There are some complications. First, the documentation and examples almost all use the RAC and RACAble macros provided by ReactiveCocoa, something we can’t use from RubyMotion. Bummer. And RubyMotion’s bridgesupport doesn’t allow us to call Objective-C methods that take blocks typed as id. Rats. Fortunately these can be overcome, thanks to some helpful folks on the internet, so let’s get started.

1. Install ReactiveMotion

ReactiveMotion is available through CocoaPods. Update your RubyMotion project’s Rakefile to include it:

Motion::Project::App.setup do |app|
  ...
  app.pods do
    pod 'ReactiveCocoa'
  end
  ...
end

The next time you build your project, CocoaPods will retrieve and build the ReactiveCocoa library. There are RAC extensions for many popular libraries. I recommend checking out AFNetworking-RACExtensions in particular.

2. Set Up a Shim for RubyMotion

We ran across an example project from Dave Lee. He sets up a convenient shim that solves both of the complications I mentioned in the opening. There are two primary pieces.

On line 84 of IMMViewController.rb a new class method, reduceLatest, is added to the RACSignal class. This method wraps the existing combineLatest to resolve the problem of passing blocks as type `id`. It works in conjunction with an Objective-C shim and .bridgesupport file that enumerate methods taking blocks of specific arity (1-5 in this case, add more if you need them).

The other piece, starting at line 159 of IMMViewController.rb, is a replacement for the convenient RAC and RACAble macros. Keep in mind that objects passed to the rac method need to be KVO-compliant.

Overall, lines 77 – 219 of IMMViewController.rb and the contents of the vendor/ReactiveMotion make a pretty good shim.

3. Read the Docs

ReactiveCocoa’s paradigms can be challenging to get a good grasp on. Fortunately the team has provided good documentation. Read it. In particular, I’d recommend starting with:

• The Readme
• The Framework Overview

I’ve also had a great experience diving into ReactiveCocoa’s source code.

Example: Triggering Authentication Using a Command

This is an example of using a command to start the authentication process.

class LoginViewController < UIViewController
  attr_accessor :credentials
  def viewDidLoad
    super
    @credentials = RACSignal.reduceLatest(usernameField.rac_textSignal, passwordField.rac_textSignal) do |user, pass|
      @_credentials = [user, pass]
    end
  end
 
  # Wired up to a button in our storyboard
  def signInClicked
    @command.execute(@_credentials)
  end
end
 
# elsewhere, in a class that has a reference to the
# LoginViewController (@view) and user model (@user)
class LoginManager
  attr_accessor :credentialsAreNotEmpty
 
  ...
 
  # Gets triggered after the view for the view controller above is loaded
  def configure
    @credentialsAreNotEmpty = @view.credentials.map -> (creds) do
      creds.length == 2 and !creds.any? {|c| c.nil? or c.empty? }
    end
 
    @authCommand = RACCommand.commandWithCanExecuteSignal credentialsAreNotEmpty
    @authCommand.allowsConcurrentExecution = false
 
    # The command's `executing` will remain YES until the
    # signal returned by the block completes or errors.
    @authCommand.addSignalBlock ->(credentials) do
      # User#authenticate uses AFNetworking-RACExtensions under the hood and 
      # returns a signal that completes when the auth request is complete.
      @user.authenticate credentials
    end
  end
end

One thing I’d love to find a better way to accomplish is aggregating the command execution with the stream of current credentials. Keeping the added state @_credentials is gross. I tried a few variations of reduceLatest but didn’t get the behavior I was looking for.
 

The post ReactiveCocoa & RubyMotion: The Setup appeared first on Atomic Spin.

It’s important to get key product features done — and sales, marketing, and management will push hardest on their own must-haves — but having a seamless upgrade strategy in place is crucial for ensuring the long-term success of your product.

To help give you and your team the proper ammunition and avoid getting dragged into this situation, here are some common themes that cause a project to end up in this dismal situation.

Bootloaders are HARD, so don’t deprioritize!

Management always knows that this is a crucial feature, but they seldom doesn’t understand the complexities involved and the level of customization and robustness required to have this safety valve in place. After all, field updates are a fallback mechanism in the event that a crucial bug gets discovered too late, or if research and beta-testing didn’t catch that an important feature was did not hit the mark expected by customers.

No Bootloader means developers will have to update prototypes… again and again.

