The distinction between blogs and newspapers blurs.
A few years ago I used to get laughed at when I suggested that the model for amateur online diarists would be that for global media corporations. De facto, this is now true.
There is something so fundamental and powerful about the reverse chronological list that it couldn't be any other way, however recently something interesting has happened.
Blogs are becoming more like news sites like CNN, a cover page with multi column snippet digests being slapped on the front to draw people in.
The Huffington post was the first blog to do this and now Talking Points Memo has followed suit.
Chatting with Nick Denton the other day we came to the agreement that traditional blog layouts don't pull repeat readers (not SEO traffic) into the site, off the front page, very well. News sites like CNN get 10 page views per visit, whereas Gawker sites get less than 2.
Although page views don't strictly mean much in the days of Ajax driven sites (Nielsen announced today they are no longer going to count them), the design of newspapers and the design of blogs are merging, setting the standard for online publishing.
Denton gave me some feedback from the Gizmodo editors about the iPhone:
'Two thumb typing nearly impossible'. - Ouch
Some waiting on iPhone improvements before buying | Reuters.com
Almost as many people are going gaga about Facebook these days, as the iPhone and the knee-jerk reaction seems to be to focus the discussion on the ui design, since it is so conspicuously different from Myspace.
Myspace is a 'fugly' mess, when Myspace was hip amongst the geeks, then fugly was hip. Successful things on the web, it was argued, are about customization and flexibility. The sticker-book-full-of-crap style of Myspace would do better than the stifling control enforced by some graphic design Nazi.
Facebook is different, it really is well designed, and now I'm hearing some of the same people who debated the virtues of fuglyness promote facebook.
Interestingly, not many people have picked up on the fact that Facebook is as different from what has become the web 2.0 style, as the Myspace style. Web 2.0 sites tend to use a lot of extraneous CSS and HTML to create round boxes and three dimensional shadow effects with high reflection. This style apes the third generation 'aqua' Apple OS.
Browsers inherently work with flat shaded square box model and so does Facebook. In doing so it creates a satisfyingly minimalist look, effortlessly that makes many web 2.0 sites look like they are designed by coders who are trying to hard, rather than designers.
Even if the focus of the design talk may be wrong not to differentiate Facebook with web 2.0 style rather than Myspace, I suspect the real issue is the type of design that people rarely talk about.
The Facebook difference is about software design rather than graphic (or even UI) design, and these things are very different.
And the key piece of software design that makes Facebook work, in my opinion, is its full on embrace of the blog style 'reverse chronological list'. If one were to pick one of the central design components of the web it would be this, the thing that made single person online diaries become the publishing model for global media organizations online.
Facebook takes a list of friends and creates a personal newspaper spliced together from the actions of people in your network. It goes beyond the early experiments in social networking which started with bare bones links to people, followed by blog like profiles (but for the 99.999% of people who don't really want or need a blog).
Just as blogging creates a paradigm for collecting your thoughts and pushing them out there in front of the world, Facebook creates a paradigm for collecting everyone else's thoughts and putting them in front of you. And by doing that it is very well designed in the non superficial sense.
"If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple's iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard."
This pretty much sums it up. Apples nailed the perfect form factor with the iPod (a cigarette packet rather than the disastrous Newton brick).
However, things have moved on since, in the world of smartphones and the Blackberry style keyboard beneath screen is 'good enough'.
I feel myself drooling over the iPhone but wishing it had a keyboard. And that seems worrying.
Seven reasons why stretchy web site layouts are dead (in the manner of a del.icio.us post):
1. Although designed for the increasing plethora of screen sizes, few people open their browser fullscreen on a massive display, so you don't need to design for that variety.
2. Most stretchy design templates behave in unpredictable ways for some content, making them look ugly.
3. Most stretchy designs allow for text that is unreadably long.
4. They are a way to show off technology (CSS) rather than make things ergonomic.
5. If something is right with a certain layout - stick to your convictions and make that option the default, thats what Apple do.
