Viewing a technology as a purely neutral object is ignoring the human intention designed into it, the meaning that humans give to the technology we interact with, and the incredible agency involved in a technologist’s work.
Enter WebAssembly. It offers a path to compiling native apps, written in languages like Rust or C++, into binaries that can run either natively or on the web. Being able to take the same app to any platform commoditizes app store silos, making them into compile targets.Metaplatforms like React Native, and Flutter are harbingers, and I suspect we’ll... See more
You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
Unsurprisingly, this is a solved problem in a field we Product Designers often ignore—video games—where “feel” is often addressed with a little industry secret called “game feel.” [...] In video games, the button you press to make a character jump is often a simple binary input (pressed or not), and yet the output combines a very finely-tuned... See more
Even collecting 1% of the sun's energy is an unbelievable change in our species' energy budget. We could create the infrastructure to beam basically unlimited amounts of energy around the solar system for all sorts of projects — colonies on other worlds, terraforming planets, constructing more mega structures, or even traveling to other stars. It... See more
ITEs are probably a subset of notes apps, just like IDEs are a subset of text editors. Every IDE is fundamentally a text editor. Every ITE is fundamentally a notes app. That’s because—at least for now—the best way we have of working with our thoughts is to instantiate them as notes.
In trying to get a particularly tricky habit to stick, I tried dozens of apps and nothing worked for me. Recording an action felt like yet another chore. None could approach the most basic satisfaction of simply crossing out an item on a list. Could you design a simple action that felt as satisfying and infuse it with as much symbolism? Were we... See more