I love the fact that you could “not install Google Toolbar” as an option to avoid this behaviour. I mean purlease - nowadays every mass market PC on the planet has this installed by default.
I have, for some time, been absolutely appalled by people spouting ‘digital native’ concepts in meetings when talking about the under twenties. The idea that “they think differently, act differently, are completely native” to the Internet when we oldies are not is often so entrenched that I have been accused (and I quote) of “designing applications for yourself, a white mid-thirties man” and “losing touch with my users”.
Apparently someone who has completely forgotten what it was like to be young is able to tell me that I have lost touch. Pah! I spit on their nonsense and go back to user centred design and thorough user testing against my target demographic and let them wallow in their contrived stupidity.
Anyway. JISC has just published a report (PDF) that rather supports common sense. (Summary from Ars Technica). Nice to have people who actually should be researching and commenting on this sort of thing come out with something we can refer to (and hopefully use to shut these digital native theorists up).
As an aside, I was in a meeting with Matt Locke (ex of BBC Innovation, now at Channel4) when someone started spouting this crap again. His use of Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-kolored Tangerine-flake Streamlined Baby as an example of exactly how one generation feels about the one following it was, I thought, particularly apt. And it reminded of a good book, too.
Forkd is coming on leaps and bounds (possibly because I haven’t touched the code for months now….). There’s been another release today (this is Feta 3 now) which adds loads of cool features:
Blog integration
No need for Flickr
Easier to find other people
If you haven’t already got an account please shout; we’re going to open up invites to the public soon, and surely you want to be in on the ground floor?
Well. It’s taken me a long time to find something in Firefox that I both genuinely dislike and fundamentally disagree with the reasoning behind the decision.
Um. This is Microsoft-like hubris, isn’t it? If I take the time and effort to write a stylesheet and put it in my document, then surely I want it styled using that sheet, don’t I? The comment from the developers are pretty upsetting too:
With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we’re doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.
Surely this is up to me to decide, is it not? And now even more Microsoft-like:
please avoid chiming with your opinions/beliefs/etc (on either side). That’s just adding to the noise. We don’t make feature choices based on who shouts the loudest.
There is a (very ugly) workaround, but dear God, what a strange choice and intransigent attitude. I’m genuinely surprised.
I can’t tell you how excited I am. We’ve been working on this in our spare time for such a long time now I’m amazed that we’ve actually finally made it. Forkd.com is live, in beta, and ready for your recipes. If I’ve not already sent you an invitation mail me (andy at isotoma.com) and I’ll sort one out straight away. Go for it people!
It’s finally here. Dave, Antony and Tom have been toiling away over a hot stove for the past few weeks and Forkd is finally ready for the tasting. It’s the feta release right now (d’ya see what we did there?) - if you’d like a feta tester account mail me. They’re very limited, but so is the readership of this blog… You’ll need a genuine love of food, a desire to show the world your cooking and the patience to log good bug reports and feature requests. If you’re interested please drop me a line (andy at isotoma.com will do it).
