This is where I write for the web.
Bono on Jonathan Ive:
What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobility depends on the pursuit of greatness over profit, believing the latter will always follow the former, stubbornly passing up near-term good opportunities to pursue great ones in the distance.
(Via Daring Fireball)
Lukas Mathis have an interesting analysis:
This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need “entry-level” performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: “Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.” And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers.
In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.
Computer housekeeping is still a complicated matter for any regular people to deal with, heck, even for a proficient user. Even with iOS which is a blank slate of an OS, Apple clearly pushing hard to get rid of the file system, and yet still not achieve the level of simplicity and ease of use they desire.
There’s still a lot of complexity we have to deal with using a computer, any computers, why? Because it’s multipurpose device. Consider a smartphone, it’s a phone, a camera, a calendaring device, an internet browser, an email device, a gaming device, and anything that an app can offer, on top of that it got plenty of sensors, gyro, proximity, light, GPS, and you name it, in short it’s a darn complex computer.
The challenge is how to make it more simple? You can’t just mindlessly reduce or hide the complexity and call it a day, because simplicity is not the absence of clutter, simplicity is not so simple to achieve.
37-minute that I will never forget, ever. Please, do watch the documentary. So good.
(via Daring Fireball)
John Scalzi explains who gets to be a geek (spoiler: anybody) and the difference between geeks and hipsters:
Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.”
Update: John Scalzi have a follow-up here.
(via Brent Simmons)
Dmitry Fadeyev:
Where the opinion is tied to a judgement however, changing opinion is deemed wrong because there appears an unspoken assumption that your power of judgement may be poor if you have to go back on the choices you’ve previously made. That is, of course, nonsense, for to change your opinion based on new information or better understanding is to be honest with yourself and others, and it is the only way to grow.
Kevin Smith - Great Filmmaking Advice
My favorite from him was:
You have to have this kind of a reasonable amount of “unreasonability” to even become a filmmaker.
Good advice, not just for filmmakers but for everything we do, to have the guts, to push the envelope within a certain constraint.
Kern and Burn interviewed Jim Coudal; don’t know him? Google him.
As curious people who love to learn, the idea of jumping into the deep end of the pool and learning about various businesses is very satisfying.
And:
He ended his talk with a quote from Dan Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness, and said, “The reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals—not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them—we set our goals for the person we are when we set them.” It’s a great point. It encourages us to dream big, and think about what will truly make us happy. Jim, like many other design entrepreneurs, has taken his career into his own hands and now controls his work, and his “destiny.”
He’s one of my heroes alive today in design and also business field.
A perfect execution no longer gives us the same impact as something more original and creative — something we have not seen before. When everyone has access to beautiful recordings of Mozart on their iPods and perfect prints of da Vinci on their walls, the only way to compete is by creating something they do not have access to, and so our addiction to originality is fueled ever further.
People still read the Classics today as they did hundreds of years ago. It’s a good indicator for the value of content: is it tied to recency, or is it still going to be read many years on? How much do you really gain by consuming content the value of which dissapears only a few days later? If it’s diversion you want, find it in activities that build rather than waste.
Note to self, keep my RSS feeds clean from site with over-the-top daily post-count.
But when you love what you do money begins to matter a whole lot less. Yes, you still need it to live, but it’s no longer your source of happiness — your source of happiness and your purpose is your work. Money driven people cannot see art for what it is because they never make it
Another great post by Dmitry Fadeyev.