“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market[.] And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.
Next product announcement: Google Psychohistory.
Either they’ve watched π one too many times under the influence of some serious pyschotropics, or Google genuinely have lost the plot.
Not a bad idea at all, and one that will definitely go down well with voters.
From Makers Market, via Slashdot :
These are perhaps the most awesome security headache ever conceived, and a nice spin on a Cold War classic. There’s also a version made from a £1 coin, which is best avoided lest I accidentally spend it.
The amount of data you can hide inside one of these is truly terrifying. Even then years ago, this was the stuff of science fiction, and now you can get it for less than a hundred bucks. The aforementioned spooks would literally have killed for something like containing this much information. Whilst talking about incredible storage density, it seems appropriate to link to this xkcd comic again.
Scrolling is neat, and scrolling your way through buttery-smooth tables in iPhone OS is even kinda fun. But when it comes to slow, purposeful reading—as opposed to flicking through a list—it becomes tedious. Dragging through thousands of words of prose isn’t skimming, isn’t navigation… it’s laborious. You’re paginating by hand.
I think that’s the crux of the matter right there. Scrolling through a long article/book is a lot of work compared to turning a page, because the part you’re reading actually moves, you have to track it, and also try and scroll at the same time.
The spacebar-to-advance-one-page shortcut is an effective, if kludgey solution to the problem, but it’s not applicable on the iPad and, perhaps more damningly, most people don’t seem to know about it. Instead, they laboriously scroll through PDFs to get to the page/section they want. Compare that with flipping the page of a book — where you finish at the bottom of the last page, flip, and start at the top of the next, no mental effort required — and it’s patently obvious that it’s the superior method for long-form reading.
The page turning animation may be gratuitous/unnecessary, but it’s a small price to pay for a superior reading experience.
It says a lot that the headline specifies Flash by name when the feature is actually targeted at all third-party plug-ins. In part, it’s because of Flash’s ubiquity, but one can’t help but feel that another big — perhaps the biggest — part of it is because of the platform’s poor performance and many security issues (not to mention Matthew Dempsky’s infamous crash bug). The torrent of passive–aggressive idiocy pouring forth from certain Adobe employees only makes matters worse.
This Flash thing is going to run for a long time, until one day, everyone realises that the problem has been solved, and Flash gradually becomes obsolete.
Via Hello Bauldoff :
What an awesome little (well, at 15 ¼″, not quite so little) lamp. If I could justify spending £80 on a lighting appliance, I would buy this in a heartbeat. I just wonder how the cat would react to it…
I may be missing something, but I honestly don’t understand this. How is scrolling desirable to the person who is trying to read a book? If I’m reading a book, I want to fill the screen with text. Then, I want to read that text. Then, I want to fill the whole screen with new text, and read that.
What I don’t want do to is read text, then spend a second manually scrolling until new text fills the screen, while keeping track of where exactly I have to continue reading.
Amen to that. (I’m still not sold on e-books though.)
