Some people even go as far as to say that Apple likes more chrome, as well as more elaborate (‘skeuomorphic’) decoration over minimalism in its user interfaces. I disagree. Apple’s attitude isn’t simply that more UI chrome or decoration is better, it’s that some types of content (and thus, some apps) are well suited to being made more ‘fun’ (and inviting, exciting) with elaborate, decorative designs.

— Sebastiaan de With

What phone do you use?

A boring old machined-steel-fits-in-my-hand-scrolls-at-60-fps-with-proper-physics-glorious-retina-none-of-this-crap-pentile-display black iPhone 4S. (Clearly I’m a fanboy for having no tolerance for awful displays or laggy UI on a device that is essentially a screen, but I digress. Bring it, commenters).

— 5 Minutes on The Verge: Loren Brichter | The Verge

First, I needed to download Ruby, which like many languages comes as a free open-source file. (I later figured out that I did not even have to do that—my relatively new Mac already spoke it.)

Second, I needed to figure out how to create and save a program—in my case, just a single line of text. I started off by saving it as a Word document, but it needed to be in plain text. I saved it in plain text, but I needed to adjust the settings to a more-specific format. And how does a computer run a new program, anyway? The answer, in my case at least, was through a utilitarian program called Terminal, a basic interface panel that lets you talk to your machine.

I created my program. I saved it. I opened up Terminal, and told it that I would be talking to it in Ruby. I commanded it to run my program, carefully writing in the file name and where it would find it.

It would not run. It took me more than an hour to figure out I had left in an extra space in my code, preventing the whole thing from working right. But then, after some 98 minutes and some serious Googling, a three showed up in my Terminal shell. I had written a program.

—

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and _why: The disappearance of one of the world’s most beloved computer programmers. - Slate Magazine

We are still far from solving one of the problems _why was working on: making programming approachable and fun.

In the world of the Web, experiences become even more important than in other kinds of products, as websites and web applications are self-service type of products, where there are no customer service personnel or instruction manuals to help the user.

— The Meaning of User Experience | User Intelligence

Some suggest that Apple is an anomaly and does not reflect the economy. To truly understand the state of the economy, they say, means to subtract Apple from it. But I feel this is exactly wrong. Apple is, through the iPhone and iOS ecosystems, defining this era. Just like Microsoft defined an era of increased productivity through the creation of the “knowledge worker”, or like GM re-defined transportation and the notion of the brand in the 50′s, or like IBM re-defined business process efficiency with automation in the 60′s and 70′s, these companies were not anomalies of their era. They were the eras. They were the locomotives of growth that taught other companies how to operate and the contemporary managers how to manage.

— What is disruption and how can it be harnessed?