I didn't know Textpattern was still around, much less widely used. I'd used it in college to set up my first blog ages ago and it was a great introduction in the then-new notion of 'content management systems'. Is it still a thing? Wordpress seems to be the first, last, and everything in-between in this space now, it seems.
Seeing the rise of Noto as other executives and leaders fall away, are removed, or otherwise leave Twitter makes me wonder how much longer Dorsey can hold on to his job, especially after the embarrassment of the failed acquisition talks. It's like watching Game of Thrones, but in real life.
In truth, what can happen is exactly the opposite: constant firing of pain signals can end up recruiting _more_ cells to transmit pain, thereby lowering the threshold need to signal pain, and amplifying the effect overall.
The giant gap between the beautiful photos of beautiful people doing enviable things in beautiful places used in demos such as these (and in Apple ones as well) and the mundane, poorly-focused, washed-out, ill-composed photos and meme reposts that are most likely to appear on your FB feed at any given moment always takes the shine off of products such as these for me, despite how much more useful or technologically advanced they may be from their predecessors. Being reminded my life is not going to be as exciting as the floor model is never a good user experience.
I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable "prosumer" programming, in the spirit of Hypercard.
I would argue that such a thing already exists. If you want to do 'easy', low-hanging, easily-prototyped design and development, the kind of experience you had as a kid with Hypercard, you can still do it, and mostly for free: it's the web.
This helps explain Google’s motivation for Android. Google could, of course, just extend their search advertising to mobile phones, Adsense for mobile devices and build mobile versions of their web applications so anyone can use them. That might make for a fine business, but it’d also be a rather weak position to be in compared to where Google is now. Phone makers could change the default search engine on their phones to something other than Google; mobile devices might change how people find information—they might switch away entirely from using a search engine, and in that case, Google would be dead in the water; or, worse, perhaps mobile devices could move people away from using advertising-supported web applications, and toward primarily using paid-for applications; in that case, Google would really be screwed.
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The thing is, Bing is already the default search on many phones, including Android/Droid phones on Verizon, who is ostensibly Google's partner.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...