February 2011
1 post
Eviller and eviller
A few paragraphs from Bob Bowdon on Huffington Post: “Why Has Google Been Collecting Kids’ Social Security Numbers Under the Guise of an Art Contest?”
It turns out that the company sporting the motto “don’t be evil” has been asking parents nationwide to disclose their children’s personal information, including Social Security Numbers, and recruiting...
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
BlackBerry PlayBook: The big sibling (as opposed...
So the BlackBerry tablet device — the PlayBook — bas been announced, here:
RIM introduces PlayBook — the BlackBerry tablet
(Engadget)
and rebutted here:
The BlackBerry PlayBook Doesn’t Exist
(Justice Gödel Condor)
And perhaps the second most interesting thing about the announcement is the music playing behind the ad:
Cut Copy — “Where I’m Going”
To me,...
August 2010
1 post
The Googizon tablet?
So I went on vacation for a few weeks, and some of the most interesting stuff to hit our industry happened while I was away. Wow.
Skipping the somewhat-unsurprising news that Google has merged with Verizon and will eat our children (I may be paraphrasing just a bit), here’s the latest thing that strikes me as funny:
Google launching a Chrome OS tablet on Verizon, goes on sale November 26...
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Google can [and will] remove Android apps from...
Check this out, from “Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature” on android-developers.blogspot.com:
Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and...
1 tag
On mass manufacturing and what it means to...
Previous post pointed to this installment of The Genius of Design:
The Genius of Design, episode 1: http://vimeo.com/12112900
The second episode can be found here:
The Genius of Design, episode 2: http://vimeo.com/12490724
Some great quotes and perspective from episode 1 follow.
The division of labor and the Designer
Toward the middle of the video, they venture into the creation of the...
WatchGreat point made in the video: around the time of the industrial revolution, The Design of Things became a separate concept, distinct from The Making of Things. Thus, today, the design of things is as important as was the making of things 200 years ago. Looks like it is a series—way cool.
May 2010
3 posts
WIRED for iPad ... I won't be buying issue #2
Okay, so I bought the WIRED edition for iPad, because it just looked too cool, and the page navigation seemed much more intuitive than that of Popular Science (which I still can’t figure out). I loved it for the first hour or so. Now I’m over it … this clearly is not the future of digital magazines. Here’s just one little aspect of what’s wrong:
Is This Really The...
1 tag
More reasons to love Flash
Tputh.com pointed to the following site, which is now down:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack
You, can, of course, get Google’s cached version here:
...
Screw the majority
Walt Disney:
When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, ‘But why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty.’ I told her that was just the point; mine wouldn’t be.
I love that quote; it shows such depth of personality and drive. I think the attitude really exemplifies the American spirit — e.g., “screw everything, I’m going to do it RIGHT.” It is pretty...
April 2010
6 posts
1 tag
Jobs, homework, and shadow-boxing
The other day I ranted about today’s kids and their attitude toward employment.
:)
A number of students have stopped me in the hall asking for explanations, clarifications, mostly centering on what prompted the rant. I think I have a good answer, finally. Well … at least a better one than I’ve been giving over the past few days.
Ever I started doing the “start-up...
1 tag
Otherwise, find a Steve Jobs and become his loyal...
Just read a great opinion piece by Stanislav on Apple, creativity, and Jobs’ monopolies [on taste and usability]. The bulk of the article is about how Apple competitors have squandered opportunities to do good work, but I think a central message is about how great design comes about (e.g., not by committees, which is common practice in nearly all non-Apple companies):
Non-Apple’s Mistake
If...
It's called "service discovery" (ca. 1996)
Kills me when I see stuff like this.
Google Cloud Print Reveals the Future of Printing
To print out a document, you rely on your local operating system, which must have a driver installed for the printer you intend to use. Most of the time, it’s not an issue; at home, you probably have one printer and all of your PCs have the required drivers.
Things get a bit more complicated when you want...
1 tag
Chickfight!
I just read some really awesome perspective on the tiff between Apple and Adobe. To begin, lest we forget that the iPhone was the first platform to truly open the world of mobile-app development, Kontra reminds us of whence we came:
Many of the App Store developers got into creating products for mobile devices precisely because for the very first time in history the iPhone allowed them to bypass...
1 tag
Apple's "pro" apps : iLife suite :: MacBook Pro :...
A lot of people are asking me what I think of the walled garden approach and whether I think Apple is evil and/or planning to put the iPhone OS on their laptops any time soon, or forcing all OSX apps to go through the App Store. For instance, I loved the BSD-based Pre, and I am a huge fan of open platforms and being able to tinker. This seems at odds with Apple’s latest series of moves...
1 tag
On employment [and selfishness]
I meet a lot of young kids in my job, so I see this a lot; it is the same attitude that I had years ago. People think of a job as a reward you get for being smart or doing well in school or acing the interview.
No: a job is not that.
