For several reasons, I have been resisting the temptation to post about Duke’s now-famous decision to give an iPod to every first-year student. To begin with, it’s been covered to death, so I didn’t think that just posting the link was doing a particular service to anyone. Second, others have already written about at least […]
Apple-Inc.
A Thousand Affordances in Your Pocket
Yup. I finally broke down and got myself an iPod. Kathy has had one for about two years now but I was holding out for two more developments. First, I wanted enough disk space–at least 20 gigs–to carry a significant amount of data as well as my music, since I intended to use it as […]
Blogo-Eroticism: You'll go blind!!!
So, here’s a puzzling bit of argumentation from Steven Strubel: However, my hunch is that Apple will continue to prevent its employees from blogging for the foreseeable future so that it can maintain its mystique. This approach may work for awhile, but the employees in Cupertino will eventually revolt, snub their noses at policy and […]
Parallel Play Grows Up, Part II
Well, the conversation continues, with an interesting twist. This time, one blogger has explicitly responded to a request for his input from another blogger. The semantics here are interesting, since the original blogger (Dave Hyatt) didn’t directly ask for comment. Instead, what he wrote was I’ll be eagerly awaiting the responses of both Tim and […]
More on Apple's Workflow Taxonomy
More good stuff: The prerelease version of Automator currently comes with 123 Actions that are grouped into categories according to function. The categories include Mail, Find, Alert, People, and iPod, and users can search for Actions using Tiger’s standard Mac OS X search field. The alternate view command groups the Actions by keyword, which can […]
A Workflow Taxonomy
A few posts ago I mentioned that Apple’s new Automator tool was a potentially interesting development vis-a-vis workflow learning. Well, a new article at MacWorld surfaces this fascinating additional tidbit: With the Automator, you don’t have to write a single line of code; instead, you build a flow chart. On the left side of the […]
When Parallel Play Matures Into Socialization
Here’s a great example of sustained and productive conversation supported by (or at least started by) weblogs and, perhaps, a counter-example to the blogging as parallel play argument. Recently, Apple Computer announced that they would be adding four extensions to HTML in order to support new features in the upcoming version of their operating system. […]