In Bob Burrough’s words (Burrough is the author of the demo):

An environmentally-lit interface takes information from the environment around the device and uses it to render physically-accurate things on the screen. It appears as if the lights around you are shining on the things on the screen. […]

This doesn’t mean you have to hold a flashlight over your phone to read the web in bed. What it means is, designers are empowered to use the design language of the physical world to design their interfaces. Gloss, glitter, glow-in-the-dark, or any other visual quality may be used. In the case of reading a website in a darkened room, the web designer may apply elegant backlighting or glow-in-the-dark treatments to maintain legibility. This is far superior to today’s method of making your phone act like a spotlight that shines in your face.

Learning China’s Forbidden History, So They Can Censor It

Chinese companies are outsourcing the censorship burden to third parties. The constant reviewing and blocking of content has to be done by humans; algorithms wouldn’t be able to catch everything. These “professional censors” — before they can start spending their days taking content down — have to be introduced to China’s forbidden history (think of […]

Learning to Love Robots

Patricia Marx, The New Yorker: The moment is equivalent, perhaps, to the juncture when fish crawled out of the sea and onto land. At the reception desk of a robot-staffed hotel in Japan, sharp-fanged, hairy-chested dinosaurs wearing bellhop hats and bow ties poise their talons at the keyboard; at a pizza restaurant in Multan, Pakistan, […]

Fine del .it

Quindi pare che questo sia l’ultimo post per un po’ in italiano. Che non mi sembrava giusto passare dall’italiano all’inglese senza dire una parola. Si fa una prova: che lo si scrive in inglese, il blog, per un po’. È una prova. Che poi magari non mi piace, magari non funziona, e si torna indietro. […]

Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by robots controlled by paralyzed people

The simplicity is the point of a tablet

Benedict Evans: The change in abstraction is the point, and adding touch to Windows or Mac misses the point. It’s like putting a mouse driver on DOS. It does make DOS better, and if DOS is all you have because you misssed GUIs, then of course you should do that. But it’s not the future. […]

I never used OpenDoc, but I find the idea behind it interesting:

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents can then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors.

Instead of recreating the same set of features within each app — forcing the user to learn different ways of doing the same thing —, the idea was to abstract the core functionality of each software to make it available across the OS.

I think iOS gets closer to that but it’s probably the internet, more than anything else, that which helped unbundling the data from the underlying software — turning the latter into a service.

The Podcast Browser

I’m not a dedicated podcast follower — I listen to a few, handpicked, episodes rather than follow a specific show weekly, from start to end. Mainly — I don’t have the patience. For those of you like me, pay a visit to The Podcast Browser: they point you at episodes worth listening to.

Nel tunnel del monopattino

More Than Death, Fear Decay

Robin Hanson: First, we should seriously worry about which aspects of our modern civilization system are rotting. Human culture has lasted a million years, but many parts of our modern world are far younger. If the first easiest version of a system that we can find to do something is typically be a rotting system, […]

How HTTPS works

🔐 This emoji won’t work in Safari’s title bar

Nice small detail: This emoji does not show in the title bar of Safari, presumably to prevent less-reputable sites pretending to be secure (encrypted using HTTPS) when they are not.

Is UTC enough?

Zach Holman: Years ago, I worked with a friend who had built a few scheduling calendars in a previous freelancing gig. Sometimes we’d be working on something that tangentially related to time, and as kind of a recurring in-joke he’d always tell me: Zach, whatever you do: just don’t ever build a calendar. Anyway, I’m Zach […]

First test of a micropost. Riveting content.

Glyphs

Font Editing for Everyone

Rethinking the macOS Font Picker

Molte delle gesture introdotte da Apple sull’iPhone X — che poi sono la novità principale e ciò che più stupisce: quanto sia fluido e immediato spostarsi da un’app all’altra e interagire con iOS — vengono da webOS, l’OS del 2010 di Palm (purtroppo fallito). Si può ritrovare pure la barra orizzontale che sta in basso allo schermo.

Cose lette nel 2017

Ho aggiunto al mio sito personale una pagina con i libri che ho letto nel 2017. Il romanzo che più mi è piaciuto è stato Americanah (di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; guardate i suoi due interventi al TED se non la conoscete), mentre il libro di saggistica più interessante è stato Sapiens.

Zuckerberg and the Imaginary Cosmopolitan

Most of Facebook’s interactions are local interactions, either between members of a community or people we already know in real life. The connections which span continents are estimated to be around 12% and 16% of the total. Ethan Zuckerman thinks that Facebook is being led astray by its grand vision of connecting the world together, […]