericsson S710a right before the iPhone, and it's true that the camera was better and Internet tethering just worked. I'm tempted by a Google phone now too just to show my unhappiness with the iPhone App Store. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

J.D. gets close to the TV media machine and finds everything a bit too scripted. It's a good reminder of one of the reasons many folks started writing weblogs.

I honestly hope Merlin turns his blog into a treatise on creativity through Steely Dan anecdotes.

Anil offers a high-level view of Apple's current developer-relation woes. He blames their culture of secrecy.

Steven Frank is letting go of his iPhone until the Apple fixes serious problems with the app store.

This is great. I'd love to see more people aggregating tweets and offering them outside of the Twittersphere.

"On July 14th, 1999, a programmer named Matthew Haughey made the first post on a blog he'd set up for himself and a few friends in an attempt to collect interesting links." Nice profile of MetaFilter! [via MetaTalk]

Nice collection of icons for web applications. Click Preview to see them all. [via glass]

It'd be interesting to see how much performance you'd gain moving to HTML 5. Maybe I'll try it with one of my personal sites. [via anil]

"Is there a formula--some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation--for a good life?" [via peterme]

Nice little Mac menubar app that gives you more control over your computer fans.

"Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves." [via blackbeltjones]

If only we could turn them all away.

The scourge that is IE6 and why it will continue to thrive.