Since 2010
We prefer using websites, and we know most apps are oversized wrappers around a website. But I have to remember that the people with a thousand apps are not the minority. We are. We are the few who would rather use a progressive web app than download a 300 MB wrapper.
Good post by Marcin Wichary at Unsung, riffing on a segment of The Talk Show.
This is one of the most baffling things about Apple software to me. For each application, or piece of an application, or component of their operating systems, why don’t they find one of their 150,000 employees who actually uses that piece of software every day, and give them ownership of it.
About a quarter of the stuff I do in my day job is implementing fixes and tweaks that I or one of my developer colleagues have found. Not stuff that our customers have reported. And that is because we own our output and are embarrassed by bugs of all sizes.
Software quality driven by pride. What’s wrong with that?
I received this piece of dystopian literature in my inbox today from a company that manages some of our toll roads here in Australia:
Our records indicate you have recently travelled through the Burnley Tunnel. If you have time, we’d really appreciate your feedback on the on-road experience of this trip.
…
Based on your recent trip, how likely are you to recommend travelling on the Burnley Tunnel to friends and family?
How likely am I to recommend a highway? That goes through a tunnel? To my friends and family?
Not very fucking likely, strangely enough.
Email is, and always has been, my preferred method of written communication for two reasons, both of which are topics of this post from Zachary Kai.
The first is it’s openness, stability, and ubiquity:
Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.
And in their longevity is their flexibility. You can read a book anywhere, anytime. You can send a letter to the farthest-flung corners of the earth imaginable. And you can email anyone.
The second is in it’s user interface:
You can choose to engage with it in human time, and so can the recipient: compose when you have something to say, respond when you have space to think.
This post by Tom Bedor has been doing the rounds over the last couple of weeks. It’s a proposition that you’d think would be common sense and part of basic human decency, but the fact that I’ve seen this post all over the place says something else.