Byword 2.0 came out today. You should get it, if you’re a Mac user and you don’t already have it. Gorgeous and elegant – the best of the crop of minimalist writing environments available for Mac today, in my opinion.
And you can publish directly to Tumblr from it – which is super cool.
Two points worth considering about this really fantastic Kickstarter project—one about the project itself, and one not (see below). First, this is, indeed, a really fantastic project. The stuff they're doing is what I've been wanting in a CMS for much of the last year. The fact that WordPress is so bloated is a big part of why I'm working on my own static site generator. This is clean, elegant, and fast.
Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customiseable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even (gasp) fun to do. It's simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work - and more time blogging.
Ghost has a smart writing screen. Markdown on the left, and a live preview on the right. Write down your ideas and format them on the fly, never pausing to click on endless formatting buttons, never having to write long/painful HTML to express your ideas. You can even theme the preview pane to match your blog's formatting exactly.
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Ghost is a Node.js application powered by the Express framework. Ghost ships with SQLite, which means it can run pretty much anywhere - however everything is connected through JugglingDB ORM, adding future support for many other database formats.
Ghost will be available via NPM, making it extremely simple (and fast!) to install on all major environments.
Ghost theming is done with Handlebars, which keeps our business and view logic separated. Mmmm semantic + sexy. If you know how to write WordPress themes, you'll be writing Ghost themes in under 5 minutes. Here's an example.
Of course there's also support for customising and extending your blog with additional functionality via plugins with helpers and data filters built right into Ghost. We'll also be supporting full international translations from the word go using Node Polyglot.js.
Finally, Ghost is being released under the MIT License. It's pretty much the most free Open Source license out there. It means you can do whatever you want with Ghost, and you can choose whatever license you want when you build something with Ghost. Want to release a GPL Ghost theme? That's fine. Want to release an MIT theme? That's fine too.
On a completely different note, look at all the promotional imagery throughout the Kickstarter materials (and, for that matter, on the project's homepage). Every single shot that includes hardware shows Apple. I suspect there are two reasons for this:
Target audience: writers are far and away more likely to be running Macs than any other group except designers, from what I've seen. Developers are a fairly even split across platforms (tech media perceptions notwithstanding, Windows has a massive developer base). Writers? Not so much. (And designers are, in my experience at least, more typical writers than developers are.)
Apple just has the best-looking hardware as an overall rule. To be sure, there are places where others are competing—the HTC One is a gorgeous phone, for example—but as a rule, Apple is setting the pace on hardware design and most others are imitating. Those who aren't are making solid hardware, but nothing that's pretty like Apple is doing. As a result, if you're going to show hardware, you're going to show Apple hardware.
This latter point is why nearly every generic computer in advertisements for web products is a genericized (read: de-branded) Mac.
Me, I keep hoping somebody else will step up to the plate and go toe to toe with Apple on industrial design. That would be an enormous win for everyone.
The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.
This is why Glass and things like it are just a little bit off, in my view. There are times and places when you want wearable things; but ultimately they need to remain outside you—easily disconnected—because my body and my technology are fundamentally different in important ways. Ways that the technological chattering classes haven't thought about nearly enough, and that they in fact seem entirely blind to, with a naïve belief that technologizing the human body always makes it better.
There's some brilliant stuff in here; read the whole thing.
Translation: Aereo's innovation forced the networks' hands. This is why good IP law—read, the kind that fosters innovation instead of killing it—is such a big deal. The networks would never have done this if not backed into a corner by a little startup that found a way to mash together existing technologies to do something new, and in a way that bit the networks.
The New York Times reports that ABC will become the first network to live stream its local programming to users of its Watch ABC app starting this week. Beginning in New York and Philadelphia, the...
What I do know is that I can't blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I'll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won't, to be honest. But at least I'll know that it's not the internet's fault. I'll know who's responsible, and who can fix it.
Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of. His eyes fume from his Twitter profile: he is Hollywood-handsome with high cheekbones and dirty blond, collar-length hair. Next to his name is one of social media's most prized possessions, Twitter's blue 'verified account' checkmark. Beneath it are numbers to make many in the online world jealous: Santiago Swallow has tens of thousands of followers.
...
There’s just one thing about Santiago Swallow that you won’t easily find online: I made him up. Everything above is true. He really does have a Twitter feed with tens of thousands of followers, he really does have a Wikipedia biography, and he really does have an official web site. But he has never been to TED or South By South West and is not writing a book. I—or rather he—flat out lied about that.
It’s the beginning of the disintermediation of the agencies, and so it’s hardly surprising that they’re unenthusiastic about the trend. This is real digital disruption: native shops like BuzzFeed or Barbarian Group will never be as profitable as the huge ad agencies, but they can still cause those agencies to suffer very large drops in their digital revenues.
It's the same pattern the web has driven in almost every industry has touched; it's just gotten a slower start with advertising because—smartly—the advertisers got in early on in the history of the web and set some default expectations. Those expectations are changing now, though.
It's not going to be easy, though:
The big unanswered question, then, is not whether native has disruptive potential — it clearly does. Rather, it’s whether native will ever be able to truly scale. Native is growth-constrained on two fronts, and that means that if you’re betting on industry-changing disruption, you’re making a risky bet. The first constraint is creative. Native is hard work....
[Second,] all of that effort is going into reaching a relatively small number of people. This is another way in which native ads are like long copy print ads: they reach a small audience, rather than a mass audience. As a result, any brand wanting to reach a mass market is going to have to use native as just one part of a much bigger strategy, and that in turn is going to keep the native-averse ad agencies in the driver’s seat.
It's been a while since I've read anything at The New Republic. Today, I read the linked article and discovered what an excellent job they've done with their site design. Some of it is pretty standard stuff these days—good typographic choices, including the typeface, line length, etc.; smart use of space on the side for the "footnotes"; and so on.
But there are some lovely little details to go along with those basics:
You can set the type size.
You can bookmark an article for reading later or get an audio version if you're a subscriber.1
You can jump back to the top with a navigation arrow that appears once you're a little way down the page.
You can see how far you are through the article you're reading by the gradually filling, narrow, subtle status bar at the top.
When you highlight text, you immediately have the option to share it via Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr... along with a character count for your selection.
I'm sure there's more; that's just what I discovered so far. In short: I think this is my favorite redesign of the last year.
Oh, and that article? Killer.
One of just two smart things I can already see in their freemium model—the other being the fact that you have to subscribe to post a comment. That's perhaps the single best way I can think of to eliminate or at least massively reduce the influx of garbage that has turned most comment threads on the internet into such a cesspool. ↩︎
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