I’ve always been drawn to their com­puters… I feel that people who don’t get it, who aren’t huge fans of Apple stuff, see people as ‘Apple fans’, but I just see it as ‘fans of a certain kind of attention to detail’.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on the attraction of Apple, counter to the oft-deployed notion of the ‘Apple fanboy’. Nice that he doesn’t refer to ‘haters’, either.

Kathy Meis, freelance writer, editor and founder of Serendipitē Studios, on the potential perils of adding too many ‘bells and whistles’ to ebooks and the danger that ‘too much noise’ might damage the rela­tionship with the reader.

The team at Monkey Do! dis­cover the draw­backs of setting web apps to run in full­screen on the iPhone.

We found out about the problem when a test user com­plained about having to relaunch the applic­ation every time they fol­lowed one of these links. Each external link was launched in Safari.

Get Lamp is a doc­u­mentary that looks back at the era of text-based com­puter games. If you were born before, say, 1980, you might remember these. Basically, to get through the game, you had to type things like Go east, Take hammer, Touch lady, etc.

In the words of the doc­u­mentary makers:

They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with sus­pense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players dis­covered how to nego­tiate the obstacles and think their way to victory.

I remember playing a sort of ‘hard­boiled crime’ text adventure on our old Amstrad CPC6128, and I surely must have played Zork at some point.

I later spent many hours playing Leisure Suit Larry, a more graph­ically advanced (and graphic!) incarn­ation of the adventure game, in which issuing instruc­tions such as Touch lady were not only acceptable but encouraged.

(via Galleycat)

Freelance writer Riccardo Mori steps back in time to a Mac running System 7.1 (con­nected to an old iBook running System 9 as “a bridge between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’ world” of his regular setup) to avoid the shiny, internet-connected world of dis­traction that OS X offers: emails, RSS, spur of the moment research on the muddy muddy web. Great photo of his bare­bones setup; I felt instantly calmed (and envious).

Gorgeous iPhone sized (60x110mm) grid-lined notepads for mocking up apps and webpages (and jotting down the phone numbers of “hot geeks” if you’re so inclined). Might buy one just to use as a decoy for would-be muggers.

If you overuse your CAPS LOCK there’s a good chance you’re senile, according to a new study. Judging by the com­ments on a typical YouTube video, there are a lot of people with really really really early onset dementia.

A com­puter tech­nique can tell the dif­ference between ancient inscrip­tions created by dif­ferent artisans.