After Class: The Week’s Best Technology Writing

It’s Friday, the weekend is looming and you want to relax with a drink and some quality technology writing — maybe. Here are some of the more interesting technology articles from the week.

From Writely to Google Docs

The Verge interviews Sam Schillace, the creator of Google Docs, and discovers the origins of one of Google’s most popular services.

The Save button is kind of funny. It’s obviously (to me) better to never have to think about saving, but we’re all conditioned to think about it, worry about it, etc. We’ve been trained to do work for the computer, which sucks. So, we really wanted to take that out, but it freaks people out when they “can’t save” their document. I think it’s funny — as though, if save were broken, your act of clicking on the screen would help the computer get that job done magically

The Death of Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart, the creator of many standard features of PCs, including the mouse, multi-tasking, and windowed GUIs, died this week. Wired looks at his influence on the industry.

“Even way back then, we already had the concept of multiple windows,” Engelbart told this reporter in 2005. “Any one application could manage multiple windows, and you could easily move objects, paragraphs, and words between them.”

Art From EMF Radiation

That laptop in front of you is hiding a beautiful secret. Radiating from its hard drive, optical drive and tiny motors is a force field of magnetic and electric charges. Called an electromagnetic field, it’s invisible to the human eye—usually. But a recent project from two designers at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design have made the invisible visible. Luke Sturgeon and Shamik Ray have created light paintings from the EMFs emitting from our everyday electronics. The result are ghoulishly pretty images showing wisps of light floating above a laptop and flowing from a radio’s speaker.