2020s
Why NetNewsWire Is Fast - I love it when Brent Simmons writes about system design and principles.
Tools for plain-text thinking
Margin is a plain text notation for thinking in lists, notes, and structured data. I have a soft spot for notations for thinking like, e.g. Markdown, TaskPaper, even bullet journaling.
The mark of a nicely designed plain text format is that it works equally well in a well-crafted app, a text editor, and on a sheet of paper. Margin meets that criteria.
The Bremont Argonaut - there’s a lot of “ink” on this watch face, but it doesn’t seem busy. Even more, the marks on the crowns are the real winners.
You could also think about the Apple Watch as the main input device. In contrast to the AirPods, Apple opened the Watch for developers from the start, but it hasn’t really seen much success as a platform. Perhaps a combination of Watch and AirPods has a better chance of creating an ecosystem with its own unique applications?
Bingo.
Knowing what books someone loves is to know their perspective and their journey, to have something special in common, to share a language.
The CWC Mellor-72 - I love the overall shape, but especially the arrow icon above the 6.
My law of music: there is no song that Aretha Franklin could not perform slower and therefore better than everyone else.
Newly discovered corollary: except possibly Pierre Boulez and Beethoven’s 5th. So slow, nearly belabored. Love it!
Drew Austin on high/low-brow music, how it fits into album reviews and club culture, and how all that has shifted in our current state of distance. Energy Flash:
“For Reynolds, “at home and at album length” refers to a process of decontextualization, the musical equivalent of the modern gallery’s white cube: a belief that any cultural product meriting serious appreciation must prove that it can survive outside of its native habitat by becoming a fungible unit of culture, fitting into the standardized format of Pitchfork album reviews and solitary, focused listening. If music sounds good in a packed nightclub at 3 a.m. but not through headphones on your couch, is it real in the same way that Kid A is real? Right now in quarantine, the contextualizing environments in which culture traditionally incubates are closed off and dormant, so everything has to sound good in the living room whether it’s meant to or not. We live in the white cube now; anything that relies on a specific source of external context is an endangered species. We’re one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.”
A new cannonball run record set - a surprise and unintentended consequence of pandemic and shutting down the economy. It’s now much easier to drive a car really fast from New York to Los Angeles. The new record is just a few hours over a day.
The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel - when a function of the monolith becomes unwieldy, split off an Outpost to service that need specifically. I like to call them sidecars, because that seems more fun!
Introducing Watchsmith - I love the idea of using customizable, bespoke complications to get a foot in the door of customizable Apple Watch faces. I’m trying it right now, so far so good!
I’ve been tinkering this weekend and MVP.css may be one of my new favorite tools. Drop in some CSS and then just use HTML elements as their name would suggest. No layout, no grids, no typographical system. No classes to memorize. Build now, worry about all the other stuff later.