Link love for June 29th, part 2

Get yer grub on with these Aluminum Snack Boxes (above) from SIGG.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson.

No Lifeguard On Duty is the name of this beautiful photographic series of abandoned swimming pools by J Bennett Fitts.

The Feast Conference gathers the world’s greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.

The Forces of User Experience, an expansion on Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience.

“The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.” Paul Hawken’s 2009 Commencement Address at the University of Portland.

Open Emu is like having a giant visual performance synth made from the tasty innards of classic games.

When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look.

What Makes Us Happy?


Review: Dreaming in Code

51klh6hn1kl_aa240_.jpgI recently finished Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It covers the development of Chandler, an open source, cross-platform personal information manager (PIM).

A project of the Open Source Applications Foundation and led by Mitch Kapor, Chandler was meant to revolutionize desktop PIM software by eliminating the ‘silos’ that separate email messages, contacts, calendar events and to-do tasks and enable peer-to-peer sharing of such information (as opposed to being proprietary and locked-in to a central server, ala MS Outlook and Exchange).

Along the way, Rosenberg delves into the bigger picture of software development by reviewing its history and thought leaders, differing ideas on organization and project management, methods of information sharing and collaboration tools, the open-source and free software movements, contemporary programming languages, modular and object oriented programming concepts, user interface design challenges, coding and quality control issues, and much more.

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