6. Imagine flexible layouts in famous paintings. Would Da Vinci have used fuzzy felts?
7. The Etsy guys recommend not to use them.
In 2004 I wrote: I want my iPhone
And boy did they deliver. The iPhone looks like the best Apple product yet.
Innevitably a visit to Europe always ends up in endless analysis of what better Europe vs the US. This time was partiularly strange, since much of Europe feels more futuristic that the US.
My arrival at Zurich airport epitomized this, the airport having the same atmosphere as the film Gattaca.
In the tunnels for the shuttle between terminals, pinpoint strobes light up 160 light box images of a post modern Heidi such that each frame syncs with the shuttle windows to produce an 8 second flipbook style movie.
Imagine your son waking up on Christmas (if you're into Christmas) morning and rushing to open his presents in breathless anticipation of getting a shiny new iPod, only to find out he's got a Zune, which is like coming second in chess.
You think he's being a spoilt little ungrateful brat until he (this is why it's a he) gets the shit kicked out of him at school by mocking friends chanting 'Zuny Zuny Zuny'. Yup, in the twisted 'Lord of the Flies World' of young adults, I'm sure this will actually happen. The Zune is unsafe for children, but surely that can't be Microsoft's fault?
Consider the ambiance of a cubicle divided office vs the average home. Cubicle offices, particularly in America, where deep plan spaces with no visible windows are legal, are soul crushing spaces. They destroy people's individuality in a way that Stalin never could have dreamed of, and ironically, in the service of capitalism. Fortunately, people are not naturally inclined to this because they do not decorate their homes this way.
Microsoft is a company that sells to the type of business that has cubicle offices. It has made bad design a virtue, by making it look economical. Soul crushing design is what Microsoft is about, but personal technology is changing that.
Microsoft's Zune may be the thing that makes it obvious that Microsoft has crappy products, because it is a luxury item for individuals, and individuals are more discerning than businesses when it comes to design.
This dirty little secret is what has suppressed innovation in computing. Its why people pay money for a piece of tawdry shareware like Powerpoint.
The moniker 'business', implies pro and 'personal' implies amateur, but the reality is entirely the opposite. Business software is quite often shit. Reliable shit, but shit nonetheless.
Zune manages to take the very few features of the iPod and over complicate or ruin them. For example, the navigation copies the iPod's in the way it looks, and for absolutely no reason, because the way the navigation works does not require the scroll wheel design. This tell tale sign of unergonomic design is known to product designers as a skeuomorph, it's why cheap hifi equipment has lots of flashing lights to look 'pro'.
It's best to let a better writer than myself bury the Zune, however. Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago sun-Times lets rip:
Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face."
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko :: Avoid the loony Zune
Is the iPod past it?
Apple's iPod was a form factor success - learning from the mistakes of the disastrous Newton they went for the cigarette packet standard rather than try and invent something new.
Lately, however, I've noticed that the Sidekick/PS2/Blackberry are onto something with a genuinely new form factor that will possibly blow away Apple if they stick to the iPod format.
The problem is that Apple can't stick to its own format anyway - the thumbwheel doesn't leave enough room for a large enough video screen - and if it gets replaced by on screen navigation with the device being landscape rather than portrait, it begs the question as to whether that is the same design at all.
In fact any viable full screen video iPod would be half way towards the two-thumb typing Sidekick style format that is now ubiquitous on Japanese and European phones which will hit the US in earnest in a year or so.
So for all the hoo ha about having separate music players from phones and IM, that was just because the interface on phones used to suck when they tried to cram in extra features without a sizeable screen or useable keyboard - it no longer does.
What does suck is the design - Sidekick, Blackberry, Windows driven phones with slide out keyboards - they all leverage the fact that typing with two thumbs on a small keyboard is good enough, but they are all terribly designed at the detail and features level.
Now if Apple did a Sidekick style handheld then the combination of the right style device and elegant design would be perfect - but my guess is that they are probably too complacent because of the iPod's success.
