Archives

Excerpt from 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form, page 18.

How many microscopic adjustments are made to a sculpture before it is complete? How many stitches go into a fine garment? This is the level of awareness you must achieve: down to the individual character.

!
-case

Judge your simplicity by skimming your words.

Your readers will skim it. They will misunderstand it. They will even repost it, having skimmed it and misunderstood it. Expect this, plan for it, optimize for it.

Get ready to say it once. Or, get ready to say it wrong, delete and repost really quickly. If you’re lucky, no one will notice your mistake except the search engine. Limit yourself even further than the constraint requires, and then having the extra freedom will seem like a luxury.

I wrote the Book for @Meredith.

Thanks to Case, Varese, Britt, and Jack for encouraging me.

Thanks to my son Leo for inspiring me.

Thanks to Adam for prompting me.

Thanks to Jenna for writing about this.

Thanks to Erin for reading on a weekend.

Thanks to Shannon, Deborah, and Matt for picking me up.

Thanks to my reviewers and contributors, especially Mom, Dad, Mark, Ben, Erik, Andrew, and Alex for comments.

I wrote the App along with the help of many people from iPhoneDevCamp pictured above, including @ravenme, @grigs,@jtkeith, @lyzadanger, @aileen_jeffries, @schwa, @bmf, @mantia, @tristan, @emory, @twittelator, and @atebits.

@Jack, @case @ceedub and @rr contributed to the App design.

@24klogos did the artwork including the hummingbird, feather for the Book cover and baby feather for the App icon.

There have been many other contributors to the text and the testing community. Thank you to everyone, and please keep the comments and suggestions coming.