There are valuable, but not necessarily obvious, benefits of having a convenient update mechanism in place during the course of product development as well. In the absence of such a mechanism, I personally have spent hours with a JTAG adapter, various tools, and rigged up connectors applying updates to dozens of devices, burning valuable development time… not to mention the interruption and time it takes to get back on track, to getting the real work done.

Partitioning your resources early saves time!

Getting your bootloader in place early forces the proper partitioning of the system at an early stage, when the separation and allocation of code and resources is much easier to do. Even if you don’t get the separation completely right the first time around, you will know it earlier and will have more time to carefully address the issues. Furthermore, you are getting more road-time to test, refine, and document the procedure with the help of test technicians and system engineers.

Take the reigns and just do it!

If you have read this far, you likely have experienced many of the pitfalls I have mentioned. This is disappointingly too common of a problem, and one that occurs over and over — despite the retros, missed deadlines, and returned devices due to a flaw or lack of a solid bootloader.

Don’t let this happen to you, your teammates, and the products you develop any longer. Stand up for the early introduction of an update strategy. It is unethical to do otherwise, and doing so will result in a notable increase in your sanity, and your coworkers, and even you beta and end users.

If you have been, or are in this situation now, please share your war stories and frustrations!
 

The post Tackle Your Bootloader First!! appeared first on Atomic Spin.

Bug #1 (liberation) was that “Microsoft has a majority market share” in the then-new desktop PC marketplace. According to Shuttleworth’s comment about closing the bug, the definition of PC has changed since 2004. “PC” doesn’t just mean laptops and desktops anymore. Now people do a large majority of their computing on smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, and other devices. Shuttleworth also mentions that it’s better for Ubuntu to focus on excellence in their own right rather than on impacting someone else’s products.

When I first saw this, I was frustrated because it seemed Ubuntu was copping out. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that he is right. A lot of things have changed since the bug was first opened. For the longest time, Windows was really the only operating system in use. I myself had never heard of Linux, and very few people I knew had Macs. Open source wasn’t widely used.

Now people use open source in all aspects of their life. A large portion of the population uses the Android OS for their phones, and their web browsing choices are Chrome or Firefox. People go to Wikipedia and YouTube everyday. Gaming used to be only capable on PCs, but now more games are accessible on other platforms like Android, Mac, and Steam. In fact, Steam doesn’t support Windows 8 and now encourages people to download Ubuntu to play their video games.

Microsoft now finds itself having to fight to get people to buy their software and hardware and to use their browser and search engine. They are also finding themselves needing to open stores in order to better reach their customers and give them better service.

Open source drives innovation. It allows programmers to focus on making a superior product that works instead of making a product that the maximum number of consumers will want to buy. In the end, the consumer gets high-quality software at no cost. Closing this bug means Ubuntu can focus on what’s important — creating quality software. If it encourages other companies to create better software, that’s a win for everyone.
 

The post Ubuntu’s Biggest Bug Squashed appeared first on Atomic Spin.

With graphic design having been my focus throughout +3 years in school, I’m very concerned with typography. I even took three typography courses — that’s six hours of class time a week during three semesters of studying fonts, the anatomy of letterforms, kerning, etc.

That being said, typography on the web hasn’t always offered much to get excited about. I’m grateful that I began designing on the web when I did (which truly started about 5 years ago) because type has been improving so much. Today there are many solutions to the old limitations on type.

There’s nothing more disappointing as a designer than finding out that you can’t use a particular typeface on a site after spending hours on the mockup and branding. It changes everything! Thankfully we are no longer limited to the typical Helvetica and Times New Roman. Here are my favorite web typography tools.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts has hundreds of free, open-source fonts that are optimized for the web. When you hear that someone has hundreds of free fonts, you know they aren’t all going to be beautiful, but there definitely are a few gems even on the first page. Using Google Fonts is incredibly easy, you just choose the ones you want to use and they provide the HTML and CSS.

Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel is even better, but requires just a bit more work. Like Google Fonts, they provide already optimized, free fonts, but where the site really shines is in its Webfont Generator. This allows you to upload fonts that you have on your computer (and own legally, of course) and it spits out web optimized versions of that font along with the CSS. This uses @font-face, which allows you to use fonts other than the ‘web-safe’ ones.

FitText.js

With responsive web design being the hottest topic in web design these days, Fittext.js is something to get excited about. This scales type along with the browser window, and very well I may add. I only hope that something like this becomes a built-in feature of CSS in the future.

