This week on Core Intuition we follow up on Apple news, then discuss the sale of Unread and all the new activity around RSS apps and services. It makes a good complement to some of my recent posts on microblogging.

Maybe I do need a day phone and a night phone. In the evenings I’ll use the too-big-for-pockets iPhone 6 Plus, and when leaving the house I’ll take… the 3.5-inch iPhone 4S. The future is on the extremes.

Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks: "Is the web we lost gone forever? Was it a brief golden age before the rise of Facebook and Twitter and The Algorithms of Engagement?" But he quickly follows with an alternate view: that it’s a blip and we’ll get ba...

Made it down to Houndstooth for Cafe Bedouins for the first time in months, maybe all year. Austin is getting a serious rain tonight, but it let up a little for the drive.

Great post by Gus Mueller on losing your way in a project: "Maybe you've been making foundational changes to your app. You've been spending time cleaning up your code, rewriting those hacks you've been wanting to fix for years now. Or you're targeting a new SDK and there'...

I should stop writing this blog post complaining about people who complain about U2. Lots of real work to do.

“If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.” — @notch on leaving Mojang

I’m working on a new project around timelines and microblogs. It consumes RSS feeds, so I’ve been wondering how strict to be when accepting posts. What does microblog mean, anyway? Wikipedia defines it this way: "Microblogging is a broadcast medium that exists in the form...

Fixed the RSS feeds. Turns out they were returning valid RSS but with an HTTP 404 header. After fighting with mod_rewrite, I ended up hacking the fix into WordPress.

Still thinking about yesterday’s iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event. Daniel and I recorded our first thoughts on a special episode of Core Intuition yesterday.

Federico Viticci has the exclusive on Transmit coming to iOS:

"Considering the old limitations of iOS for inter-app communication and file management, using the Transmit extension feels like a major breakthrough and exactly the kind of experience that the app was meant to be on an iPhone and iPad."

While traveling this summer, I used Panic’s Prompt to download and rename files on the Core Intuition web server. It’s going to be great to also have Transmit’s UI in my pocket.

Learning curve with Ember.js is a little greater than I thought at first. Not sure I’m doing everything “correctly”, but getting the hang of it. Very cool framework.

A couple of hours from now I should be firmly planted in my seat with popcorn and drink for The Two Towers. I didn’t get to finish re-reading the book this week as I had planned, but from what I’m hearing there are enough differences that maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. The...

Steven Johnson for Slate, “Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?" "Now that Microsoft has largely caught up to the Mac in terms of basic file manipulation tools -- thanks to Windows XP's elegant user interface -- the iApps have become a key differentiator for Apple. They are a...

Aaron Swartz talks at the Creative Commons launch party: "Right now you can only ask a search engine one question: 'What pages have these words in them?' When pages include RDF metadata, you will be able to ask more advanced questions like 'What's the current temperature in ...

The weather turned cold here yesterday, and that just contributes to my blogging apathy after the Thanksgiving weekend. I’m just too lazy to blog, and the backlog of unread items in NetNewsWire was over 150 this morning. Time to trim the subscriptions again. There’s too much...

John Lim of PHP Everywhere:

"I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and software changes so fast and if you spend too much time specializing you're already a dinosaur before you turn 40."

Adrian Holovaty describes the BBC’s ‘intelligent’ design personalization. By keeping track of what links you follow, sections of the home page are given darker backgrounds to draw your attention to those you visit most often. Sounds like a great idea, but I wonder if it is t...

Odd that I had never heard of Good Experience, a newsletter by Mark Hurst. Just discovered it today via Tomalak’s Realm. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon:

"For example, quite awhile ago we developed the 'similarities' feature - the one that says 'people who bought this also bought that.' In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had."

Peter Merholz, “Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture”:

"As information architects know, explaining what they do, even to smart people in related fields, is difficult. Once given a clue as to what user experience is, folks can understand that improving the user experience of a product will be valuable. That will never be true of information architecture, which, by nature, is more abstract and subtle."

Best of chi-web and sigia-l: “Using the archives for each mailing list, I’ve compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings.” [via WebWord] Also on UIWEB, Reasons ease of use doesn’t happen on engineering projects...

From the BBC: “The international community has a ‘moral responsibility’ to avoid war with Iraq, the Catholic Church has warned.”

Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator) makes the moral case for war in Iraq:

"We know what a terrible thing we did after the Gulf War to encourage Iraqis to rise up and then not follow through in helping them. But you can't take the worst America has done and then cite it as reason not to try and do anything good."

Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.

Joel on Software, “The Law of Leaky Abstractions”:

"If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened."

I haven’t seen Futurama since it first aired – the time slot doesn’t work for me, but I wonder why I haven’t been taping it. The fourth (and final) season started last night, so I finally made time to watch it again. What a great show. It was especially funny that the Al Gor...

Today is the big day, and you should vote. Even though you can’t stand all the negative ads. Even though it’s hard to tell who’s the Democrat and who’s the Republican because they all move to the center for their campaign. Even though they just give us the buzzwords we want ...

Matthew Thomas' “When good interfaces go crufty” is a fun read. It’s nothing we don’t already know, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded that some of the interfaces that we are so used to are still confusing for new users. His talk on the evils of using file paths to re...

Out all last week, vacationing around the Gulf coast. It was good to unplug for a week and forget about the email, the blogs, and the constant hum of a noisy FireWire drive. I think we went three whole days without hearing the word “sniper”.

Brent Simmons responds point by point to the misinformation in the Applelust.com article, “Going Native: The Attraction of the Cocoa Interface." Although the article is a mess, there are a couple of valid observations in it: "Still, at this point in the evolution of Mac OS X...

Last night I saw Spirited Away. I first heard about the film shortly before its release in Japan, and finally it is getting a limited release here. It opened in Austin at 3 theaters, which is more than I expected. Our showing had a good attendance, and one earlier in the day...