Adobe kills mobile Flash →
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Steve gets the last laugh.
Josef Kenny
Josef Kenny is the most awesomely fantastic human being I have ever had the fortune to encounter in my short existence on this plane of reality. He is good at everything he does, including but not limited to making music and being an awesome friend. It is difficult to comprehend just how awesome he is without firsthand experience. Just take my word for it.
— Danny Stewart
Sleek Fonts for Minimalist Designs →
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One of the most essential elements in a minimalist design is typography. Let’s face it, you can’t do justice to minimalism with pre-installed fonts like Arial, Century Gothic, Georgia, Verdana, Times New Roman, and etc. But frown no more! Here are 30 sleek fonts you can download for free that could fit perfectly on your minimalist designs.
(via The Loop)
Ten years →
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What a difference ten years makes.
Fractal in C →
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Ken Perlin shows how to make a fractal in three lines of C code. (Here it is spaced out to make it more legible.)
(via Josef Kenny)
Shock the Monocle →
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So you’ve mastered it’s vs. its — and you try not to use dashes too much. You’ve learned that the passive voices has its uses; you’ve learned how to build sentences and paragraphs with parallel construction; you’ve learned to use the Oxford comma.
You’re aces in my book.
But there’s this one thing — you’re still using comma splices.
(via Benjamin Brooks)
Fractal in C →
• ∞
Ken Perlin shows how to make a fractal in three lines of C code. (Here it is spaced out to make it more legible.)
(via Josef Kenny)
Secret software on millions of phones logging everything →
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This is like a housing developer installing secret cameras in the bathrooms before selling the houses. For quality control, of course.
(via Marco Arment)
‘Build and Analyze: Blows Enough For Me’ →
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In this week’s especially good (I think) podcast, we talked about the difference between cheap and bad, and I revealed the top-secret second Instapaper app that I canned before shipping.
(via Marco Arment)
Windows Phone Demo →
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Very cool. View this on your iPhone or mobile device.
(via Daring Fireball)
Personal data and trust
Reflecting on the article I posted earlier about secret software being installed on millions of phones that offload significant quantities of information, including much of which that may be sensitive or personal, ostensibly for quality control purposes, has got me thinking about personal data, privacy, and trust.
Everyone who reads my site knows I’m an Apple user. I make no apologies for that. We also live in a time where everything is about data mining and how much information can be gathered on customers (and of what value that information is deemed). Everyone does it. But I think a very fundamental distinction is “Why do these companies want this information?”
Apple
I think Apple’s use of personal data is the most clear-cut out of anyone’s. Their end goal is to sell you hardware. Their software has always improved the quality and value of their hardware, and now their cloud services aspire to boost the quality and value of their software. Their goal is to build a big ecosystem to better serve the user with the goal of making it more attractive to sell more hardware. There are, arguably, no questionable motives here. They want to make money by directly selling you their products. Therefore, I feel comfortable with Apple having a certain amount of information about me.
Amazon
I actually trust Amazon with some of my personal data as well, because I am aware of their motives too. They are trying to sell me stuff. That’s what they are there for. To make money from me by selling me whatever I want or need. I purchase things from them. That’s why I give them my business. That’s what they’re there for. They are attempting to improve their bottom line, and my experience as a customer in order to ensure my future business. That’s totally okay with me. I have no problem with them suggesting new things for me to purchase based on things I have looked at or previously bought. Their improvements based on this data are actually valuable to me, as they lead me to things that I have an interest in buying and they are based on my own personal purchase and browsing history. As long as this data stays within Amazon, this is absolutely fine.
Google is where I draw the line. I used to love Google and rely on their services as much as possible. Now I am engaged in a constant effort to move as much data as possible away from Google. As many have pointed out, Google’s customers are not users, they are advertisers. Users are Google’s product. Users are what they sell. Initially I didn’t have too much of a problem with this, but after seeing the kind of company Google has grown into over the past few years, this now makes me very uneasy. I use Bing for search (much to the mockery of friends and co-workers) and I avoid giving Google as much information as possible. This may sound a little “tinfoil hat,” but I am not a fan of the idea of continuing to add to the pile of information Google already has on me, and if I can make it even a little bit more difficult for them, I will.
I’m a little out of touch with Facebook, as I haven’t had an account with them for a long while, but I don’t trust them any more than I trust Google. They, like Google, are sitting on huge mounds of personal information about everyone who uses the service. On top of that, thanks to their advertising and web integration, they are able to gather information about you well outside of their own website. Based on their current business model, they, like Google, have no better way to make money than to use that information to their advantage by selling it to advertisers and interested third parties. Like Google, this is a machine I do not wish to fuel. (I also haven’t really liked the atmosphere of the site since 2007-2008.)