Screen Resolution

With Retina displays becoming more and more common across several devices, type is becoming even prettier and more important. It’s getting close to the sharpness you would see in print design. I just recently (after some hesitation) upgraded to the Retina MacBook Pro. I highly recommend it, especially to designers. Eventually it will be a standard, so it’s best to get used to designing for it already. Not to mention things that are not optimized for Retina are hard to look at.

Web Typography Wish List

At this point, there are only a couple of things I still wish for. We have letter-spacing in CSS, but it’s only okay. I would like more control of kerning, which is the spacing between individual pairs of characters rather than the uniform spacing that letter-spacing controls. I would also like better control of the rag of paragraphs (where the lines in a paragraph end) and widows (when the last line of a paragraph consists of a single word). A beautiful, typographic web that can be compared to print is just around the corner.

If you know of any other web type tools, please share them. New ones are surfacing everyday.

The post Tools that Are Changing Type on the Web appeared first on Atomic Spin.

It’s June. It’s graduation time of the year. My son just graduated from high school. Atomic Object has four college interns working with us this summer. And in the last few months, we’ve welcomed five new employees, four of whom are recent college graduates.

What to study? What’s my best career path? What next? The questions and the blizzard of bland advice can be disorienting and disheartening.

And commencement addresses can be really tiresome and filled with hollow platitudes about how graduates should aspire to greatness.  Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

But there are really good commencement addresses and other writings that give some relevant perspective on the “how to craft a good life” work we all face. Here are links to some of my all-time favorite graduation speeches, as well as a few related articles that have captured my attention. The following snippets inspire me and I think they can be helpful to anyone, not just graduates.

Drake

From his own high school graduation speech.

There are many different ways of following through… Sometimes it’s about going there, not getting there. Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

Cal Newport

This article by Cal Newport is one of my personal favorite bits of career advice, because it tells a story so closely analogous to my own circuitous career path to Atomic Object: Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You.

Had I subscribed to the “follow our passion” orthodoxy, I probably would have left during those first years, worried that I didn’t feel love for my work every day. But I knew that my sense of fulfillment would grow over time, as I became better at my job. So I worked hard, and, as my competence grew, so did my engagement.

Anna Quindlen

Villanova University commencement address in 2000.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time you look at your diploma, remember that you are still a student, still learning how to best treasure your connection to others. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad. Get a life in which you are generous.

David Brooks

New York Times Column: The Way to Produce a Person

If you are smart, hard-working, careful and lucky you might even be able to find a job that is both productive and internally ennobling. Taking a job just to make money, on the other hand, is probably going to be corrosive, even if you use the money for charity rather than sports cars.

Gretchen Gavett

Gretchen Gavett captured wisdom from a cross-section of her favorite writers who share the graduation-specific advice they wish they had been given.

Amy Jen Su

Co-author of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence.

Recognize you have the power of choice at every moment available to you: choice in what you do for work, who your friends are, even what your attitude will be for the day. Be conscious, stay awake, and live with your eyes wide open. Own your life and career. Accept the trade-offs inherent in every decision and choice you make. For every “yes” there is an implicit set of “no’s” you are saying so make your choices and commitments wisely.

Karen Dillon

Former editor of Harvard Business Review and co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?

Be interesting. When you sit in that interview, don’t assume that the lines you can write on your resume will be enough to get your foot in the door to the job of your dreams. We’re going to spend long hours, five days a week working together. I don’t want to work with someone who is narrow and boring. Have opinions — on politics, on pop culture, on favorite writers or thinkers. Have personal interests that may have nothing to do with the job at hand. Have something to say.

Steve Jobs

Stanford University commencement address in 2005.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Suess)

His speech at Lake Forest College in June 1977:

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when they were served
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
‘To eat these things,’
said my uncle,
‘you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid
BUT
you must spit out the air!
And as you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.’

Hats off to all recent graduates and those who, like me, are inspired by writings that shed a different light on what defines a successful life.

The post Graduation Advice for Life appeared first on Atomic Spin.

