Computers, software, and gadgets for writers
Short Fiction by Richard Dooling Diary Of An Immortal Man was a cover story for Esquire Magazine and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. The full text appears online at Kurzweil AI. Diary Of An Immortal Man is kinky science fiction and black comedy, inspired in part by Ray Kurzweil’s tremendous book, The Age Of Spiritual Machines; both speculate about what the future holds for us and our biotech lust for immortality.
Here’s a fresh look at the age-old tension between those who prefer the Command Line Interface (CLI) to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), by way of an example from my favorite text editor, Vim 7.0. Writing in the Free Software Magazine, Terry Hancock argues that user interfaces should teach, not hide. “The key concept here is that we should view GUIs not as an opaque layer to separate the digital classes, but as a convenience to make learning easier”. Probably the best essay on what some call “Interface Zen” is still Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line, although it’s officially dated (written in 1999). Stephenson’s favorite operating system at the time was BeOS (now nearly extinct), but in a 2004 Slashdot interview, Stephenson wrote: “I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of ‘In the Beginning was the Command Line’ is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I’m honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.” In 2004, Garrett Birkel (with Neal Stephenson’s permission) republished Command Line, interspersing his own notes and comments, in an effort to bring the essay up […]