The Observer | UK News | Why the iPod is losing its cool
A list of recent web design trends that are about to jump the shark:
1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere.
2. Pastel colors.
3. Linear blends.
4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels.
5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution.
6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably.
7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to.
These things are so commonplace now that sites designed this way seem like the web design equivalent of a fashion victim. When the bubble bursts there will be big pastel shade mess.
Its fairly odd that a design tweak like the New York Times' website overhaul should be news, particularly since CNN did pretty much the same thing with less fuss a couple of weeks ago. And it took the times nearly a year!
Nerertheless, something interesting is at work - first, sites are now ignoring smaller screens for the first time in years - 1024 pixels wide is becoming the standard. More importantly, by ignoring the low end they can also ignore large screens in a way that 800 pixel wide designs didn't really cut it. They are bypassing the ridiculous 'holy grail' three column CSS layout that geeks with no graphic design sense use in favor of fixed column, paper-like designs used by web designers.
Lastly, with RSS and Ajax, the notion of a page impression is gone - and yet that, rather than just impressions is what is often measured for advertising.
I wonder how long the page impression metric will last?
The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
The Apple Newton showed that form factor is everything. The Newton was pretty cool and ahead of its time - the first PDA. But it was the wrong size.
The Palm Pilot did less (it didn't even try to do full handwriting recognition), but it was the right size. The same form factor as Walkmans and cigarette packets and wallets and iPods, it slipped into existing shirt and jacket pockets, to be carried everywhere.
Good design is about the right choices not technical wizardry. The Segway looked like magic - a two wheeled stable vehicle. But it needed gyros and computing power because its two wheels were next to each other. If its wheels were inline then it would have been a bicycle and the conservation of angular momentum alone would have kept it aloft. The bicycle is a better design for a two wheeled vehicle than a Segway.
The Origami is remarkably similar in size to the Newton - and therefore, even if it packs as much technical innovation as the Segway, unless people start wearing sporrans, the world over, it will die.
Intel shows Origami-like device | CNET News.com
Windows Live Local - Virtual Earth Technology Preview
In 1994 lot of people thought VRML was cool, but it wasn't cool compared to offline video games and it wasn't useful compared to regular web-page search and browse.
This mockup of Microsoft's Local Live' reminds me of VRML. As a video game, it's crude by the standards of 1994 and as a web app it has none of the design sensibility of Google Maps.
The mockup is from a multi billion dollar company whose most obvious online avenue of attack against Google is local advertising - and the end result is a maps application that allows you to choose a view that superimposes crappy vignettes of the interior of a 'race car' or 'sports car', as you 'drive' around maps. The product substitutes kitsch and gimmickery for ergonomics and usefulness.
I love San Francisco, but when you realize that the Castro Safeway and the Sony Metreon are landmarks, you realize that its a small city. It is the worlds best sleepy seaside town.
One of the two landmarks has some architectural merit, the other is the Metreon, a failed attempt at a French style Mediatek - a multimedia library/art complex.
In the end the Metreon, complete is a shopping mall, and now its being sold to a mall developer.
Metreon's shattered dreams via kottke
Jakob Nielsen says that the new UI paradigm to replace Apple's will come from Microsoft:
"Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future...The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named "Office 12") will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface"
Results-oriented UI turns out to be templates. Because there are too many options in MS Office to have individual commands the idea is that the results of groups of them are displayed.
It is, perhaps, a bit rich for anyone to champion Microsoft over Apple in terms of design at the moment, but design is subjective, I guess. Where Nielsen is provably wrong, however, is where he confuses User Interface with User Interaction (isn't he supposed to be an expert in Interaction?):
"rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen's visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get."
No. WYSIWYG refers to the fact that what you see on the screen is what it looks like when printed or nowadays, printed on the web. It has nothing to do with dropdown menus rather than typing commands, it is just that command line interaction sits in a UI that is not WYSIWG. This is just a confused metaphor.
