Merlin Mann and John Gruber: Topic x Voice

At the recent South by South-West con­fer­ence, blog­gers Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave their thoughts on the dif­fer­ence between good blogs and bad ones. It has been released as a 43Folders pod­cast. Plenty of swear­ing and Merlin Mann-style humour.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on Safari 4 Public Beta

I agree with Gruber’s com­ments on the lack of a pro­gress bar in the new ver­sion of Safari, which has been replaced by a spin­ning roundel.

It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show pro­gress in a way that was prom­in­ent while the page was actu­ally load­ing, and without tak­ing up any addi­tional space on the screen after load­ing was complete.

► Daring Fireball: Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta Released One Week Ago, Roughly in Order of Importance

No, seriously, what the hell’s that island?

J. J. Abrahams is the cre­ator of Lost (with Damon Lindelof), Alias, and the dir­ector of Mission: Impossible 3. Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, I stumbled across this talk of Abrahams dis­cuss­ing how ele­ments of sus­pense can help pro­pel a nar­rat­ive. The talk was given at TED, an organ­isa­tion that star­ted out as the Technology, Education and Design con­fer­ence in 1984. Now it’s an annual meet­ing where luminar­ies get 18 minutes to give the talk of their lives.

“The first ques­tion people ask me is: What the hell’s that island? It’s usu­ally fol­lowed by: No, ser­i­ously, what the hell’s that island?”

Love it.