A job is an opportunity, extended to you by someone, to help that someone make money.
That’s it. Someone out there is in the business of making money, and by...
March 2010
7 posts
iPad interface design
Really awesome volley from brilliant writers on iPad UI conventions (focusing on realism/eye-candy).
Jon Bell: “Page Flips Are Better Than Infinite Scroll”
“Forcing a user to drag a finger to initiate a flip every time is unacceptable. I experienced this with early versions of the Kindle iPhone app and it was maddening. “
Marco Arment: “Overdoing the interface...
1 tag
On walled gardens and information appliances
An old friend of mine sent me a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “All your apps are belong to Apple” writeup that recently surfaced, and he asked what I thought. In the article they list a number of “troubling” (EFF’s term) points found in the iPhone developer license, among them:
A ban on public statements about the license
Apps can only be sold...
2 tags
Let's go beyond Print++
I just read “Books in the age of the iPad” by Craig Mod. It is a brief manifesto on how to think about targeting print as a medium as everything goes digital. I was struck by the following really provocative quote:
In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not.
Brilliant writing, love the punch. Anyway,...
1 tag
Apple vs. Goog\b\b\b\b HTC
Earlier today I read the Engadget article on Apple suing HTC, the handset manufacturer making Google’s Nexus One. I had no idea what an enormous crapstorm this thing would open up. Here’s just one place well worth checking out: a student at Maryland pointed me to a really well thought-out, intelligent discussion going on at Hacker News.
My thoughts …
Swiping to unlock and other...
Wanted: iPad developers
This is for all the students I know at the University of Maryland. One of the smartest guys on the planet, Paul Graham (yes, the one whose book I make you all read) heads up a VC firm called Y Combinator. It has been ranked very highly recently, meaning that they know what they’re doing. But you’ve already read Hackers & Painters, haven’t you, so you already know that.
...
The accuracy of climate modeling
I had a conversation on the university’s shuttle bus about a year ago with one of the climatologists here at Maryland. He’s one of the modeling guys; he develops models such as those used to make policy decisions about climate change and global warming.
The interesting thing is that he readily admitted that the models that the community uses are not particularly accurate — for...
1 tag
Dude, just pay for it already
I just read a post called “Twitter timelines stopped updating hours ago. Why no word from the mothership?” by Martin Bryant at theNextWeb.com … here’s the meat of it:
This is a familiar problem – Twitter has these glitches from time-to-time – but after six hours you’d have thought Twitter might have noticed and updated their Status Blog with a reassuring update that they...
February 2010
34 posts
1 tag
The iPad and its appeal to humanity
The other day I pointed to this video as describing the computer literacy of the vast majority of potential consumers out there. It’s a Google employee asking random people on the street in Times Square “what’s a browser?” Result: fewer than 1 in 12 people understand the technology they use.
My point: they don’t have to. They shouldn’t have to.
I just read...
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and...”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry [opening quote of A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart]
1 tag
What the Pre got right (#iPhone)
I just read a comparison of the Nexus One versus the iPhone — “Nexus One from an iPhone Developer’s Perspective” by Jeff LaMarche. In it he takes the final parting shot:
But, if the iPhone is not an option for one reason or another, the Nexus One is definitely a most adequate phone. I’d gladly recommend it over any currently available Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Palm...
Googlevil and books
How authors are responding to the Google book thing:
Thousands of authors opt out of Google book settlement (Guardian UK)
Seems they are not thrilled with Google’s fine print. I dare say I don’t blame them. Here’s a quote from author Gwyneth Jones:
I decided to opt out of the Google book settlement on the advice of my agency, David Higham Associates, and on the advice of Gill...
More on GooglEvil from Fake Steve
Awesome rant from Fake Steve comparing Google and Apple. The money quote:
We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal...
1 tag
Innovation and why Apple is tight-lipped
Really funny how the press makes such a huge deal out of Apple’s secrecy around their product announcements, calling it “paranoid” and so forth.
Actually, it is extremely prudent practice.
Innovation is hard primarily because it is extremely difficult to ask the right questions. Bear with me on this. This is something that I preach to all the incoming grad students [people are...
1 tag
Pursuing innovation and motivating engineers
A few years ago, I was asked to review a chapter for an upcoming business textbook on innovation management. I thought it odd that, in general, we don’t know much about innovation (where does it come from? how to do it well? how to do it regularly?), and yet here we are writing books on how to manage it. So in a fit of hubris I replied that I would rather write a chapter than review a...
1 tag
On greed and the future of publishing
Here’s a great bit of insight from the minds of publishing giants. Taken from “New Yorker Editor David Remnick Thinks You Should Pay More Than $1 For His Magazine”
“There’s no doubt to me that the business of practically giving away the magazine to jack up circulation has no future,” David Remnick, editor in chief of Condé Nast’s NewYorker magazine said during...
