Just finished Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs".

It was interesting to read about the various decisions made along the way to the first iPhone launch and remember the real-time launch back then. Even though the first phone had limitations, they were able to do enough things "right" that you could feel the paradigm shift within a few minutes of using it. Coming from a mobile software company at the time (and having access to all the top phones of the time, various Blackerry devices, Moto Razr, etc) it was easy to see that Apple had really made something extraordinary with its software.

Thanks for sharing your work. I'm not sure I have a particular use for it at the moment, but it's well executed.

One point of (hopefully) constructive feedback is that it wasn't obvious from my first interaction with the temporary doc that I was able to create checklists and bullet points. Once I saw that those are possible, I quickly guessed the keystrokes, but it might be helpful to add some graphical guidance.

thanks! It's something I've batted around with a few friends who've tried it. I agree it's not totally clear.

On desktop, you get a little popover menu with all available formatting when you highlight some text. On mobile, it's always there when you select.

I was thinking along the lines of something like a little help icon (?) that might toggle it on desktop, some sort of overlay that only appears on first use, or just a real simple tutorial video or something. I'll think on it. Thanks for the feedback!

There are major cultural differences between these schools that the article doesn't touch upon. Having presented business/product ideas to classmates & colleagues at both schools, here's a gross simplification of responses I've experienced:

Me: I have an idea for "foo"

MIT reply: "Here's a list of 10 reasons why that won't work"

Stanford reply: "That's neat, and here's 10 reasons you should work on it"

One might see the Stanford response as unrealistic or patronizing, but one of these creates a culture of positive ideation (and hustle-culture startups) while the other leads to a lot of discouraged entrepreneurs.

The average thing I (as someone in the academia) hear about MIT is their press office exaggerating the importance of some research finding. The average thing I hear about Stanford is a controversy in mainstream news. To an outsider, MIT culture seems to be more about conventional nerds. Stanford culture seems to attract more than its fair share of political weirdos.

Me: I will write software to help salesman plan their route when they travel.

MIT: the travelling salesman problem is NP-complete so your idea is impossible

Stanford: you should build an MVP that just randomly sorts the destinations and see if that's good enough first, then pivot to what customers really want

You could always just use USPS.

We sell discounted postage with print-at-home labels at https://stampnik.com/

disclaimer: founder of Stampnik

USPS priority has been amazingly predictable for me all year, even through all the pre-election noise. I think they were 19 for 20 in being on-time to their estimate (including several of Saturday mail, Monday deliveries 600-900 miles away). The 1 that missed missed by a day.

I have had had some terrible parcel post experiences, but priority has been good.

I've had 5 packages this year take longer than two weeks priority. One not of those five was 40 minutes away that took 8 days to arrive. I've had stuff sit in post offices so long I had to call to make sure they weren't lost. Another item get marked delivered in a different zip code than my own, only when I opened a case was the package thrown on the ground in front of our mail box cluster. I can't tell you how many packages marked as delivered only to be delivered the next day.

The rest of the site is also pretty interesting and includes photos of various silkworm species at different stages of development.

Thanks for sharing this. I’m an insect nerd myself (mostly lepidoptera, apocrita, and orthoptera).

I once raised hundreds (maybe even over a thousand) of Bombix mori, just to show my daughter the lifecycle of moths. My sister in law runs a silk farm. I asked her for “a few silk worms” and she mailed me a whole box of them, across more than 1000 km. I literally got a box of worms in mail and opened it. The upkeep until they spin cocoons was hilariously difficult when we don’t also have a mulberry plantation. We literally had to mobilize the whole family (me, my wife, my parents, and my 80+ year old grandma) to hunt for wild mulberry trees and collect enough leaves to feed those always hungry mouths. When we put a pile of mulberry leaves in the box, because there were so many worms, we could hear them chewing the leaves a meter away. And because they grow bigger, eventually we realized we had to split them into multiple boxes. And when it was time to spin cocoons, some of them decided to go rogue, escape, and spin cocoons in random places of my home. (Before they are ready to spin cocoons, they pretty much just stayed in the open boxes and ate and ate and ate.)

Anyway, I only knew that B. mandarina are wild relatives of B. mori, but photos of their cocoons found on the internet make me think they don’t spin enough silk to be worthwhile for yarn spinning. I never encountered another species that spin enough silk. So I learned something new today. Thanks again.

I'm so glad some folks found this a worthwhile post and also thanks for sharing your story. It seems that these caterpillars just eat/grow/molt ceaselessly until it's time to spin a cocoon!

These single-subject, old school design websites make me nostalgic for the early web.

p.s. Coming across this site made me want to build an entire grade-school curriculum based on "silk". There's so many subjects to cover, including: Biology (worm lifecycle, climate) History (trade, Silk Road) Chemistry (why silk is so strong) Arts (what can be made of silk, production process)

As a kid growing up in China, buying silk worms and raising them were/are pretty common.

Unfortunately my baby worms never lived long enough to form cocoons :(

I believe silkworms can be eaten too like mealworms.

This is very neat tech, and if you're interested, there's a startup further along on developing haptic technology for VR.

https://tacticalhaptics.com/

there are tons of start-ups doing haptics for VR. is this one utilizing the tech in the study?

There are a lot. For example, here is the Spain based startup Neurodigital working on this kit https://sensorialxr.com/.

Interesting idea, but I've found that making my own custom static touchbar has been the most useful way to use this hardware. Followed this article: http://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/

I personally have a mix of app launchers, brightness/volume controls and a play/pause button.

.....and $FB is up 6% in after-hours trading

He's probably referring to a regular mouse that you move around your desk. As opposed to a touchpad or static mouse with a large sphere you spin around with your thumb.