Laurie Voss via Quartz:

You are looking for grasp of complex topics and the ability to clearly communicate about them, which are the two jobs of the working engineer.

From Marcin Wichary on Medium:

The perfect underline should be visible, but unobtrusive — allowing people to realize what’s clickable, but without drawing too much attention to itself. It should be positioned at just the right distance from the text, sitting comfortably behind it for when descenders want to occupy the same space…

I believe Medium’s fastidiousness regarding typography is one of the defining characteristics of their brand.

Clay Shirky on Medium:

Contrary to the contrived ignorance of media reporters, the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade. (If you work at a paper and you don’t know what’s happened to your own circulation or revenue in the last few years, now might be a good time to ask.) We’re late enough in the process that we can even predict the likely circumstance of its demise.

After 200 issues of A List Apart, Kevin Cornell is retiring as staff illustrator. I find Cornell’s work to be gorgeous:

I was fortunate enough to have him illustrate the very first (out of print) Rands t-shirt. Can’t wait to see what he tackles next.

My hunch is a lot of folks are going to have a bunch of questions that will easily be handled by this handy guide by Sebastien Gabriel:

This guide is designed as a “get started” or introductory read for the starting to intermediate designer who wants to learn or get more knowledge about cross-DPI and cross-platform design from the very beginning.

From Kevin Kelly on Medium:

But, but…here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014. People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.

Yesterday was a study in contrasts. I was cleaning up part of the garage in the morning and found a box full of CD cases containing classic video games: Quake, Baldur’s Gate II, Riven, and Alice. Later in the day, I also had the opportunity to play the open Destiny Beta for a few hours.

Anyone who believes that we’re not a part of a wide open frontier only need look at what was considered state of the art just a few years ago.

Josh Olson asks, “How do you stay the course with task management?”

As part of the new gig, I’m continuing with Workflowy as my personal to-do system. It’s a bookmark called “Brain” and it’s roughly a page-long outline, but it’s still early in the gig. I’m bracing for the inevitable flood of tasks when I leave the honeymoon phase.

When this flood does occur, I’ll likely do what I’ve done in the past. When the work associated with task management become onerous, when it’s 1am and I’m dragging and dropping tasks hither and fro, I’ll think, There has got to be a better way.

There is. And it has nothing to do with well-designed productivity software.

I eagerly evaluate every single shiny new productivity system because my sincere hope is that they’ve solved for… me. They need to solve for the fact that I excite easily, but I have a short attention span. They need to solve for the fact that I eagerly embrace the disruptive new, I’m not beholden to the past, and will adapt to whatever new craziness they’ve designed. But they also need to account for the fact that new craziness has an incredibly short half-life.

It’s an impossible design specification and my advice for productivity software vendors is to ignore it.

We spend a lot of time asking too much of our tools when, in fact, what we really need is just good practices. I’m certain I could keep track of my individual tasks on a torn coffee-stained napkin reliably as long as the practice around the maintenance of that napkin list was reasonable and, more importantly, maintained consistently.

I eagerly evaluate every new productivity solution that shows up because I truly want them to be “the one,” but after doing this for over a decade, I’m certain the tool isn’t the problem. I am. Where the innovation needs to occur is not within Asana, Things, or Workflowy, it’s with how I choose to spend my time. It’s developing a well defined protocol for myself regarding maintaining my to-do list, and then religiously following this protocol and consistently investing my time.

Fact: to-do list management is boring. It’s like writing unit tests for your life. It’s maintenance work and we engineers both understand the value of maintenance work and excel at finding brilliant excuses to not do it. A simply delicious way of avoiding this boredom is to keep it interesting by changing the rules, finding a new application, and talking about your productivity workflow rather than maintaining that workflow.

Which is what I’m doing right now. See, I’m the problem.

Nick Keppol via MartianCraft:

The first thing people usually want to discuss with an update like this is the look and feel. However, there are plenty of comparisons between the Mavericks and Yosemite icons. They’re cleaner, they’ve removed the gloss, made things happier and brighter looking, and retained some skeuomorphic elements.

I have a thing for people who obsess.