I used to work with a CAD system that had several thousand menu items because templates don't tend to work for professional software. Templates are often the 'hide the crap under the carpet' approach of UI design avoiding stripping out superfluous features for true design elegance and providing the worst UI experience of all when templates can't be adapted intuitively
This would be OK, but for the fact that from 'clippy' to the automatic insertion of things like bullet points in Word, Microsoft has a terrible record at UI which is results oriented, i.e. tries to guess what results you want and groups commands together.
What's currently badly designed about Office is not the details or the bloat, but the premise. Yes, the WYSIWYG UI is dead, but only in the sense that it refers to printing a document from what you see on screen.
Paper documents, ledgers, and overhead projector slides were the metaphors that, Word, Excel and Powerpoint were based on. But we live in a realm of email and weblogs, websites, shared web updatable financial data and multimedia mashups. Office is not designed to deal with these types of documents. What is wrong with Office is Word, Excel and Powerpoint not the principal of menus.
R.I.P. WYSIWYG - Results-Oriented UI Coming (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Marc Canter had it absolutely right when he cautioned about the fuss over Ajax.
Perhaps Ajax is a meme more than a 'thing', and like all good meme's something that is spreading because the environment is ready for it.
When I first used Gopher or WAIS and then downloaded Mosaic I was impressed by the architectural simplicity of Internet applications, so much so that I stopped being an architect and started working on web stuff.
Here was something in computing that was seemingly a retrograde step - one window instead of many. I spent most of my day at the time in front of a twin screen CAD application that had several hundred palettes. But because that one window opened onto a world of other computers, like a unix terminal, it was so much more elegant. (My favorite new experience with UI has been finally using VI, a text editor with Zen-like elegance that has evolved over 30 years while maintaining simplicity).
In fact the one window paradigm has persisted in an almost inevitable way, as the parasites of the web have driven people to use pop-up blockers, thus keeping it from becoming more like windowS, plural, apps.
The chunkiness of the web continued when forms were introduced, and people started to create applications, but with the new restrictions of statelessness and non event-driven UI.
Restrictions are sometimes held up as the mother of elegance and the web had all of them: bandwidth restrictions, browser compatibility restrictions, restrictions maintaining state, procedural user interface restrictions and the one window paradigm.
From this, the web has, in my opinion, improved the quality of software design.
But the web now exists in an environment where some of those restrictions are easing and perhaps the time is right for event driven UI (which as Marc pointed out, has been available for years with Flash, but just within the wrong community) so perhaps Ajax is, like better bandwidth, a natural evolution.
And, unlike the poorly thought out attempts at useability standardization, Ajax is an elegant way to lay down some specifics for richer web apps - even if there is absolutely nothing really new in it.
Continuing on my anti-CSS rant - 3 columns, with fixed-width left and right and a fluid center column, are ofter referred to as the 'holy grail'.
The problem is that this is an obsolete solution, when people increasingly have massive screens where any fluidity breaks the design if people auto-expand windows - which they do.
Mike Golding breaks the mold and argues the case very well for fixed width CSS layout: notestips.com :: The benefits of a fixed width design
Tables may suck, but CSS is no improvement. Yet web designers who have never used page layout tools for offline printing, or object based CAD software are still brainwashed by it.
I just came accross this classic: BlueRobot "Many a talented web designer has struggled with CSS-based centering. Though CSS vertical centering eludes us, two techniques for horizontal centering are BlueRobot approved. Take your pick"
First one: "Unfortunately, IE5/Win does not respond to this method - a shortcoming of that browser, not the technique" Fair enough, but then why recommend it (This is still one of the largest browser versions in use).
Second one:
#Content {
position:absolute;
left:50%;
width:500px;
margin-top:50px;
margin-left:-266px;
padding:15px;
border:1px dashed #333;
background-color:#eee;
}
All this to avoid 'align=center'.
When I arrived in the US from bad teeth land one of the first things I asked my dentist for was a set of American teeth.
Unfortunately I was told there was nothing that could be done. However at dinner with friends last night I was introduced to 'Rota Points', the best toothpick in the world.
