The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a "map" of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about. Links are no longer lonesome strands precariously holding together a sparsely connected Web, but a booming choir of ephemeral connections... See more
To be fair, computers — both the desktop kind and various mobile kinds — enable seemingly-impossible things. But it feels frustrating to see the pioneering spirit that originally led to the development of modern computers giving way to uninspired flat interfaces and CRUD SaaS apps. The things you can do are limited to bespokely-implemented... See more
My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how different social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical eras – and plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat-out... See more
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
Human beings simply aren’t equipped with the necessary bandwidth to process the explosion of information that our world has normalized.To make things worse, it turns out that the desktop metaphor underlying so much of our computing was not equipped to handle it either. In response to the increased stimuli, our Desktops simply started generating... See more
We believe that digital technology creates possibilities, so our solutions truly adapt to the new environment, rather than emulate analog qualities onscreen.
Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation.This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user's circumstance instead of a bundle of features.