Real, shipping stylus-based computers -- not just mockups or concepts like Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook -- go back to at least the late 1980s, with the GRiDPAD:
Maybe the lack of success has been due to poor implementation, but I wonder whether styluses are just inherently problematic:
1. Truly reliable handwriting recognition always seems to be just over the horizon, and I wonder whether it always will be. Honestly, I often can't read my own handwriting. Sure, you can store handwriting as "ink," aka a bitmap, but that's like choosing a fax as your file format.
2. Switching from stylus to finger to (possibly) keyboard is awkward. You need someplace to put the stylus, and it makes one-handed operation pretty difficult.
That said, I actually think I'd enjoy having a stylus for input sometimes. I hope that someone eventually figures out how to put all the pieces together. (Too bad that Microsoft Courier didn't make it.)
Steve Jobs played a minor role in Apple’s early success with the Apple II
I disagree. Here's what Isaacson writes (p. 73):
If it had not been for Jobs, [Wozniak] might still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box . . . . To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak's awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs's role.
For all of his foibles, Jobs was the quintessential founder, relentlessly pushing the business forward -- recruiting great team members, signing up investors, and polishing the product for a mass audience.
Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. . . . Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."
Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.
What an engagingly written interview with a thoughtful designer. Two points stand out:
1. Unlike Apple, which apparently eschews formal user research, Google relied on "ethnographic research" to shape Android 4.0.
2. In between Apple's hyper-realistic UI and Microsoft's Spartan aesthetic, Google is trying to find a middle ground in Android 4.0 that facilitates new approaches and new experiences.
From the screenshots alone, it's hard to tell what it actually will be like to use Android 4.0. But it's great to see that Google is thinking so deeply about user experience.
From Tom Hughes, who was design director for the Macintosh project, here's more about the meeting between Land and Jobs:
[A]ll serendipity for Sculley who was just along for the ride. He just happened to luck out. And, there was no pilgrimage… no planned meeting with Dr. Land. I was working for Steve as Design Director for the Macintosh project and we were in Boston and I asked Steve if he’d like to meet Dr. Land, whom I had worked with before Apple. I called Dr. Land and he agreed to meet Steve. We arrived to find a BBC documentary film crew there. Dr. Land excused them and we began a 3 hour visit which included a glimpse into color experiments that were in his lab, to his personal office and an amazing review of some of his personal collection of photographs. The memorable part of this was that Steve was meeting someone who legitimately could be, almost uniquely, a mentor for him. And, clearly, they shared an awareness of the importance of good design as it contributed not only to their products, but to their corporate culture as well.
Hats off to Microsoft's Greg Lowney, who, in the early '90s -- working pretty much by himself -- pioneered this corporate focus on accessibility. A great example of intrapreneurship within a big company.
This announcement only makes more poignant what he said in that speech:
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
What a wonderfully thought-provoking and inspiring piece. Thanks, Paul, for sharing it.
In a similar vein, from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College:
"If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.... Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."
But PR isn't about logic -- it's about storytelling. And if Airbnb isn't careful, the arc of the narrative here could seriously harm their business.
I agree with edw519: Airbnb needs to do something dramatic -- whatever it takes to transform EJ from a neglected victim of an unfeeling corporation to a hardy survivor who has moved on, thanks to Airbnb's caring and magnanimous support.
Making it easier to spot popular comments -- without showing comment scores -- would be helpful. But instead of drawing attention to the HN username, why not emphasize the comment itself, with a change of font weight and/or color? So just as downvoted comments now fade to gray, maybe the most highly rated ones should somehow stand out.
A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.