I use Apple’s iWork suite in my work and am glad to be long rid of MS Office. However, as a librarian and someone who has worked in digital archiving for years, I’ve been concerned about the fact that Apple’s Pages and Numbers and Keynote are using formats unlikely to stand the test of time. I tend to save a lot of PDF versions of these documents, because at least PDF has been fairly robust over the past 10 years.
Today I noticed that if I instruct iWork apps to include a preview for QuickLook when saving, they put a PDF and JPEG version of the document in question right into the “package” that is the native file format. In other words, in the future I’ll be able to open the directory that is a Pages file, inside that find a QuickLook directory, and inside that find a Preview.pdf that is readable by anything that reads PDF documents. Fantastic! Now my iWork apps can automatically save a robustly readable version of themselves right into their native file format.
Caveat: The Preview.pdf seems to be saved at 50% size. I’m not sure why this is, since a PDF is resolution independent and can easily be viewed at full resolution. This makes using the auto saved PDF’s a bit awkward (but I think still fine for my personal archival purposes).
Bottom line: I would recommend turning on the “include preview by default” choice in the preferences of all iWork apps. This does increase the size of the documents, but it makes it much more likely you will be able to view them again in ten or twenty years.
On techPresident you can find a piece that compares the top fifty words used in Obama’s speech yesterday to the top fifty words used in mainstream media responses. Micah at techPresident asks:
Are we still living in the age of sound-bite politics, where the sharp attack line, even taken out of context, can become the “truth” of an event or a person thanks to the amplifying and distorting effects of broadcast media? Or are we entering the age of sound-blast politics, where a 37-minute speech can actually be watched, read, and digested by millions of people (a million views already on YouTube!) using the abundant spaces of the internet–and the themes and meanings they encounter and absorb will be not about the “politics” of a speech, but its actual content?
Note, YouTube only counts a beginning to end viewing as a “view”. 1,230,086 of those when I posted this entry.
Barack Obama today asked us to care for one another in a political speech that illuminated race in this country as none other in decades. Please, whoever you support for President, if you live in the US give this speech 40 minutes of your time.
Obama accepts the contradictions of life, he owns them. He does not back away from his family (including Rev. Wright) just because they have an ugly aspect. Yet he call on himself and all of us to do better. I find myself asking: Can I accept this call?
I have no idea if we can really elect this man to the Presidency. But I am so thankful we have elevated him enough to make his voice heard even now. And if we can elect him, I hope it means that we can learn to elect, with open eyes, other imperfect souls trying to make the world a better place without forcing them to masquerade as infallible. For this is leadership: not taking us where we say we want to go, but showing us where we really need to go.
These past few weeks I’ve begun to read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish. Sullivan writes for The Atlantic, and it says much for this publication that it values the mix of his many contradictions. (Side note, I couldn’t be prouder of James Bennet, someone I played with as a kid, who has grown up to become an extraordinary journalist and the editor of The Atlantic.)
I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man’s explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger. And I would think much, much less of Obama if he had never opened himself to this subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments. That he has done all this - while still attempting to reform and explain it - is a remarkable achievement. Maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. But the promise of Obama is that his campaign appears poised to show that America is ready for this - and the immense healing it would bring.
And so we are suspended between the old politics and the new, between a Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready and may never be ready for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defense - and an Obama who offers all of us a chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.
He may fail; and the Clintons may be proven right. But he may also succeed - and what a mighty success that would be. These things are never easy; and we were lulled perhaps into an illusion that they could be. So now the real struggle starts. And it will not end with an Obama presidency; it ends with a shift from below that makes an Obama presidency possible.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disagreed with my pastors, sometimes enough to walk out on them, almost never enough to walk out on the community around them. Recently I have walked out, finally bent past breaking by a deceitful man shepherding our parish. Rev. Wright said some things worth challenging and throwing back at him, but from what I’ve read and seen he said many more things that would nourish my soul and keep me coming back if I lived in his neighborhood. I love the thought of a President who can hold such tensions in his spirit and still lead with hope and vision.
Actually, the temperature has been warming up, but some students at the University of Minnesota organized a freeze on the Northrup Mall last week. Check out the video. Echos of another moment in time. Almost makes me wish I still worked there!
Late in February the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (remember the inquisition?) promulgated a statement from the Vatican clarifying that anyone baptized with the wrong words has not been baptized at all. The wrong words include “in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier.” The right words seem to be only “in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
I am so sad about the state of my church. I can’t imagine God gives a hoot which words are used as long as the parents’ and community’s hearts are in the right place. What a shame that we spend our time arguing trivia instead of building a better world. With ruling like this, is it any surprise that we have fewer and fewer priests willing to put on the straightjacket?
Even sadder, I find, are the number of my fellow Catholics who egg on the hierarchy, tormenting them with endless pinpricks of complaint about how our precious tradition is being violated. I am tired, this is not church, this is third grade.
Some pretty amazing news out of MIT last week: Elsevier and MIT’s OpenCourseWare have inked a deal to allow OCW to access a certain portion of Elsevier content under a Creative Commons license. Though I can’t find a reference to the specific CC license agreed to, David Wiley seems to think it is a By-NC-SA license, which would allow anyone who gets this material from OCW to use it and share it non-commercially. Bravo to MIT and Elsevier for finding common ground that allows broader use of such important content. I can’t help wondering if the open content movement is not putting real pressure on companies like Elsevier to work harder to allow their content to be used fully in the academic community.
Any reference to constraints that limit creativity is just another way of equating creativity with self-expression, an erroneous and irresponsible idea. Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design. No component fuels creativity more than constraint. Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant. The discovery process is mostly about finding constraints, which is why we must do such a thorough job of it.
Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles.
The article as a whole reduces the magic of art a bit too far for my taste. Not all creativity is in service to a client. But even so, I think the importance of knowing the constraints of your medium is critical.