The bits in between my teeth are gone now, even if I'm still on page 27 of the Great Book of British Smiles.
Color scheme shows a base color with alternate color schemes based upon base, complement, split complement and neighbors.
Richard Dawkins is surely one of the world's foremost authorities on how the spread of information and ideas may have more than mere similarities with the evolution of viruses, having, amongst other things, coined the term meme in passing.
Guardian Unlimited, Richard Dawkins: Apple of my eye:
"Nothing in my 20 years' intensive experience of programming and using computers had prepared me for the Mac. It wasn't an evolutionary advance on its predecessors; it was a macromutational leap into the future. It is that future we are now living in, whether we use a Mac or a virus-compatible PC."
Dawkins once dismissed the world's fastest growing virus of the mind, Catholicism, as being based on the mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young girl as 'virgin'. He has a wonderful knack for stating things that are controversial but provably true as a given - 'a virus compatible PC' - no discussion, no timid assertions because billions of dollars of market share are at risk.
A couple of months ago, the New York Times was working on a piece on the idea doing the blog rounds that the Windows software monoculture is more dangerous when computers are networked together. The piece never ran, because it wasn't authorative rather than any lack of temerity by the Times with respect to Microsoft. But then a major report suggested the same, and the author of the report had to resign over the assertion.
Dawkin's has mentioned it as a given - that Windows is virus 'compatible' - he should elaborate.
Duralex glasses are a design classic.
I like drinking wine, but even in San Francisco, friends sneer at me, if I don't order a man's drink. I think the real problem isn't the drink, it's the glass. I hate wine glasses.
The solution would be if wine in bars were served in sturdy Duralex tumblers.
Bormioli Rocco - Products - Duralex
Speaking of AOL, I'm always amazed at how large companies don't really have to react that fast to threats from better technologies, products or services. In fact in some cases the worst technology actually wins. Email me if you have any suggestions of examples of 'non-design classics' that are still around.
Here's a start:
1. PC Laptops - is it my imagination or, other than Apple, is laptop design actually going backwards?
2. Windows - the original Apple Os was more elegant. We are stuck with impossible uninstalls and no full-text search.
3. Office - I have to fork out $200 just so that I can add comments to other people's Word files -and Powerpoint - aaargh - the greatest crime in design history, a substandard piece of shareware that pollutes the world with blue blends and horrible fonts.
4. AOL - how did a nasty dial-up service to a walled garden network with 'get rich quick' style branding manage not only to survive the Web but acquire a decent media conglomerate?
5. Cadillac - every Cadillac since 1970 looks like a refridgerator on wheels, with a similarly plastic interior and an engine with no engineering finess.
6. VHS - OK DVD's are finally getting rid of this monster that killed Betamax for the consumer market.
7. Cell phone interfaces. OK, you can get a tricked out Java cellphone with a million added widgets, particulalry if you live in Europe or the Far East, but why can't you do simple things like store your address book at the provider end - so that you can move to a new phone (on the same network).
8. Stamps - why don't some mail boxes have franking machines (this personal annoyance is somewhat overcome in the US where you can actually get stamps out of an ATM).
9. Checks - they shouldn't exist unless the bank personally transcribes all the details into account statements so you can see what the hell has been going on with your money.
10. Retail banks - In a parallel universe, I wish that Paypal had brought them all to their knees.
Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google's HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity - bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway.
Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups - it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling - each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the 'tech box' which had drawers marked 'cool mechanisms' and 'amazing materials' full of - well what they said. All the items within were catalogued and could be looked up in a database via the intranet.
The highlight, however, was a demo of a thing called a Sound Spotlight - an invention that Ideo have been given the task to productize. A foot square rectangular box, rather like a speaker, is attached to a CD player - in this case playing bird noises. Point the box at any surface and the sound appears to emanate from the surface rather than the box. By moving the box in our hands we had a flock of birds appearing to be nesting in the rafters 50 feet away and then in the palm of my hand a second later.