In case you haven’t read the post mentioned above, the important thing to know here is that rake is actually something like:

PATH=bin:$PATH \
GEM_HOME=vendor/gem_home \
GEM_PATH=vendor/gem_home \
java -jar vendor/jruby-complete-1.7.0.jar -S rake

The Problem

For this particular application, I wanted to precompile the assets on the CI/build server as opposed to during deployment as is the normal case for a Rails app. If I tried to run the assets:precompile rake task, I would get the following error:

file:/projects/rails_app/vendor/jruby-complete-1.7.0.jar!/META-INF/jruby.home/bin/jruby bin/rake assets:precompile:all RAILS_ENV=production RAILS_GROUPS=assets
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (127): [file:/projects/rails_ap...]
org/jruby/RubyProc.java:249:in `call'
/projects/rails_app/vendor/bundler/jruby/1.9/gems/actionpack-3.2.13/lib/sprockets/assets.rake:12:in `ruby_rake_task'
/projects/rails_app/vendor/bundler/jruby/1.9/gems/actionpack-3.2.13/lib/sprockets/assets.rake:21:in `invoke_or_reboot_rake_task'
/projects/rails_app/vendor/bundler/jruby/1.9/gems/actionpack-3.2.13/lib/sprockets/assets.rake:29:in `(root)'
org/jruby/RubyProc.java:249:in `call'
org/jruby/RubyArray.java:1612:in `each'
org/jruby/RubyArray.java:1612:in `each'
org/jruby/RubyKernel.java:1045:in `load'
Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

It appears to be trying to shell out to a jruby script inside the jruby-complete.jar. The shell does not know how to interpret the path to a file inside of a jar, which is the cause of the error. Examining the assets.rake file from the stack trace shows where this is happening:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

def ruby_rake_task(task, fork = true)
  env    = ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'production'
  groups = ENV['RAILS_GROUPS'] || 'assets'
  args   = [$0, task,"RAILS_ENV=#{env}","RAILS_GROUPS=#{groups}"]
  args << "--trace" if Rake.application.options.trace
  if $0 =~ /rake\.bat\Z/i
    Kernel.exec $0, *args
  else  
    fork ? ruby(*args) : Kernel.exec(FileUtils::RUBY, *args)  end    
end

You can see in line 9 the use of a FileUtils::RUBY constant. When running a Rails app with the jruby-complete, jar Kernel.exec is called, and the constant ends up being something like:

file:/projects/rails_app/vendor/ \
 jruby-complete-1.7.0.jar!/META-INF/jruby.home/bin/jruby

The Work-Around

Fortunately there is a very simple work-around. First, I created a script/jruby script that encapsulated the way I am running jruby:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=bin:$PATH
export GEM_HOME=vendor/gem_home
export GEM_PATH=vendor/gem_home
cmd="java -jar vendor/jruby-complete-1.7.0.jar $@"
exec $cmd

Then I added a file_utils_ruby.rake file to the lib/tasks directory containing only:

FileUtils::RUBY = "script/jruby"

When Rails loads this file, the constant will point to my jruby script, instead of to something inside the jruby-complete jar. I had assumed I would get a warning about reassigning a constant, but no such warnings seem to be issued. And with this in place, the assets:precompile task executes cleanly.

In addition, the alias for rake can now be changed from what was listed at the beginning of this post to just be something like:

script/jruby -S rake

The post Rake Assets Precompile with JRuby Complete appeared first on Atomic Spin.

However, we shouldn’t fall prey to actually believing that given the necessary time to implement every abstraction, refactoring, and re-organization is doing the world any favors. Useful software needs to be used. To be used, software needs to be in the hands of users. To get into their hands, it needs to be shipped.

Most vectors for improvement are only visible once a piece of software is being used by people who didn’t create it. This is the most important point to reach in a software product’s lifecycle, as quickly as possible.

Until this point is reached — while version 1.0 is still unreleased — two lists must be ruthlessly prioritized:

1. The features to be included in 1.0.
2. The technical refinements to be included in 1.0.

Some Refinements Provide More Value

Agile and lean project and product management practices largely address how to prioritize features. That task is usually, but not always, out of the hands of software makers. However, which refinements are included is often left up to the dev team.

By refinements I mean refactorings, subsystem redesigns or rewrites, addition of deploy/startup/runtime configurability via metadata, or addressing other forms of technical debt. These are the tasks that make the software more simple, modular, simple, and flexible.

To build the best release, a dev team should not strive to implement every refinement and pay back every penny of technical debt from the project. Rather, it’s our responsibility to prioritize these items so we can tackle the most important ones, ensuring the resulting release provides the most value for our client and thier users within the time we have.

Prioritize Refinements Wisely

Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you evaluate the priority of implementing a particular abstraction, refactoring, or developer tool:

1. Does it fully automate a task requiring the time of your client or the end user?
2. Does it empower the client to do something I would otherwise have to spend time doing on their behalf?
3. Does it empower the user of the software to do something I or the client would have to do on their behalf?
4. Does it insulate most of the system from a component very likely to change or be unreliable?
5. Does it make the code easier to understand and reason about?
6. Does it make the code prettier?

