Chopsticks for salad

Brilliant! saltandfat:

Yesterday I made spaghetti with tomato/parmesan sauce for lunch, and I added a simple salad to the mix.

But wait - what are chopsticks, of all things, doing in my bowl? Prepare to have your mind blown.

You see, whatever you think of chopsticks’ utility as carriers of dumplings, stir fry, rice, noodles, or sushi (I find them decent only at handling the first one), allow me to suggest that they are in fact the perfect utensil for eating salad. And as far as I’ve traveled and dined, I have not seen anyone capitalize on this.

Think about it - salad usually consists of mostly flat, folded-in leaves arranged in a heap. The top of that heap is somewhat forkable, though it’s hard to apply pressure without lifting up either no leaves or all of them. Poking flat objects just isn’t optimal.

Enter the chopsticks, with their power to compress leaves and use the friction of the resulting random shape to their advantage. No more awkward pulling of forked-through leaves. No more chasing the last few bits of lettuce around the bowl. Point and pinch, and enjoy.

(this post was reblogged from saltandfat)

First Listen: Massive Attack, 'Heligoland' : NPR

Fantastic new album. Drops next Tues, Feb 9th.

The Truth About Agave Nectar: It’s All Hype

All sugar- from table sugar to HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) to honey- contains some mixture of fructose and glucose. Table sugar is 50/50, HFCS is 55/45. Agave nectar is a whopping 90% fructose, almost- but not quite- twice as high as HFCS.

Craziness. But a good lesson: even with organic, natural, etc food (maybe ESPECIALLY with this kind of food), common sense is more important than marketing. Keep it simple kids, and follow Michael Pollan’s advice: Eat Food, Not a Lot, Mostly Green.

(this post was reblogged from marco)
“The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.” -Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad @lukew posts some interesting points (and this image) on the future of “real” v. “virtual” user experience Click for high-res photo

“The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.” -Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad

@lukew posts some interesting points (and this image) on the future of “real” v. “virtual” user experience

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We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards. If you wish to enable our experimental plugin support, you will be able to manually via about:config, but do so at your own risk. We are working on an add-on that will allow the user to have control of which sites to enable plugins for, as some sites, like YouTube, do work quite well.

Firefox for Maemo RC3 « blog.pavlov.net

Interesting in relation to the iPad debate. Mobile Firefox will default to turning off the Flash plugin… but but will allow users to turn it on, even on a per-site basis. This approach makes much more sense to me than Apple’s (I can’t imagine the average user would actually bother to delve deep into a browser’s settings to muck about, but power users could).

My Extravagant Zsh Prompt / Steve Losh After reading this post and a couple others, I’ve switched to ZSH from Bash as my Terminal experience, and I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve been pining for tab-completion for Terminal commands for awhile, and the added Git integration that Steve Losh describes in this post are money. Click for high-res photo

My Extravagant Zsh Prompt / Steve Losh

After reading this post and a couple others, I’ve switched to ZSH from Bash as my Terminal experience, and I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve been pining for tab-completion for Terminal commands for awhile, and the added Git integration that Steve Losh describes in this post are money.

The iPad and the Future of the Web

Much of the debate about the iPad has revolved around the meme that Apple has purposely set out to kill Flash, and by extension, Adobe. Comments that Steve Jobs made a few days after unveiling the iPad further encouraged the spread of this idea, with an all-out social-media-war opening up between Web Standards advocates, Flash and Flex developers, Apple fans, and everyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. I’ve read a lot of these articles, and the wildly-diverging opinions of people I respect has been of particular interest. After considering the merits of the various arguments, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve all missed the point: the iPad isn’t about the battle of HTML 5 and Flash; it’s about the browser.

Taking aside the vitriolic comments that Jobs (and some Apple fans) have made about Flash, let’s assume that the iPad, like the iPhone, will never have Flash installed. What is the user experience in Apple’s perfect world?

1) Web browsing - performed through Safari. Mobile Safari, based on the open-source Webkit, would be Flash free and optimized for websites with HTML 5, CSS 3, and h.264 video. Apple’s ideal user would use Safari for perusing document-based sites - CNN, Wikipedia, friends’ blogs, whatever. These sites are fairly static - checking out a single video, reading a few articles or blog posts. For anything more complex, Apple wants its iPad users to download…

2) Apps - Standalone applications, downloadable through the App Store. From Apple’s point of view, anything more complicated than a fairly-static, document based site should go here. And it’s not just a matter of games and media vs textual content - the NYTimes is one of the premier App Store apps. MLB layers video and content. Facebook’s app allows for a more multi-touch optimized exploring than its site through mobile Safari. Cynics rightly see this approach as driving editorial (and financial) control to Apple, but that motivation aside, Apple’s argument boils down to the following: “User experiences that require stateful or rich interactions should exist outside of the browser, and should be optimized for the platform on which they are being used.”

So. “Rich User Experiences” should live out of the browser, and ideally should exist natively on the client. Where have I heard that before… wait, what was that Air thing Adobe has been working on?

From Apple’s point of view, Flash is moot. Web browsing is a fairly passive experience that should be based around open standards (and, to be frank, a video codec that works in their favor) - which means no Flash, and if that means a faster and less-bug-prone browsing experience, all the better. Anything more complicated than that should (in Apple’s view) live in an App, and I doubt Apple truly cares if that app is written in Obj-C, or in Flash or C# compiled to iPad compatible bytecode.

In this scenario, Adobe is far from dead - it actually is placed in a very strong position, if it can execute properly. Flash (and for me, Flex) can become *the* best way of creating rich applications for any client, either via Air, or by compiling Flash apps to run as an iPhone/iPad app.

No, this battle isn’t between Apple and Adobe… it’s Apple and Google. Go take a look at the concept videos for Google’s rival tablet. Notice the difference? In Google’s world, EVERYTHING is in the browser. Google’s ideal user experience is diametrically opposed to Apple’s.

This isn’t a battle of web technologies. It’s a battle for the future of user experience.

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The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy. Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history.

Alex Payne — On the iPad

I don’t think it’s just the iPad that’s marking this change in culture; if I grew up with an XBox 360 and my current MacBook, I doubt I’d have ever learned how to think like a programmer.

ASDoc, you kill me

I recognize that not many Flex projects are…um, meticulous about generating ASDocs. I’m working on one now that is, and it’s actually pretty helpful. But the ASDoc generation is just TERRIBLE. Finding a fixing errors is a nightmare. Check out this current one:

“Error #1095: XML parser failure: Unterminated attribute”

No line number. No FILENAME. This will be fun to debug…

Google Chrome extensions

dancroak:

Not yet available for Mac Chrome, but for future reference:

Chromium builds ARE allowing extensions, so I picked these up earlier. I love me some Chromium!

(this post was reblogged from dancroak)