After a three year hiatus I bought a Mac - largely because design of PC laptops has seemingly regressed to the days before the Sony Vaio 505.
When I last had a Mac, both the hardware and the software were better designed than a Windows based PC. On an Apple you didn't have DLL's that made it impossible to manage software installations and you could link several computers together without having to hire a full-time network administrator. Microsoft software was a pile of junk compared to Apple's until very recently.
These days, however, Apple seem to be able to produce excellent hardware design, but their software has deteriorated. Take, for example, the 'aqua' interface in OSX - yes there are animated events just like on an SGI (and where are they now?), but the principal interface issue, text rendering, is a joke on OSX. The latest version of the Apple OS anti-aliases text, period - you can adjust the threshold above which text is smoothed but you can't switch it off. Even if you were to be able to switch off the text smoothing, which effectively reduces the screen resolution by a factor of 2, you would then encounter the fact that you can't change the default OS font and the default is not designed to be 'unsmoothed' text, kerning letters so that they merge together or are unreadable. Back in the days of System 7, Apple had already solved this, while Microsoft were still to develop screen ready fonts such as Verdana.
Now all this may seem anally retentive, but reading text on screen is a fundamental issue and one which Apple used to be a leader in. Anyone following the evolution of UI design would notice that easily readable non-aliased fonts such as Jason Kottke's Silkscreen are important on the web, but Apple have ignored unaliased fonts altogether.
Apple should stick to hardware and media software applications, their OS no longer competes with Microsoft's on the desktop and ironically, letting it disappear may increase the chance of a challenge to Microsoft's monopoly, the Apple OS is kept alive only to serve the purpose of deflecting anti-trust allegations away from Microsoft.
It seems that Rube Goldberg is the American Heath Robinson, or is Heath Robinson the British Rube Goldberg? Either way, great commercial, shame about the car.
Honda's New Accord via Azeem Azhar
From the country that brought you the three armed sweater, the transparent skirt.
In actual fact these skirts are not transparent but have an image printed on them to appear so.
Does your bum look big in this?
More on the way to a PacketPC, John Robb would like this wireless enabled hard drive from Toshiba.
Geek.com Geek News - Toshiba's new HOPBIT wireless personal server
"Apple has to come up with something, a product, an app, a gadget of some kind, that will put a crippling hurt on another established technology or company."
Why don't Apple compete with the consumer electronics market and come up with the definitive media PC?
Applelinks: Latest Warp Core Praised
Jon Robb considers wifi enabled hardrives:
"1. Digital still cameras.
2. Digital video cameras.
3. Portable radios.
4. Portable CD players.
5. TiVo (if shipped in combo with a base station that contains a hard drive).
6. Digital audio recorders.
7. Car DVD and tape players (with FM transmission add-ons for the Archos or iPod).
In all of those cases, the core element is the portable hard drive. The recording and/or playback feature functionality is merely a dumb peripheral (directly connected or connected via wireless). Add wireless and server capabilities and it can power your PC, your TV, and your stereo. "
Sony are about to release the gadget I have been dreaming of.
The size of an iPod (that great form factor that fits in your pocket), the 'PacketPC is basically a WiFi enabled portable bootable drive. Plug this into any computer and use it as if it were your own.
With 60GB internal storage this can hold most of your applications and important data. Lets face it, although many people use more disk space, the critical stuff like email and applications account for far less space than replaceable items such as MP3's.
The PacketPC has a screen and Palm Pilot style text entry capability, but is primarily designed for read only (I always used to update my palm from scraps of paper when I had it connected to my PC anyway). The built in GPS chip will make use of location aware mapping services and entertainment/travel guides. Without hooking up to a PC the PacketPC is not designed to run much other than a web browser and contacts manager, but to be honest that's all I would use on the move. It has an MP3 player and headphone jack etc.
