A few interesting things that have flowed through my feed reader recently:
An interview with William Buxton. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that if I hadn’t attended a session on user interface design for music software that he chaired at the Audio Engineering Society conference in 1987, I might not be writing code for a living today.
Two essays on the ‘New Aesthetic’ — the original one by Bruce Sterling that was floating around everywhere, and some counterpoint from Ian Bogost. Bogost’s new book “Alien Phenomenology” is on my ‘to read soon’ list.
Peter Norvig’s “Python for LISP Programmers” — old, but stumbled across it again. “Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with “traditional” syntax.”
ReactiveCocoa, from the folks at GitHub.
Native apps spend a lot of time waiting and then reacting. We wait for the user to do something in the UI. Wait for a network call to respond. Wait for an asynchronous operation to complete. Wait for some dependent value to change. And then they react.
But all those things—all that waiting and reacting—is usually handled in many disparate ways. That makes it hard for us to reason about them, chain them, or compose them in any uniform, high-level way. We can do better.
That’s why we’ve open-sourced a piece of the magic behind GitHub for Mac: ReactiveCocoa (RAC).
I’m still wrapping my head around this one.
