"It wants you to be somewhere that your mind is clear." The focus of the article is on its advantages as a creative device, but it gets at what I see as the biggest draw of iPad(-like devices) as a platform for makers: we can finally create experiences that do not require our users to be tethered to a machine that they associate with WORK. For so long the audience of web art and literature has been people bored at work, with all the distractions inherent in desktop computing. Now we can actually have our videos/images/writing experienced by people sitting on their couches… Yes, this could be another CD-ROM, "this is the future of art" type of dead end, or it could truly be a new relationship between digital artists and our audience. (I'm hoping it won't be too long before there are competing/non-closed devices, but the web itself is the open/universal platform regardless.)

"Given that traffic noise is the most prevalent disturbing noise on the planet, it’s heartbreaking to think how close we were to muting the endless loud ribbons with which our planet is criss-crossed, and letting the panoply of sounds those roads mask become audible again." Love this guy.

"All of this stopping and starting led to a somewhat confusing situation. The W3C was simultaneously working on two different, incompatible types of markup: XHTML 2 and HTML 5 (note the space before the letter five). Meanwhile a separate organization, the WHATWG, was working on a specification called HTML5 (with no space) that would be used as a basis for one of the W3C specifications!"