Siri’s social dilemma:

Secondly, voice assistance carries a whole host of privacy issues. Some are basic: How do you prevent others from using your phone with voice commands? What kind of access security is built in to a system like Siri? In some cases, it can become more complex. Consider how much private information is contained in your smartphone. How much of that information would you be comfortable broadcasting around you to strangers and people you know? Would you be willing to have Siri dictate your texts, emails or appointments out loud in your workplace? At home? You can imagine a thousand and one scenarios where that would be undesirable. Would you want a secretary dictating your next appointment out loud into your doctor’s iPhone for everyone in the waiting room to hear?

I have no idea if Siri’s voice control service is as good as the hype claims (let me be uncharacteristically pessimistic and assume not), but if it is — and if becomes widely used — then we’re probably looking at a shift in social norms around communication technology as significant as the shifts following the adoption of the mobile phone. Remember when conspicuous mobile phone usage marked you out as an irredeemable wanker? And how that marking changed almost overnight?

Nice post comparing the interfaces of a number of blogging tools. Adam Mathes compares Movable Type, Blogger, and Wordpress and finds that they all come up short compared to Twitter:

This is why anyone – even confused celebrities who barely comprehend technology – can actually use this product. You show up, there’s a box at the top, you type in it, and it shows up below with other people’s stuff you can read.

Textpattern’s posting interface has a bit more complexity, but it does one thing right. On logging in, you’re always presented with a big box for typing in and a prominent “Publish” button.

(Yes, I am on a bit of a Textpattern kick again, why did you ask!)

update: Post discovered via the inestimable Waxy Links.

Most beloved of CMS tools, the mighty Textpattern, is now version 4.2.0.

Check out the release notes.

Via Daring Fireball, a pretty depressing tale from Garrett Murray, developer of a stats app for the iPhone.

Irsquo;m far more likely to get 15 one-star reviews when something goes wrong than I am to get 15 five-star reviews when everything goes right. Perhaps itrsquo;s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, itrsquo;s hard to get excited about building an app.

I sympathise, but I have to wonder how much actual attention most people pay to reviews on the App Store. The average buyer must have figured out by now that most reviews are written by homophobic twelve-year-olds on sugar highs and adjust their expectations accordingly. Furthermore, I guess one upside of the current pricing model is that it’s easier to take a risk on the app if it takes your fancy, despite clearly negative reviews.

Just confirming the advice on image formats compiled at YUIBlog. I tested CS3 and Fireworks, and Fireworks outputs an excellent 8-Bit PNG file with variable transparency for web pages.

I don’t think this information has been spread all that widely, so I’ll just do my bit to help out.

Partly for my own reference, and partly to gather feedback from other developers, I present below an extract from an email I sent to the developer of CSSEdit, to my mind one of the finest web development tools available.

In many ways, I think the tab implementation on CSSEdit is excellent, but I have a few problems with it. Maybe there are some UI options that I haven’t seen to mitigate my problems, but I haven’t found them yet.

1. Command-W closes the entire window, not the tab. Strictly speaking that’s probably correct but every other application that I know uses tabs maps Command-W to “close tab”. The app doesn’t also remember the existing tab-set after I frantically re-open the window.
2. I like to have a set of related tabs grouped together – first the CSS, then the preview in the next tab along. Currently that requires a bit of manual re-arrangement to set up for a new project, as you can drop a preview tab onto a CSS file window, but not vice versa. I’d like “new preview” to consistently open to a new tab in the same window but I can’t figure out yet how to enforce that.

Have any other users of CSSEdit found ways around these problems?

Today, my friend and co-worker Kyle’s iPhone/Touch application Ancient Wisdom went live on the iTunes App Store. Ancient Wisdom is a small and light-hearted tool that displays koans and sayings by philosophers and writers such as Lao Tzu

I helped out by designing a logo and some background art. The rather cute monkeys who help impart the ancient words of wisdom were created by the developer himself, a noted fan of our simian friends.

Here’s the logo in its current state:

I’ll be helping to polish and refine the user interface over the next few weeks. I’m also really exited by the prospect of designing in a technology that perhaps requires fewer compromises than HTML!

I’m only about half way through this revelatory essay on web typography and the paragraph and I already know that it’s the most important thing I’ve read on the craft of web design in years. I think it may completely change the way I work.

Don’t miss the accompanying piece of stylistic treatments.

This has to be useful: shell scripting in 20 pages.

Here’s a simple trick that I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere.

Say you have a series of thumbnails of a known size. You want to give them a fancy border effect but don’t want to waste a lot of time in Photoshop applying it to every one.

The simple answer is to create an image — larger than the original — that contains the border and its background. Then you simply apply that image as a background image with CSS (give it a “center center” position and sufficient padding) and bob’s your uncle.