Book idea: Oral histories of common UI design elements and conventions: Gmail’s Butter Bars and Toasts, rotating pizza mouse pointer, pull-to-refresh, Cut/Copy/Paste, double clicking, Ctrl-Tab, slide to unlock. Context surrounding them at the time + today’s perspective.
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Book idea: Stories of encoding challenges throughout computing: Things that went wrong because one part of the system escaped things differently than another – but written for a non-technical (or not-really-technical) audience.
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Book idea: The guided tour of Unicode: Stories of glyphs, politics, technical challenges, typography and engineering, workarounds and mistakes, world’s languages and alphabets. Let various specific Unicode code points walk you through today’s world.
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Book idea: Anthology of day-in-life stories from different chat communities (Unix talk, . SAVED, PLATO, Community Memory, IRC, ICQ, BlackBerry, Slack). Focus on jargon, emergent practices, everyday habits, creative adaptations of the platform.
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(“Book idea” in all of the above is shorthand for something with the right amount of depth and breadth. Could also be a podcast series, a YouTube show, etc.)
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Book idea: When typography and engineering intersect. Don Knuth, segmented displays, bitmap fonts, monospace, HTML. Not just history – also stuff practical and useful today, e.g. how font fallback works, or weird Unicode letters. (Arguably the *obvious* book for me to write.)
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Marcin Wichary Retweeted Marcin Wichary
Book idea: One of these:https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/965692060534648832 …
Marcin Wichary added,
Marcin Wichary @mwicharyImagine the premiere Sony Walkman manual written today, explaining the differences from Spotify rather than from record players. Or an iPod user manual that’s presented as a discourse on record labels, DRM, and piracy. Or a manual to a TV written as a… fictional story.Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 15 likesShow this thread -
Marcin Wichary Retweeted Marcin Wichary
Book idea: A book version of the Museum of File Formats:https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/724323369798131712 …
Marcin Wichary added,
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Replying to @mwichary
Chapter 2: A diatribe on "jiff" versus "giff" as the pronunciation for .GIF ... Chapter 7: The pleasures of .TXT ... Chapters 23-47: The descent into the third ring of hell that is .PSD ... Book 2: PDF
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Those are actually all fantastic (non-ironically) examples! Books 3–5: .DOC
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Replying to @mwichary @thatsmrwill
There is definitely a separate book to be written about love for plain text and stories around it and how it exists outside of Moore’s Law.
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