Inck ~ Words on the Internet by Nicholas Hall

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Volume Two, Issue Three -- Early Evening-In Edition -- Letters to the Editor

‘Content’ Has No Content
- Inck is Like Ink
  by Nicholas Hall on July 25th, 2011
  Inck is an ongoing experiment in grid-based frontend development, databaseless content management, HTML5 and CSS3 techniques, whimsical layout, and the recombination of design, content and code.
  
  I write, design, and build Inck as one project, switching between writing code and words when I feel like it, or when a change to one suggests a change to the other.
  
  Inck’s ‘content management system’ consists of text files parsed for linebreaks and nothing else, formatted beyond that with HTML. The front page is configured with a simple list of articles, word counts for where to break them, an optional banner headline, an image embed, and CSV data to populate the sidebar, all in the file ‘a1’.
  
  Because everything is a file, everything--content and code--is managed through a version control system, originally Subversion and now Git.
  
  Because I have intertwined writing and coding, I've discarded the ambition of treating ‘content’ as abstract data that flows through an abstract system to reach a consumer in an abstract presentation.
  
  Content management systems are a failed idea. ‘Content’ is a failed idea, as though the fact of two things’ being text meant they had some logical relationship. Everything on a computer can be represented as text, a string of numbers one and zero at least. But we know that most of the things on a computer, spreadsheets and photographs and songs, are different, and require different tools.
  
  That extends to the types of text in written language. Articles, short articles, long articles, poems, dialogues, lists, quips; these are all different,… continued, with one Letter to the Editor »

Writings and Attendant Features in Inck

writing	Apps are Bullshit	Facebook is Microsoft	Writings and Attendant Features in Inck
	long article	old article	new sidebar
feature	Link to Skip Familiar Information	Non-Chronological A1 Layout	CSV Sidebar Parsing

- Facebook is Microsoft
  by Nicholas Hall on December 6th, 2010
  The recent string of ‘events’ held in a room at Facebook headquarters seemed like the college theatre department equivalent of the Broadway show of an Apple event. First announcing new privacy ‘features’, and then the new Facebook ‘email’ system, Mark Zuckerberg has tried to cast himself in the lead role of reality-distorting salesman and ringmaster that Steve Jobs brought into technology. He fails at this not because of his performance or the production around it, but because he just doesn’t have the goods.
  
  Apple is able to present their new products as world-changing innovations because a few times in history they truly have been. Facebook on the other hand hasn’t innovated anything, just driven through by brute force the implementation of a collection of obvious ideas, ending up at the right place at the right time.
  
  In this, Facebook is an impressive operation, and a credit to the capacities of its founder, a young nerd gifted in the combined mechanics of consumer applications development and cold-blooded capitalism, but in neither separately, and uninspired in the work of making great products. It’s in that sense that Facebook has stepped into the space that Microsoft occupied for so many years. They are a dominant product that we have little choice in using if we want to take advantage of a new capacity, in this case the ambient social interactions offered by the concept of social networking. As both a cause and symptom of that… continued, with five Letters to the Editor »
- Privacy is Not Principal
  by Nicholas Hall on April 20th, 2011
  Your iPhone’s been tracking your location for a year, and that’s okay.
  
  Keep in mind that your location history is only kept indirectly on a file on your computer. It isn’t being sent to Apple or Google or the government.
  
  But why would you care if it was? More to the point, why do you think Apple or Google or the government would care?
  
  No one cares where you are.
  
  Your friends and family might care, but… continued, with one Letter to the Editor »

Apps are Bullshit
by Nicholas Hall on May 26th, 2011
When I say ‘apps’ I mean two different things, both of them bullshit, but in two different ways.

One, they are a technology, a bullshit technology in that it has not primarily been employed to make a product better, cheaper or more useful.

Two, they are a marketing ploy, bullshit only in the sense that all marketing is, being an immaterial game of value signification played to help people part with their money. This kind of bullshit is good, and essential to the continuation of our industry.

To explain my first point, I’ll have to explain the technology. If you already know the technology, skip the next four paragraphs. (Or don’t, but still skip quibbling over their simplifications, elisions and other necessary inaccuracies.)

Currently, the technology of most apps is ‘native’, as opposed to ‘web’. This is a very expensive distinction in programming, and I have witnessed companies waste from tens of thousands to millions of dollars on native app development, often to be left with a product that serves their business objectives worse than would have a web app.

The expensive distinction is this: Native apps are full computer programs. Computer programs use the fundamental functions of computers to do whatever they do. They can therefore do any one thing as well as any other, from calculate missile trajectories to animate Angry Bird trajectories, from sequence genes to sell you jeans. But with flexibility comes complexity, especially in computer programming.

Web apps are just web sites. They can be wrapped up in a special single-purpose web browser that hides the address bar and various buttons. Without that stuff, the website becomes its own and only interface. The developer can put buttons, menus, whatever, in this ‘web site’, making it whatever kind of interface is best. It can look exactly the same as a native app.

The difference then is that most of the work behind the web app is taken care of by the web browser. Browsers are incredibly capable applications themselves, allowing web developers to easily arrange and style interactive text, images, menus,… continued, with three Letters to the Editor »

Inck

The Weather

‘Content’ Has No Content

Inck is Like Ink

Writings and Attendant Features in Inck

Facebook is Microsoft

Privacy is Not Principal

Apps are Bullshit