Dramatic changes in the media industry – as evidenced by last year’s closing of the nearby Rocky Mountain News in Denver – have prompted the University of Colorado at Boulder to review the future of its journalism program.
CU said Wednesday that on Sept. 1 a committee will start the process of “program discontinuance” for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. A separate exploratory committee will determine what a new interdisciplinary “information and communication technology” program could look like.
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Apple to Host Music Event Sept. 1
Simplenote 3.0
Simplenote has become my main venue for thoughts, project notes and just about anything else text-based. This update includes tags, sharing and a great full-screen editing mode for the iPhone and iPad.
New features come with APIs, so tag syncing and more should hopefully show up in apps like Notational Velocity before long.
If you use an iPhone or iPad and need someplace for words to live, you’ve got to check it out.
The Minimal Movement
John Carey, at the wonderful fiftyfootshadows.net:
I find that I sit somewhere between the ultra minimal lifestyle that many tout on their blogs and social networks and those attached to older, kitschy nostalgia. I like having old books on my bookshelf and small trinkets from my travels scattered around my living space. I like both the minimal forms of modern trends in product design and the warm feeling an old wooden bookshelf can bring.
Pakistan
A series of satellite photographs conveys the epic scale of the floods sweeping through Pakistan, leaving millions homeless and the world aghast at an extreme weather disaster that experts consider the new normal.
The images are haunting.
New Office for Mac Video Surfaces
From the video:
We’ll take a document and print it out with Word for Windows and with Word for Macintosh. Take the two sheets of paper, overlay them…hold them up to the light. If we see any difference, we consider that a bug that we have to fix.
It’s taken them this long to decide that printing differences between versions is a bug?
This explains a lot about how Microsoft views products, sadly.
Steven Frank’s Retro Room
Panic cofounder Steven Frank (yes, that Steven Frank) is building a Retro Room:
I went insane and decided to start collecting computer and video game paraphernalia from my youth.
He is also cataloging his finds over on Tumblr. My favorite may be the literature for the 20th Anniversary Mac.
It’s a great look at the technology that defined a generation. It makes me a little sad that I’m too young to have experienced the PC Revolution. By the time I was old enough to care about computers, the world was dominated by Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, and Apple was churning out lots of garbage.
The Future of Textbooks
Textbooks don’t have to be text. They don’t have to be books.
Stunning. The future of textbooks aren’t in dead trees.
I Thought You Were Supposed to Sell Lost Cellphones to Blogs
Brian Lam lost his phone. A lady turned it in to the restaurant.
[ via DF]
Update: Here’s Google’s cache on Lam’s now-locked Twitter account.
‘Eric Schmidt is Creepy’
More and more, I get the feeling that if there’s a rift between the old “Don’t be evil” Google and the new “Let’s do whatever we want” Google, that it’s a rift between Schmidt and Larry/Sergey — if not personally, then at least culturally within the company. On the one side, the Larry/Sergey Google that makes amazing cool things — the search engine, Gmail, Android. On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.
Clunky
I love the simplicity of the MacBook Air — when I have to use someone else’s MacBook Pro, it feels heavy and clunky. Don’t get me started on how it feels to use someone else’s Window machine. It would be nice if my Air lasted for 20 years.
I agree. The Air is a piece of art. While it doesn’t meet my day-to-day needs, I really wish it did.
NPR and Mobile Usage
As for mobile platforms, the NPR News iPhone app has a slight bump in traffic in the mid-morning and evens out throughout the day. Curiously, this is a unique pattern among NPR mobile platforms, and may indicate a strong use of that particular app during the morning commute.
[…]
The Android app, iPad app and mobile website all see more steady use throughout the day until late evening, when the mobile site and iPad app experience a bit of a second wind of traffic, perhaps as people get their last dose of news before bed.