The best thing about the PacketPC and the reason why it has pre orders of 150,000 units from Fortune 500 companies, is its simple approach to backup. Sony's enterprise backup service (a consumer service will be available later this year) means that the PacketPC will remotely sync via WiFi or Ethernet with an identical machine in a datastore. Lose your packet PC and clone replacement will be delivered by Fedex with 48 hours. The backup seems to be a simple disk image so there are no settings to really worry about, the offsite model is an exact clone of whatever is on your machine, and data is transferred in encrypted chunks for the enterprise service.
Jeez I sooo want this, if only for the backup.
Macromedia care about software design, and there are not many companies that do.
The software industry is maturing and customers are beginning to care about well designed products. A few months ago, Macromedia looked like an acquisition target for Adobe, perhaps today's 20% surge in value will help propel them out of Adobe's reach.
Forbes.com: Macromedia shares up 20 pct on analyst upgrade
BusinessWeek runs a piece about the Segway's lack of marketplace segue.
The Segway is an example of bad design. By that I don't mean that it isn't a seductive and innovative object, but it is an example of innovative engineering rather than design. Design includes how something fits into context i.e. society and the Segway is a Cuckoo.
Like Kamen, Clive Sinclair is an impressive innovator, after a string of successes he launched an electric vehicle the C5, which was intended " to herald a new era of ecological personal transport".
"The Sinclair C5 was a commercial disaster. The Press hounded it as a dangerous joke. Only around 12,000 C5's were ever produced, many sold off abroad after the project folded. "
The Segway is the new C5.
BW Online | January 16, 2003 | Is Segway Going Anywhere?
Workers at businesses and municipalities that have tested the transporters aren't exactly sending in rave reviews, either. "You can't keep warm if you're not walking," says a postal worker in Concord, N.H. "You end up like a frozen popsicle on a stick."
Two all beef patties, lettuce, 1GHz PowerPC G4, 1MB L3 cache, 512MB DDR333 SDRAM, 60GB Ultra ATA/100 SuperDrive, pickles and onions all in a lightweight and durable aluminum alloy enclosure.
I want a media PC - and by that I mean a PC that controls all the media I watch/listen to/photograph etc. I don't want a separate Tivo, DVD player, MP3 player, digital photo archive - I want one machine to handle all of this.
Apple are heading in this direction, both in terms of hardware and software - and who better than Apple to provide this most luxurious of items.
The problem is that every attempt at a media PC that I have seen makes an annoying amount of noise - meaning that it gets switched off at 'bed-time', and then takes an interminable time to boot, ruining somewhat the spontaneity of waking up to the sound of music.
Please Apple, given that reliable sleep mode never works and instant boot never will, design me a silent machine that I can leave on all the time.
"Because clean dishes remain in the washer, the table becomes an ersatz cupboard between meals." The new York Times lists the 'self cleaning dinner table' as one of the ideas of the year. - What year would that be, 1958?
I have a big problem with dish washers - I hate unloading them - it seems pointless to move dishes from what is essentially one storage place to the next. The solution for slackers like me is to have two small dishwashers - pull clean dishes out of one and put dirty ones into the other. No unnecessary unloading exercise for me.
Ho hum, now I guess I'll drive three miles to the gym and walk for half an hour on the treadmill.
NYT: Self-Cleaning Dinner Table - login required
The iPod is a work of art and it brings back the utility of the original walkman, without the hiss. The promotional material for the Walkman 2 showed it hidden behind a compact cassette box. The iPod does the same thing - but contains 400 cassettes.
Cassette tape Walkmans have always been more ergonomic than CD Walkmans, which can't fit the into most pockets. In fact, clothing dictates one of the most successful form factors: 'pocket size'. Regardless of any other issues, MP3 players don't have the problem that CD players have, and the iPod is almost exactly the same size at that other design classic Sony's 1983 WM-20, cassette tape sized Walkman. The CD was never a successful portable form factor.
Ikea, who are usually known for bringing modernism to the masses are threatening to demolish a building by Marcel Breuer, best know for his classic modernist furniture.
