Dustin Curtis

Designer, hacker, investor, nomad.

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The way it is

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is […] but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact… and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. 

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

STEVE JOBS

I didn’t think too much about this quote when I first read it a couple days ago. But it keeps coming back to me.

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Android Design Preview, a LiveView clone for Android

Introducing Android Design Preview, a little utility for Mac/Windows/Linux that’ll mirror a portion of your desktop screen (such as your Photoshop canvas) to your USB-connected Android device.

It requires a wired connection, it’s kind of ugly, and requires the Android SDK to be running… but it’s close enough to LiveView for me! The fact that it has taken this long for a design tool like this to be released for Android is absolutely incredible; it is basically impossible to create good mobile UIs without a rapid proofing system.

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Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

From Alex MacCaw, a developer at Twitter:

Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the ‘click and wait’ approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That’s the process they’ve used their entire careers so it’s no wonder most developers are blinkered to the alternatives.

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Bill Nguyen (founder of Color): The Boy In The Bubble

The first time Nguyen ever pitched a venture capitalist it was for a product he had never heard of. It was 1998, Nguyen was 27, and an entrepreneur had overheard him at a tech conference. “Three weeks later, he calls me and says, I have a meeting tomorrow with Kleiner Perkins, do you want to pitch? Im like, Well, whats the idea? Were going to send faxes over the Internet. Im like, Okay, I can pitch that,” recalls Nguyen. “I never prepared a business model, nothing, literally just pitched the idea this guy told me in the parking lot.” That night Nguyen went home, changed the name of the company from Ziptel to OneBox, expanded the company’s business to web-based “unified messaging,” went to another VC for backing, and, 18 months later, sold the startup for $850 million–two months before the dotcom crash.

This is an excerpt from the fantastic article (expose?) by Danielle Sacks in Fast...

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UILayer

UILayer provides a JavaScript API on top of WebKit for working with the concept of layers. Instead of manipulating DOM elements using a myriad of mixed concepts, you go though a single, well defined API.

This is really neat. And it was built by Rasmus Andersson, the original designer of Spotify who is now at Facebook.

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Motorola’s Gimmicks

From The Verge on the new Motorola Droid RAZR:

So is the Droid RAZR worth Motorola’s marketing blitz? Is it the phone to get? Well, probably not. While the hardware engineering required to stuff the internals of the Bionic into the thinnest smartphone design on the market is nothing short of amazing, the compromise on display quality needed to get there simply isn’t worth it.

It’s amazing that Motorola keeps pumping out these pieces of junk. Each phone has a little gimmick–in the case of the RAZR, it’s thinness–at the expense of every other important aspect of the user experience. The display technology used on the Droid RAZR is called Super AMOLED, and while it is possible to cram one of these displays into a very thin profile, the screen itself has atrocious color reproduction and litters the viewing area with strange red lines dangling off normal pixels. After looking at a Super...

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Shit Work

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.

Excellent article by Zach Holman about the problems with features that require difficult up front work and constant curation. When I signed up for Google+ last week, I was amazed at how much work it took to build my Circles. The UI is a mess, it’s confusing, it breaks all sorts of paradigms (in a bad way), and yet, when it was released, people were screaming about how awesome it was. Because it’s evolutionarily advantageous, humans are drawn to being given control… even when it’s illusory. Good product designers ignore users and then give them more than what they want, even when it’s literally less.

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Sam Sifton’s final restaurant review: Per Se

A meal at the restaurant at the end of September brought pan-roasted Massachusetts cod, with applewood smoked bacon, briny littleneck clams, pickled garlic, celery and shoots of parsley. “Clam chowder” was the description on the menu, as “shiny glass” might have advertised a diamond. The cod had a sweetness beneath its crisp, salty exterior that was distinct from that of the clams, which claimed the texture of the bacon. It was a pure distillation of autumn east of the Bourne Bridge, a Hopper painting made edible, seafood squared.

I’ve never eaten at a restaurant of such a high caliber as Per Se or French Laundry, but it’s a major goal of mine. As a person in constant search of impossible perfection, I wonder what this kind of experience feels like. Is the best restaurant in the world ‘good enough’?

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A Peek Inaside Richard Stallman’s Brain

Here are a couple excerpts from Richard Stallman’s amazing “Speaker Packet,” which gives a scary tour of the man’s brain:

Temperature: Above 72 fahrenheit (22 centigrade) I find sleeping quite difficult. (If the air is dry, I can stand 23 degrees.) A little above that temperature, a strong electric fan blowing on me enables me to sleep. More than 3 degrees above that temperature, I need air conditioning tosleep. Food: I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up. Restaurants: The only general thing I can tell you is that what I like or dislike about a meal is the sensation of eating the food. Other things, such as the decor of a restaurant, or the view from its windows, are secondary. Let’s choose the restaurant based on its food.

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$81,570,000,000.00

There are a lot of interesting nuggets of information in Apple’s 2011 10-K Annual Report filed with the SEC earlier today, but I found this most impressive:

Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities increased $30.6 billion or 60% during 2011 [to $81,570,000,000].

$30.6 billion dollars of cold, hard profit in one year. Ridiculous.

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