Ask yourself each of these questions for every task not directly related to a feature or bug. When you say yes, give it a priority corresponding to the number for the question. Each week, set aside part of your team’s time (I usually allocate part or all of each Friday) to tackle the items with the highest priority – 1 being the highest.

Successful software is usually never done. Once the software is being used, you’ll learn a lot. And you’ll hear yourself saying, “Man, I wish we would’ve done XYZ,” about a task that didn’t even appear on the dev team’s list representing the yellow brick road to ultimate software excellence.

Perfect software, from the perspective of a craftsperson, is also never done. There is always an improvement, a refactoring, another abstraction, or a “Friday task” that could make the system more elegant, simple, or flexible. As professionals, we need to admit to ourselves that our time is limited, and use that knowledge to our advantage by effectively managing our time. The software we create will provide more value as a whole to the world if we do.
 

The post Prioritizing Refinements – Choose Wisely appeared first on Atomic Spin.

When it comes time to creating a new product for existing brands, branding can be difficult to reverse engineer. But as designers of applications, we need to take care to understand the intricacies of the brand. Why is this so important? Because how you build digital experiences has everything to do with how your users feel about your brand.

More than a Logo

If brand is more than a logo, what is it?

Branding in a word: Perception.

Your brand is the impression your product creates in a customer’s mind — how they think and feel about your product. Or as The Design Council puts it:

If a brand results from a set of associations and perceptions in people’s minds, then branding is an attempt to harness, generate, influence and control these associations to help the business perform better.

In a brick and mortar store, a brand is conveyed through layout and decoration, but also intangibles like the speed, attitude, and quality of service. In the digital world, brand is known by your logo and colors, and by the ease and satisfaction of the experience. Visitors may forget how your app looks or the message it conveys, but they will remember how it felt to use it.

Michael Wolff, a thought leader in branding, says,

“People will forget what you said and do, but people will not forget how you make them feel.”

This is true in both the physical and the digital world.

One quick example is Target’s online experience. Target stores have a strong visual brand identity, and every time I use Target’s website, I feel great. I can easily find and see what I’m ordering, and they do an extraordinary job of communicating during and after the order is complete. The way I feel after using the Target website is consistent with how I feel about the the Target brand identity — predictable, simple, effective.

Branding Is as Branding Does

A beautiful product does not necessarily mean a functional one. There’s a difference — sometimes subtle — between the way something looks and how it behaves. We can separate the brand into two parts: the Brand Identity and the Brand Experience.

• Brand Identity = How it Looks
• Brand Experience = How it Makes you Feel

Find out: “How do my users feel about my company?”

Sweat the Details

In the digital world, each and every interaction is an experience. The experiences should match the brand perception they already have about your product or company.

What might the brand experience look like in an application? Unfortunately, there’s not an easy answer to that question because each brand and each encounter people have with a product are different depending on the context and situation.

However, paying attention to specific aspects of using the product will go a long way toward creating a pleasant experience for your users. Give special attention to:

• Workflows (or UI flows)
• Interactions
• Wording
• Anticipation
• Affordance

Be attentive and creative when designing interactions within your app. Turn otherwise mundane interactions into a subtly-addictive experience, and you will create a user base that loves using your app. Not only that, they will want to show it off to others.

Examples of Good Digital Brand Experiences

Google

Google auto-completes your search before you hit ‘enter.’

Flickr

Flickr lets you advance to the next photo using the right arrow on the keyboard.

About Me

About Me provides contextual info and prompting to take you to the next step in the setup process.

Paypal

Paypal gives different fee informaiton depending on the type of payment.

Forcast.io

Forecast.io lets you move the radar backwards and forwards in time by dragging.

Tweetbot

Tweetbot app for iPhone makes subtle sounds when you press buttons.

Choose wisely the digital experiences where you concentrate your branding efforts. Sweat the details on the look and feel of your products. Spend the time to make them shine. It’s the only impression people may have with your company. How do you want them to feel?
 

The post Why You Should Care About Branding in a Digital World appeared first on Atomic Spin.

One way we have been spicing up our forms is by improving the look of the checkbox and radio button areas. Making toggles and visual cues for standard form elements will make forms feel more interactive. The styling can be done with CSS alone, using pseudo selectors, or with JavaScript to put classes on elements, depending on the state. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t play nicely with pseudo selectors, but we can fix that.