ArchitectureWeek - News - IKEA Threatens Breuer Icon - 2002.1204
Creative projects that people take on after the dot com crash - photographs of the entire California coastline:
California Coastal Records Project -- Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline
Lets face it - most software and computer hardware is crap. In most tech. organizations, design doesn't exist or is part of marketing or engineering, something that would have managers from other product-based industries slapping their thighs and crying with laughter.
In "the ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects", Scott Berkun outlines some reasons why the most basic of design requirements, 'ease of use', is willfully ignored in software development.
Over the next month or so, in an attempt to justify my ranting, I'll elaborate on the future of design in the Computer Industry.
The ten reasons why ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects - UIWEB.COM
Armed with a digital camera and inkjet printer, San Francisco artist Michael Koller is in the process of producing a unique photographic study.
He has taken thousands of sequential photographs of building elevantions along a 30 mile continuous route through San Francisco.
By editing these images to join up seamlessly he is producing one single continuous image.
Like many innovative art projects, this takes advantage of techniques that were previously unavailable. This is a project that would be almost impossible without digital cameras and imaging software.
seamless city - San Francisco - m.koller
"The day before the first bombing run on Bhagdad during the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi TV showed a mass of Iraqi soldiers marching beneath the huge crossed swords of the Victory Arch, to the theme music from 'Star Wars'.""
Samir Al-Khalil's book, The Monument, deals with the subject of monuments built by Saddam in modern day Baghdad.
Some of the details of these monuments are a perfect study in monstrosity. Take, for example, the above mentioned celebratory arch constructed in honour of the victory in the war with Iran.
"The triumphal arch is shaped as two pairs of crossed swords, made from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers that were melted and recast as the 24-ton blades of the swords. Captured Iranian helmets are in a net held between the swords. And surrounding the base of the arms are another 5,000 Iranian helmets taken from the battle field. The fists that hold the swords aloft are replicas of Saddam Hussein’s own hands. The German company that built the monument, H+H Metalform, said it was given a photograph of Saddam's own forearms to use as a model. "
The massive castings of Saddam's hands were manufactured in Basingstoke 40 miles from London in rural Hampshire.
The new Hummer is an object that personifies the skeuomorph - something which appears to be functional but is in fact decorative. The underlying decorative nature is what in fact makes the Hummer the ultimate example of the SUV as pure kitsch.
The original Hummer was designed to traverse mud fields, ford rapids and scale mountainous terrain and as such was perhaps overkill for doing groceries in suburbia. It looked rugged and cool and in fact was very rugged, too rugged - i.e. bloody uncomfortable. The new Hummer sought to correct that - to create the oxymoron of comfortable and utilitarian, military chic for comfortable civilians, something as obviously stupid as the civilian comfort, white leather interior 4 wheel drive Lamborghini’s that the Saudi army ordered for its pampered troops.
Can you imagine driving the kids to school in a luxury tank? - er yes, that would be the Hummer 2.
So it is with all SUVs - they are ultimately poorly designed, in the best cases they are off road vehicles that never drive off road, in the worst cases they are pretend off road vehicles that never drive off road and would rattle to bits if the owner was ever inclined to try.
The aesthetics of SUVs may offend, but there are some far more serious issues that they present as Keith Bradsher, the former Detroit Bureau chief for the New York Times points out in his new book 'High and Mighty'. What promises to be the 'Unsafe at Any Speed' of the current generation provides insight into the environmental and safety issues of SUVs, which have been the savior of the US car industry in terms of profits.
Amongst other things, the book outlines how by being classed as 'non-passenger vehicles' (light trucks), cheap bodywork over chassis rather than the monocoque (shell) structure creates a vehicle which is dangerous for both its own drivers and others on the road. - And this does not even touch on the environmental issues.
Scion is Toyota's new brand aimed at generation Y - you know - the ones who laugh at you 'cos the crotch of your pants isn't six inches from the floor. Well apparently these guys now have buying power and a whole boat load of lurid tricked out gear that would make Vin Diesel whimper is about to hit the consumer market.