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
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
