Imagine Facebook already trading on the Nasdaq; how would the market react? Would analysts and pundits send the stock upward, praising Zuckerberg’s swiftness at securing FB’s position? Or, to the contrary, would someone loudly complain: What? Did Facebook just burn the entire 2011 free cash-flow to buy an app with no revenue in sight, and manned by a dozen of geeks? Is this a red-flag symptom of Zuckerberg’s mental state?¹

An interesting read. Monday Note currently seems to be the most interesting commentator on Facebook’s future and its acquisition of Instagram.

Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.¹

With five years worth of hindsight (well, one year would’ve been sufficient) this is just hilarious reading.²

The very worst thing you can do with frequently asked questions is make a list of them on your web site. Frequently asked questions are bugs, and the only satisfactory answer to them is to fix the problem so the questions don’t get asked again.¹

One of the great things about the month of december is the wide array of awesome advent calendars for geeks. This year I added PHP Advent to my list of essential reading. However december was one of those months where I barely had time to sleep, let alone actually read, so a lot of articles were left in my Instapaper cue. A few days ago I read through one of them and found this great quote from Drew McLellan. The whole article is very well worth a read.

This review was written and edited exclusively in Byword.

I began this article on a Tuesday night from my iPhone around 11:30 pm while my son, Noah, was up for his late-night feeding. On Wednesday morning I picked up where I left off by opening Byword on my MacBook Air while in my office. After lunch, I grabbed my iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard and visited my favorite local coffee shop where a latte accompanied me as I finished the article.

This is exactly the sort of writing workflow that I’m looking to adopt.¹

This workflow appeals to me as well. I like being able to work device agnostically. Especially I’d like to be able to seamlessly work on blog posts from my computer(s), iPhone and iPad.

Since the blogs publishing interface is web based it’s possible, but that is not the way I’d like to write. I find myself being much more productive in something like Byword than in the WordPress Admin panel. Therefore I think I need to bolt some hacks together to be able to write in whatever application that I want, save the result in Dropbox and have the blog itself pick up the articles from a certain Dropbox folder and publish them. I’d like it to be like the post workflow in Marco Arment’s Second Crack², but still using WordPress as the CMS.

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can’t imagine any other way. Simplicity is not the absence of clutter. Get it right, and you become closer and more focused on the object.¹

It’s impossible to imagine a world now in which developers proudly browser-sniff to check that the customer is using the “right” browser on the “right” operating system, while they race to code applications that revolve around non-standard “extensions” thereby locking themselves and their users to one browser because it temporarily has the shiniest proprietary extras. That’s absolutely unthinkable as we approach 2011.¹

With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.¹

John Gruber writes a great article about Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs Biography, and about five simple words that could easily be used as a replacement for Apple’s “Think different”-tagline.