Making things simple, radical and beautiful
There’s never been just one way to buy software. In ye olden times, if you liked some shareware, you’d mail off a cheque, or call up a hot-line, to get the full version. Later on, you could walk into a store and walk out with a shiny box, manuals, and disks. (source) MS Windows 1.0 These were some expensive boxes: Name Year Price 2025 Equivalent Adobe Photoshop 3.0 1994 $895 ~$1,956 BBEdit 1993…
You might’ve heard of the Internet Phone Book , a collection of poetic, interesting, personal websites, and essays about websites, collected by Kristopher and Elliott. We chatted about how the phonebook was made, and about why they’re optimistic about the web that’s made by real people and artists. TLDR: Make a website, it’s good for your soul. Because Kinopio sponsored the first printing of the…
I could see myself running a hotel. A little world where the architecture is otherworldly. And of course, the service is impeccable – because nothing matters more in any business than how customers are treated. (source) I collected this photo as inspiration ~14 years ago. Feels good to finally use it. But while it’s normal for one night in a hotel to cost ~$300, most people expect the price of a…
Here lies Glitch, a place on the web you could go to write up a website or a node.js server that would be hosted and updated as you type. 🥀 RIP 2015 – 2025. The Glitch editor in action. Built on top of ACE, and later Codemirror. I co-created Glitch at Fog Creek Software. I laid out the original product vision for web development with real code that was as easy as editing a Google Doc, designed…
At the dawn of the industry, we needed big companies to deliver quality software. You’d buy version 1.0 because the way it worked was revolutionary, and it let you do amazing new things. You’d buy version 2.0 because it added helpful new features. Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. became household names because software was hard to make, and even harder to box up and get on store shelves. But by the…