danh

Emacs 24 also has a new minor mode, electric-pair-mode, that auto-inserts matching parens à la Textmate. Quite useful.

Ian Dury is still an excellent reason to be cheerful.

Thanks. That should definitely be the default, though.

> The problem with the ideas listed is that they're obvious

It is surprisingly difficult to tell if an idea seems obvious because it is just, well, bloody obvious, or because it is a really good one.

A surprising amount of great, original ideas seem obvious with the help of just a tiny bit of hindsight. Or foresight, for that matter.

I have to disagree: I think this one works out just fine. And there actually is an arrow to go forward as well.

For me, pagination makes reading long documents a lot easier than scrolling. For example, I love the pagination feature in Instapaper.

Also, this is the prettiest thing I have seen coming from Google. By far.

At least it's better than go-oo.org.

I'd actually like to see the exact opposite: an editor that warns me every time I use a too common and worn out phrase or sequence of words.

That shouldn't be too hard to do, should it? :)

I would hesitate to call it "mature".

I would start with number 4, and save the formal grammar study for (much) later.

IMHO, the far most important thing to do is to listen. I prefer podcasts, but anything (radio, films, TV, overheard conversations in bars) will do.

Understanding spoken language is also (again in my opinion) by far the most difficult part of learning a language. Especially in real life, and really noisy, situations, where you probably only hear half of the sounds people are making. The rest you will have to fill in yourself - which is sort of like solving crossword puzzles in real time.

This takes a lot of practice, and there's really no way around that.

Starting by studying all the rules of formal grammar is, I think, a bit like learning to play tennis by first studying the rule book a couple of years...

And what could possibly go wrong?

That just goes to show that normal English is highly unusual.

I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs wants to kill these guys, or give them a medal.

My favorite is "Colors you can see with the human retina".

Steve writes, for example: "She was pulling out a giant needle as she told me this. It just sort of materialized from under the table, the way a knife appears in a bar fight. It was a very large needle."

I'd say that's some rather good writing right there.

> the average, non-geeky customer is totally confused

I must be average and non-geeky then. I'm totally confused by Microsofts mobile strategy.

I'm using essentially the same strategy. Basically I split feeds in two categories:

"Fresh" ones I either read on the spot, or mark-all-as-read. These are the ones I usually check frequently, and very quickly. And I don't have to feel bad about marking all as read :-)

"Evergreens" are ones I like to read entirely, but not necessarily now.

I'm using Google Reader, but these days mostly through the splendid Reeder on the iPhone (http://reederapp.com/).

I don't think semicolons help your example.

    return
    {
        foo: 7
    };

still returns undefined.

It may be crap, undemocratic, pulled out of behinds, and egotistic. It's still true though.

You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.

And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two different novels, for example, but pretty much all the "intermediate novels" you can think of just don't make any sense.

You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. You can just tweak the details, in the turd-polishing sense.

That being said, being ugly can of course be profitable. If you want to signal that you are cheap, for example, the ugliness helps. Just look at the difference between, say, Walmart and an Apple store. So maybe Google wants to look cheap - but I for one wish they didn't.

Sure, the author is a bit whiny, but I still think he has a point.

One example: design. I still haven't seen a single page from Google that looked stunning, or even good (to my eyes, obviously). Their entire design philosophy seems to be infinite-amount-of-monkeys-hacking-css and A/B-testing. They even manage to make their main landing page, with only a handful of items, look quite messy.

The method may be scientific and all, but it doesn't produce good looks.

Even more contemporary is young Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced Albin): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden

For a good illustration of the possible weirdness of names, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

I thought that was an attempt at being funny, in a "See: recursion" kind of way.

5. Pulse mysteriously appears again in App store, without explanation.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/pulse-ipad-2/

I get the feeling that they are trying to adapt, desperately even, but they still keep hoping that the internet will someday just go away.

And in Safari 5...

But he does now (a couple of hours later):

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/modernizr

Apparently after reading HN:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/df-hn

Also (from right now) it seems that Gruber doesn't know what browser sniffing is (or at least pretends to), but still has an opinion:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/html5-safari-ope...

Well, that depends very much on your level. If you are completely new to Spanish (like I was), you'll need to bootstrap the learning process with something really basic.

I started using an audio course from Pimsleur, teaching me to say "Where is the hotel?" etc.

After that, I still needed material of the simpler kind suitable for foreigners. There are a bunch of such podcasts, for example:

http://www.notesinspanish.com (very beginner-friendly, some parts in English)

http://teresasanchez.biz/podcast/ (slightly more advanced, all in Spanish)

http://www.spanishpodcast.org/ (also a bit more advanced)

When you're getting bored with the stuff for foreigners, you'll find a wealth of "normal" podcasts in Spanish. Don't worry if you don't understand every word, as long as you get the basic gist.

When I started I very much enjoyed a podcast on astronomy, at http://universo.iaa.es/

Spain's national radio, RNE, has pretty much all of their programming available as podcasts, at http://rtve.es

The BBC has a rather good daily news podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/mh/

After a while you'll be ready for something more difficult, for example:

Etcetera podcast is two guys in Buenos Aires philosophizing in a rather entertaining way, at http://etceterapodcast.com/

Pretty much the same, but with three guys in Spain and more swear words, is Kafelog, at http://www.kafelog.com/

My experience is pretty much the opposite.

I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.

I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.

I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.

Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.

And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.