I just read and enjoyed this:
Female characters appear in superhero comics less often than males — but when they are included, how are they depicted? The recent theatrical release of Wonder Woman briefly catapulted the question of female superhero representation into the mainstream.
Read “Analyzing the Gender Representation of 34,476 Comic Book Characters”
The analysis is beautifully visualised, including some great pixel art.
I just read and enjoyed this:
It seems to me that when people talk about what you ‘can’t’ do on a device, there are actually two different meanings of ‘can’t’ in computing. There is ‘can’t’ as meaning the feature doesn’t exist, and there is ‘can’t’ as meaning you don’t know how to do it. If you don’t know how to do it, the feature might as well not be there. So, there is what an expert can’t do on a smartphone or tablet that they could do on a PC. But then there are all of the things that a normal person (the other 90% or 95%) can’t do on a PC but can do on a smartphone, because the step change in user interface abstraction and simplicity means that they know how to do it on a phone and didn’t know how to do it on a PC. That is, the step change in user interface models that comes with the shift from Windows and Mac to iOS and Android is really a shift in the accessibility of capability. A small proportion of people might temporarily go from can to can’t, but vastly more go from can’t to can.
I just read and enjoyed this:
For six weeks in October and November 2015, just before Myanmar held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact.
Read “Myanmar’s Smartphone Revolution”
I didn’t expect Facebook to hold such a dominant position in people’s lives. There are also some great examples of how routing around infrastructure differences causes completely different usage patterns compared to the US and Europe.
I just read and enjoyed this:
This post is all about WeChat, but it’s also about more than just WeChat. While seemingly just a messaging app, WeChat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile operating system depending on how you look at it.
Read “When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China”
I enjoyed this article by Benedict Evans, particularly this bit:
In the enterprise, new technology tends to solve existing problems in new ways (or of course solve the new problems created by the new tech). In consumer products, it’s more common to seem to be proposing a change in human behaviour, and so in human desires. You may in some underlying way ‘really’ be replacing an existing behavior in a different way, as Word replaced typewriters and email replaced Word, but that line of reasoning can easily lead you to unfalsifiable assertions when you move up Maslow’s Hierarchy. ‘Millennials care less about driving because smartphones give them their freedom now’ certainly sounds good, but I have no idea how you could tell if it’s true, far less predict it. This is not a falsifiable analysis. All that you can hold in your hands is that you’re proposing a new human desire, and that’s a subjective view, not the objective analysis one could do of the roadmap for flight in 1903 – worse, it requires a change in your subjective view. You don’t think that you want to listen to music walking down the street, and you don’t think that you want to be able to call anyone from anywhere you might be. The argument for progress here is effectively false consciousness – ‘you think you don’t want this, but you are wrong, and one day you will realise the truth of your own feelings’. But you can’t ever know this – again, you can’t falsify it.
Steven Sinofski made similar observations when writing about platform shifts.
I just read and enjoyed this:
The iPhone is the best selling product ever, making Apple perhaps the best business ever. Because of the iPhone, Apple has managed to survive to a relatively old age.
I just read and enjoyed this:
The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly.
I just read and enjoyed this:
In 1634, the rage among the Dutch to possess [tulips] was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade.
I just read and enjoyed this:
In February 2006, Jeff Han gave a demo of an experimental ‘multitouch’ interface, as a ‘TED’ talk. I’ve embedded the video below. Watching this today, the things he shows seems pretty banal – every $50 Android phone does this! – and yet the audience, mostly relatively sophisticated and tech-focused people, gasps and applauds. What is banal now was amazing then.
I just read and enjoyed this: “A Year of Google Maps & Apple Maps”
