Uncarved

Chris Clark has written a piece that offers an interesting perspective on some ideas I had explored in a post I wrote last year, called “Don’t Ask Me for My Email Address“.

Clark writes [emphasis mine]:

Email has grown gnarly in the decades past, as we’ve started receiving dozens or hundreds of spam and bacn messages a day. I have multiple server side rules and filters just to keep it in check, and an inbox policy of flagging anything I care about before running a slightly-modified version of John Gruber’s Inbox Sweeper to keep things tidy.

Reply-all gaffes, top-posting etiquette, plaintext versus HTML, attachment limits, inbox limits… everybody hits them. By comparison the simplicity and clarity of Facebook mail is impressive. A Facebook message requires (privacy controls pending) a symmetrically-acknowledged relationship between parties, and on top of that spam-murdering convenience it’s self-threading, low friction, and lightweight.

In a nutshell, Facebook is better than email unless you’re some kind of email expert. And for email’s successor to support all the expert features of email, none of its myriad problems would be solved.

It’s been a recurring theme this week, but the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users. These are the people who are still using slotted screwdrivers and Edison light fixtures and manual transmission cars.

I would specifically add that I find Clark’s argument that Facebook messaging improves upon e-mail only within the context of social communication; I find their messaging model incapable of replacing e-mail as a tool for work (email’s ability to run filters and rules, organize, and archive information comes a big workflow helper for email).

That having been said, however, maybe e-mail as a personal communications tool is for power users now (or, perhaps more aptly, once again).

My parting thought here isn’t to close your e-mail accounts and move to Facebook. Rather that – as we enter a new year, reminding ourselves to take fresh perspectives – is that it’s terribly easy to over-value past investments in our efforts build today what will stand tomorrow.

[Via Daring Fireball].

Uncarved Design, email, Facebook, wu wei

Arguably the best linguistic “style guide” ever written for contemporary English. Doubly-relevant to Uncarved, since it both informs the way I aim to write, and serves as a canon for how sentences and paragraphs can most optimally be constructed.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style, 1918

There is a new hardcover edition to commemorate the anniversary. [via Daring Fireball]

Canon books, language

It didn’t take very long, but I finally grew annoyed with Blogger. The Blogger bar permanently affixed to the top of the blog was the straw that broke the camel’s back; though its presence seems perfectly reasonable, I just couldn’t bear looking at it.

And although Blogger’s functionality is “sufficient,” it’s just no fun to use. WordPress, by contrast, are constantly adding polish to the user experience of the CMS.

But maybe I’m just seeing greener grass — time will tell.

Uncarved changes, news

As evidenced by my recent post history, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0, Apple’s rumored “netbook” device, and generally evaluating Apple’s products from a product design perspective.

Although Apple’s revenues are driven largely by hardware sales, it’s the software running on that hardware that actually delivers the value. After all, Apple doesn’t have exclusive access to any hardware components that aren’t also available, in some form, to their competitors. Sure, there are some chips they create in-house, but these components certainly have direct competitors in the market. A variety of vendors produce comparable touch-screen technology, graphics chip sets, and the rest.

Apple has long touted software quality as their products’ key differentiator, and they’ve been aggressively developing their operating system (I’ll delve deeper into this particular term later on) as the centerpiece of their software ecosystem.

This common software code base is presently powering Macs, iPhones, iPod Touch, and even Apple TV.

This is brilliant. Read more…

Canon Apple, lexicon, OS X, OS X variants

Uncarved