Tidbits

A tidbit is a small piece of a something. Tidbits are life's building blocks... by themselves are they often meaningless, but become very powerful when combined together.

It is impossible to tackle anything successfully if you just think in terms of generalizations and abstractions. When you start paying attention to the little things, you'll do great work.

Good products have tidbits that are not coincidental. With great products, for better or worse, we usually fail to notice the tidbits at all (we just get a good feeling) and find ourselves scratching our heads wondering "What did they do right?" The answer of course is... everything... every detail. If you are aware of this, I think you appreciate it even more.

Don't worry about spending too much time on tidbits. If you work on the right ones, they'll pay off. Make sure you're working on the right ones.

At the risk of no context, here are a few tidbits of mine recently:

• Typography Project — my initials in serif + sans-serif
• Study of Visual Opposites — over 300 photos later...
• Mock Cover Design — his architecture is truly stunning.

• VAMacros.h — makes variable-length arguments easier
• AliasExtensions.h + .m — round-trips paths with alias data

Cocoa programmers are welcome to use the code above as they see fit.

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