So-called SEIER + SEIER( +  SEIER) from Copenhagen, e.g.:

• Oscar Niemeyer, Architect: French Communist Party HQ, Paris 1965–1971

• Le Corbusier, Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly-Sur-Seine, Paris, France, 1951–1955, House B

The various SEIERs have hacked a photo gallery into a kind of architecture Weblog.

Long-awaited development: An interview in Eye not conducted electronically. Feature not awaited by anyone: Complaint by Rick Poynor that graphic-design history picks and chooses its winners. And, as ever, I seem to be alone in noticing when the same topic comes up in more than one place in the magazine. Am I the only one who reads it cover to cover? [continue with: ‘Eye’ 81 →]

Soi-disant “blokey” homosexualist actor Mr. RUSSELL TOVEY in de facto Duran Duran music video.

I cannot go so far to say he is the smartest man in publishing, but the smartest young man in publishing is clearly Mr. JAMES BRIDLE.

• Books in Browsers presentation

• Web Directions presentation

Mr. BRIDLE approaches Ben Hammersley levels of erudition.

Sorry. If Mike Monteiro is going to use this post as a pretext to unleash his 30,400 cyberbully followers, I withdraw.

The leftist bully is unreformable

Lacking God in their lives, leftists enact the substitute religion of progressivism, which requires apostates, a Satan, and a hell. Mike Monteiro, being as he is firmly held in the grip of progressivism, is constitutionally unable to recant his religion. He too requires apostates and a Satan. He does not understand he lives in Hell.

He, and everyone like him, is unreformable, and is moreover an active danger to everyone else.

iA Writer is an iPad text editor. I used it in the brief window before it was ruined and found it useful within its own limitations. In specific, I liked the fact that everything I wrote automatically appeared in a certain Dropbox folder. I was able to handle that level of complication easily.

The current version bruits the following feature:

Dropbox & iCloud Integration

Dropbox [and] iCloud allow [W]eb synchronization of your documents from iPad to the cloud, seamlessly, so you don’t have to spend time syncing with iTunes.

I didn’t know I could even bother syncing with iTunes. Now, what does “iCloud Integration” mean? It means your documents are forever locked on your iPad unless you take undocumented steps.

• There is no “iCloud” to “integrate” to. There is no ready-made location where iA Writer could possibly save its documents.

• Documents no longer autosave to Dropbox.

• “iCloud integration” apparently now means you must sync your iPad to iTunes, then look in the Apps tab for a specific pane that lists your available files, then manually save them from there one at a time.

It turns out you can force a document to permanently move (not copy, move) to Dropbox if you use the source-documents list in a Windows-like way, hitting certain arrows and selecting just the right folder. (The only folder iA Writer ever uses, in fact, although, in a Windows 3.1–like twist, Writer presents your entire file system to you just in case.)

Here is iA Writer’s actual blithe and blithering support page about iCloud integration. I’m sure it read better in the original German, as so many assurances of what’s best for us do.

A text editor is useless if it allows you to edit text solely under lock and key. Looking at baubles through a shop window is the sort of thing that makes Tiny Tim cry and drives the rest of us to anger.

Because it sequesters your documents in an environment we are endlessly reminded was custom-crafted for simplicity, I have no hesitation at all naming iA Writer as the hardest-to-use application I have ever encountered on any Apple system. And I’ve been using those since 1984.

It’s very simple: Your iA Writer documents should autosave everywhere and be auto-available everywhere, with no thought or effort whatsoever.

Earlier, I levelled a serious criticism at technology podcasts: They’re toothlessnessly nice and waste our time recapping their guests’ projects. Technology podcasts make all their guests sound like smashing successes, steering clear of any and all discussion of their lives and what and how they are as people. These podcasts are all business, staying resolutely on topic and constructing a mythology of triumph unsullied by personal characteristics.

Things have actually gotten worse since I wrote that. As an example, the man with more personality per cubic centimetre than anyone in the industry, Mike Monteiro, has proven to be a crashing bore in podcast form. Talking about work quite simply is not his forte. But he’s just the tip of the pyramid. Nobody who works in computers is all that interesting when talking about working in computers. I could not care less what your new project is or what you think about a certain inanimate or virtual object.

I am now proposing to solve the problem. Of course it won’t work and is a failed exercise even before it begins, but I want it known that an alternative has been proposed.

What I have in mind is a limited series of podcasts, perhaps six, assembled under the strictly factual and unironic title Feelings: The Technology Podcast About People. I would interview luminaries about everything but what they do in their line of work. There would be no specific duration for each episode; we’d talk until we were done.

And you’d pay to listen to it. Free podcasting is an orders-of-magnitude-worse model than free blogging. I’m sure you could pony up $5.99 for a six-pack. You’d get them all at once, not in instalments. Transcripts would be included, and likely would be separately published for free and unhindered reading.

Just to get this to work would require access to equipment I don’t have. Setup alone would be a lengthy process. But I have a great deal of confidence I could get people to talk. And this would be an actual conversation, not an interview. Because I would be asking my guests to do the same, I would put myself out there.

I’m willing to give this a try despite the quite serious risk it poses to me personally. But you’re going to have to pay for it if you want it to happen. And I’m offering a free lifetime subscription to the first person (by UTC timestamp) who points out how badly this sort of thing has turned out before.

But let me ask you something: Who else stands a chance at making this work?

Awwcupy Wall Street.