Beauty

What is beauty?

It's sort of subjective as to what is beautiful. To me, my wife and children are beautiful. Sunny days on amazing beaches, the Burren in co. Clare and tree tunnels (when trees shade a road and you drive through surrounded by the green folliage) are all beautiful. These would be things most people can agree to being beautiful.

Other things that are beautiful as far as I'm concerned will probably not be so easy to understand.

1. The Xbox One
To me, this is from years of evolution of the hardware to produce an affordable piece of kit that can sit fairly unobtrusively in your front room enabling games to be played and entertainment to be had. Skyping family from the TV is cool and the new-found integration with Windows 10 is great. You can't fault it really.


2. Amazing innovation and ambition
This is more a generalisation but something like space-ship one and two fall into this category. They are beautiful not only in their innovation but the sleek lines and what they are trying to achieve. Other things that fall into this are the Raspberry PI which is incredible for its size and what they are trying to achieve with it and everything Elon Musk is doing - the Telsas, SpaceX and his super-fast trains.

3. The perfect piece of code.
A task that is complex and suddenly you discover something so simple that just works and is so simple it can't go wrong. This leads to beautiful software which there is plenty of. I often get excited over little bits of software I've written that do cool things. Windows 8 tried to be a thing of beauty and it nearly did this. The problem is people weren't ready for windows tablets and Windows 8 isn't ideal on desktops. Windows 8.1 improved this but the power/speed of Windows 8 was lost. Windows 10 however has addressed these concerns and, IMO, they have created something beautiful.

My Linx 1010 arrived and it's a thing of beauty - it's not a surface which is a stunningly beautiful piece of hardware and software, but,  a full windows OS tablet for 1/2 the price of an iPad with USB ports and SD slot - you can't go wrong.

Beauty doesn't necessarily have to be things you see but they can be ideas too. I like things :D