In forms where there are tag selections (checkbox) or an icon selection for the item we are creating (radio buttons), we try to make the visuals nicer:

This can be accomplished with HTML and CSS like this:

<div>
  <input type="checkbox" class="check-with-label" />
  <label class="label-for-check">My Label</label>
<div>

Unfortunately, as noted previously, Internet Explorer doesn’t like pseudo selectors and will not provide the effects. We can bring in a JavaScript library called Selectivizr to help bring in the pseudo selector support. You need to have another javascript library loaded, such as jQuery, dojo, prototype, Mootools, or others. You can add it to your project by putting this snippet in your HTML head section (filling in the JS Library with the proper includes from your choice from the ones listed):

<script type="text/javascript" src="[JS library]"></script>
<!--[if (gte IE 6)&(lte IE 8)]>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="selectivizr.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Aside from some lack of support on rounded edges, gradients, and other things that CSS3PIE can help with, you will have the pseudo selector support needed to make the form elements a little bit nicer!
 

The post Selectivizr – Pseudo Selector Support for IE appeared first on Atomic Spin.

I thought the podcast did a wonderful job of synthesizing the etymology of written language and the evolution of communication and language throughout history. Not too surprisingly — at least to me — that evolution hinged on the ease-of-access to the masses; where it went from a centrally controlled medium to almost entirely distributed.

I spent the time marking my favorite parts of the podcast below and made notes on each part. Enjoy!

3:30 – 5:50

• Uruk in Mesopotamia was one of the first cities to have writing.
  • Uruk was a city of approximately 300,000, which was extraordinarily large at that time.
• It is estimated that writing (in the form of symbols) was introduced in 3150 BC.
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat is credited for discovering the evolution of tokens to writing.
  • Argued that she is just as important as Charles Darwin.
• Language consisted of over 10,000 symbols but only a few hundred were typically used.
• It is estimated that it took approximately 10 years to learn.

11:00 – 15:10

• Phoenicians introduced the alphabet to the Greeks.
• The “Semite” alphabet was made up of only consonants (guttural noises necessary).
  • Took ~4 years to learn.
• Greeks replaced certain consonants with vowels, which made it easier to learn.
• It is speculated that because of how easy it was to learn the language it helped to make Athenian democracy possible.

17:27 – 17:50

• Discusses how literacy drastically improved the intellect and knowledge of people.
• Assisted in removing despots and other bad regimes that used the monopoly of language.

19:30 – 21:10

• Discusses how spaces were introduced between words.
• Latin, for instance, did not have word separation.
• Irish monks started using it regularly, and it eventually spread to other parts of the world.

22:40 – 26:00

• Benedictines are credited for moving from scrolls to books.
• The Chinese invented the original printing presses.
• Europeans had moveable type long before the “Gutenberg Press.”
• Gutenberg is (or should be) credited with making the printing press economical and therefore making mass production possible.

26:27 – 28:15

Benedictines were not particularly happy about the Gutenberg press:

They shamelessly print, at negligible cost, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths, while a true writer dies of hunger [and] a young girl reads Ovid to learn sinfulness… Writing indeed, which brings gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses.

They also sought protectionist legislation and went as far as wanting to ban the press.

The same kind of murmurings have come from large modern day newspapers as well — hundreds of years later. :-)

30:28 – 32:05; 36:00 – 36:52

• Discusses the introduction of Radio.
• Radio, originally, was less about the distribution of knowledge and was instead used to spread propaganda.
  • It was broadcast only.
  • It took a tremendous amount of capital and money to own broadcasting stations.
• Radio ordinances restricting foreign broadcasts were commonplace in Germany and Russia in the early 20th century.
• Ironically, the Soviet Union produced a large amount of short-wave radios that only received foreign broadcasts.

42:48 – 45:20

• Reviews Orwell’s concern on communication mediums in the 20th century.
• How the modern digital age revolutionized communication and made it distributed.
  • Cheaper
  • “Ordinary” people started spreading information
• Discusses how most of the important communication inventions of our age were done for intellectual pursuits only or for entirely different reasons than what they are now used for.

50:37 – End

• Review of the Internet age.
• Addresses poor experiments that “prove” the Internet makes us “stupid.”
• The age of social media.
• The slow death of mainstream media.
• Notes that the Internet gets it wrong a lot but it also corrects itself very quickly.
   

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