1 tag
On business education and apprenticeship
America went into economic decline starting in the 1970s. Figuring out why may lead to a solution (one can hope …), so I sort of obsess over it.
I have suggested that a rising education level in the country likely led to a decline in the choice of manufacturing-based jobs, thus contributing to a decline in innovation (it is hard to innovate when you are not building anything, since the act of...
1 tag
Outsourcing: effect or cause?
Two people questioned me on something I said the other day about outsourcing … “cost-cutting is a last resort” … one asking for a clarification, the other a justification. Both were getting at the same issue: the fact that the chicken-and-egg problem does not have a self-evident answer.
To recap: I claimed outsourcing is an effect, not a cause … that it happens when...
1 tag
Google to become an ISP? Beware →
Google’s latest announcement:
We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least...
1 tag
Google Buzz re-invents Gmail →
Tim O’Reilly on Google Buzz:
In some ways, Gmail Buzz brings many of the benefits of Google Wave to Gmail. Every Buzz item can be turned into a conversation (much as in Wave or Friendfeed.) People can comment on your Buzz, comment on your comments, or @ reply you. Sure, it lacks the hyper-cool wiki-style shared editing features (though those perhaps could be added in a future release), but...
1 tag
We need a web-based FrameMaker
There is a small but faithful group of FrameMaker users who are more than a little ticked off that Adobe purchased FrameMaker from Frame Technology only to kill it. The Mac version of the software is no longer available. Still runs on Windows, but the software’s feature set is almost identical to what it was in 1995, when I first started using it.
Why FrameMaker is interesting … first...
Adobe: Flash.app as an HTML5 IDE
Okay, either I’m completely missing something, or there is a huge void waiting to be filled by some intrepid team of coders.
I did a bit of Flash development for the Coil Guitars website (I did the page content, e.g. the in-page animations of the electronics, etc. … Aditya did the site’s structure, meaning the lion’s share of the work). Flash is a powerful tool for doing...
1 tag
Academia and the decline of wealth in America
For those of you under about 40 years of age, it wasn’t always like this.
In the US, it used to be that every year you could expect to be wealthier. Your purchasing power grew over time: you could afford things you couldn’t the year before. Your salary increase every year outpaced inflation. If there was something you wanted and couldn’t afford, all you had to do was wait. Give...
2 tags
The thickness of napkins →
Brilliantly done brief about quality of design, linking hardware, software, restaurant management, and, I would add, life in general:
[Q]uality offerings display self similarity. Any small part of it, is indicative of its whole. This lets you make a good judgement about an entire product by looking at a very small portion of it. This is as true in software as it is in restaurants.
If you ever...
How to compete with iPad →
Matt Gemmell on the new class of consumer device the iPad represents (i.e., think Jef Raskin’s information appliance), speaking directly to tablet manufacturers:
When competing with iPad, you have to realise that, to your new core market, tablets are not computers. There’s no such thing (to your customer) as a “tablet computer”; the very name reduces the likelihood they’ll buy it. The...
1 tag
Sun also gets it
Just got back from a meeting with Sunacle [slides of my presentation as well as an abbreviated write-up of the talk can be found here], and I have to say, I couldn’t be happier. The near-term future is going to rock.
A bit of history: in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Sun had system performance that was very impressive, despite having microprocessor performance that lagged behind...
Jonathan Schwartz's resignation letter/haiku →
Okay, this is evidently for real. I heard about it right after it happened, but I just thought it was a joke. Well, either it is for real or lots of people are in on the joke.
The guy who single-handedly drove Sun [almost] into the ground just resigned … on Twitter … with a haiku.
My god, talk about adding insult to injury.
Best response yet, IMO:
Wow. Just … wow.
Well, if...
The Failure of Empathy →
Mike Monteiro puts the case for the iPad very succinctly.
I was surprised by the reaction the iPad got the day it launched. Following along on Twitter I was seeing things like ‘underwhelming’, ‘meh’ , ’it’s not open’, ‘it’s just a big iPhone’, etc. And most of this stuff was coming from people who design and build interactive experiences. As designers, and technologists we’re very much aware that...
“Money is like love: if you’re always giving it away, you’ll always...”
– Overheard on plane
1 tag
“All future interesting problems will be throughput problems. GPUs will evolve to...”
– nVIDIA presentation - okay I paraphrased the last sentence because I didn’t have time to get it down verbatim but it certainly captures the spirit … nVIDIA has thrown down the gauntlet and sees themselves the heir apparent to the central processing throne. Computing should get even more interesting...
1 tag
Trends in Memory Systems →
Here’s a talk I just gave today to people from Sun, DARPA, Oracle, nVIDIA, and academia. Since the slides are mostly illustration and not necessarily self-explanatory, here’s a shortened version of the narrative [one paragraph per slide].
Hey there — I was invited to talk to you guys today about memory systems in general, and since it is a diverse group [spanned everything from...
