collylogic.com - Simon Collison's weblog

Tanks, troops and terror

16th March 2008

Having spent a comfortable Sunday morning reading the newspapers and pondering how best to use my freedom on this wet day, I began to feel compelled to write about the worrying reports coming out of Tibet, a country an “autonomous region” that I have spent many years reading about, hoping to one day visit before its whole identity and heritage is obliterated…

#738 | 16/03/08 | More >

Found typography

9th January 2008

I’ve finally started a Found Typography Flickr set, just like every other designer. However, this gets off to a great start with wonderful adverts from 1890s/1900s issues of the beautiful Journal of Decorative Art that our Greg found in his house.

#724 | 09/01/08 | More >

The Saga of the Interwebs

17th December 2007

Seven years into the new Millennium, an approximate 26,328 task forces, 3,402 unworking groups, and 5 fantasy comic book heroes are in existence on Earth. The unofficial and invented 2007 consensus of the interwebs discovered that of these 29,735 unworking groups, task forces and comic book heroes, the average working interweb developer was aware of two task forces, 1 working group and a full 5 comic book heroes, but still could not explain what any of them did. The Fellowship of the W3 continued to thrive throughout this period of confusion, despite the onset of crippling apathy and increasing irrelevance. But how did we get to this pivotal stage in the saga of the interwebs, where the arse doth not know itself from the elbow? Your humble and confused author will seek to explain…

#721 | 17/12/07 | More >

They found my lack of faith disturbing…

26th October 2007

Arrested by Stormtroopers

Aggressive new policing in Nottingham.

#715 | 26/10/07 | More >

The US launch of the iPhone has put the rest of us three months behind, and I’m cross

5th September 2007

I spent the last hour writing a long rant about how every developer outside of the US is now on catch-up.

  • I wrote about how every day for the last three months I have endured blog posts, links and feeds about the latest cool stuff for the iPhone.
  • I wrote about developing apps and sites for the little Safari, and how only those in the US can experience this.
  • I wrote about this being the first time I have witnessed such a major gulf in shared knowledge, and that geographical location should not compromise anybody’s opportunity to develop for the web.
  • I wrote about my desire for Apple to build a tool into Safari to emulate the iPhone experience (a bit like Opera’s Small Screen View) so that even those without an iPhone could still develop for it.
  • I wrote about “Cuppa-tea-no” (as Andy Clarke calls it) and I wrote about Eric Meyer’s spot-on dissing of Media Temple for bringing back the “best viewed with” message.
  • I wrote a lot of stuff that many people in the US would possibly hate me for, and the rest of the world might like me for.
  • I wrote about the new iPhone Touch giving us Europeans a shot at understanding the iPhone experience.

And then Safari crashed, and I lost my entire article. Bastard. Still, you get my gist, right? It isn’t Apple’s fault, what with phone network politics being central to a worldwide launch, but it still makes me cross.

#710 | 05/09/07 | More >