I love this -- people are competing to write new blogging platforms based on simplicity. Yes. That's good! Competition, energy, ideas, simplicity.

There's Svbtle and Obtvse and lots of debate.

And the best thing, they all have feeds, so they show up in my river. Bing!

What's so great? It's all happening on the open web.

Let's have more choices, fewer silos, more interop. Goodness.

 3/24/2012; 4:49:26 PM.

NYC cops will hit you if you get in their face. They're not warm and friendly like midwest cops. However, you can jaywalk in front of them and they don't care. Imagine my surprise as a Calif transplant to get a ticket for crossing Univ Ave in Palo Alto on a red light -- walking! Different places, different cops.

People in Calif give me grief for being such a NYer but here in NY I'm more like a Californian. Waiting for a table the other night, first in line. The NYers that came after all had a reason they should be seated before us. And they paced, and looked and fidgeted and complained and made their presence felt, and some actually did get seated before us. Inside I'm thinking, NYers are such assholes.

Anyway on Twitter today all kinds of people wondering why NYC cops are so mean. Two reasons: 1. They just are. 2. They have to deal with NYers every day of every year, until they retire. Think about it.

 3/24/2012; 3:40:05 PM.

As you may know I'm a big fan of the Bootstrap Toolkit. I like it for the same reason I like standardized user interfaces on desktop computers. The more apps have in common, the more apps people can use. There are also esthetic reasons I like it. Design for the sake of design is not good. Design should enhance the utility of the thing being designed. Too many websites are substituting style for design. I don't want my tools to be examplars of style. I want the to be tool-like, i.e. useful.

The Mac was the first popular computer to standardize its user interface, going so far as to publish user interface guidelines. One of the nice things it did was establish iconography. Symbols that mean the same thing when used in all software. For the most, those icons came to mean the same thing in Windows and Unix apps, as well as web apps. (Apple famously sued Microsoft for using the trashcan icon in Windows, so Windows doesn't use the same icon as the Mac here.)

Now, with Bootstrap 2.0, they introduce the idea of standardized icons for web apps. It's a nice start.

First, here's a list of all the icons we're using.

It's a bit of a puzzle to try to match these up with the Bootstrap icons.

There's one I'm still looking for. It was a cool little icon they had in the Alarm Clock on the original Mac. It looked like the flags you see on mailboxes in the country. The flag goes up and down. When you flip it down, the window expands to reveal the settings for the clock. Flip it up and they're hidden and just the current time is visible. I want to use this pair of icons in the menubar in Bootstrap. I'm trying to find a picture, but coming up empty.

We used this same icon in the early versions of Frontier/Mac. The About Window could flip down to reveal buttons that would do stuff. But normally you wouldn't need them, so the flag would hide and reveal them.

 3/24/2012; 10:43:06 AM.

Adam and I did another podcast yesterday. I think it's a good one. Mostly about the software I'm working on called The World Outline. But lots of other stuff in there, some of it even funny, I hope.  

If you have a little time this weekend it would make me happy if you listened!

 3/24/2012; 10:42:12 AM.