Month / April 2011

by Alex

Manifesto tab sweep

I’ve had a few manifestos open in tabs for a while now. There’s some good stuff in these, and I keep meaning to find a home for them…

Right Brain Terrain‘s manifesto, written in the pages of a Moleskine notebook. I think I like their logo most of all, though much of their work is also pretty great.

The Holstee manifesto. “If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. … Stop over analyzing, life is simple.”

The Workisnotajob manifesto. Lovely prints, too, though shipping to the US is pretty spendy.

(Someday, my own manifesto might find its way here. I’ll have to write it first, though.)

by Alex

Bruce Mau Design: 3 Conditions That Set The Stage For Blinding Insight

From Fast Company’s design outpost: Paddy Harrington, of Bruce Mau Design, talks about 3 Conditions That Set The Stage For Blinding Insight. A bit over-the-top title-wise, but the project (a new website for Studio Gang architects) is interesting, as are the conditions.

Here’s the short version, lifted from the middle of the article:

1. Immersion
Surround yourself with both the problem and with inspiration. That means drawing on the field of study itself, and gathering all the information that you can. It also means drawing on inspiring, but unrelated fields. Insight can come from anywhere.

2. Friction
The differences between things are one of the surest ways to find insight. Just as biodiversity is a hallmark of a healthy ecosystem, cogni-diversity (let’s call it that) is the sign of a healthy creative environment. That can come from a diverse set of collaborators, or simply leaving your office and talking to different people at the supermarket in your neighborhood. Seek difference because insight lies in the space between.

3. Delirium
As Einstein says, we’re slaves to our pre-frontal cortex. The rational centre of our brain controls the vast majority of our conscious thought process. Designers have always known that you have to stay up really late sometimes to find insight. You have to distance yourself somehow from the world. These techniques are simply ways to escape the tendency towards purely rational thought. The trick is to get to a short hand. If you can calm your thought, the chances are much better that that moment of insight will simply emerge from the deeper recesses of your mind.

by Alex

Inside Apple’s Q2 Numbers

Jean-Louis Gassée takes a look at Apple’s Q2 numbers in his latest Monday Note column. His columns are almost always interesting and insightful; this one’s no exception.

To me, one of the most interesting numbers is the Asia-Pacific growth (76% growth, vs 28% overall) of the Mac platform, accompanied of course by overall 151% revenue in the region. Also interesting, but unsurprising, to note that desktop sales are still going down by single-digit percentages every quarter — 6% this quarter — while laptop sales grew by 59%.

Is any other company having as much success in Asia at the moment as Apple? Seems like a huge growth opportunity there, and touch interfaces lend themselves very well to multi-byte character sets. Very, very interesting times are ahead.

Regard Asia. In China the iPhone is +250% year-to-year (vs. +155% in the US).
The number is especially interesting because this ought to be where iOS goes to die, snuffed out by a swarm of locally produced cheap handsets running Android or its mutant cousins Tapas and Ophone. You’ll recall Stephen Elop, currently Nokia’s CEO, cautioning against aggressively priced MediaTek based Android devices in his Burning Platform memo.

Instead, Chinese customers appear to insist on The Real Thing. We now hear that the Shanghai Apple Store does more volume than the historic 5th Avenue location, with a new store, China’s largest, in the works.

by Alex

Best PlayBook review so far

Why RIM chose to ship the PlayBook in such a state is unfathomable. The iPad 2 and Xoom have been out for weeks, so there’s no heading them off at the pass. Instead, the PlayBook debuted with all eyes on it — but instead of a world-class performer, we got the homeless guy who plays air guitar in front of the mall.

One of many money quotes from Galen Gruman’s highly entertaining review of the RIM PlayBook (“PlayBook: Unfinished, unusable”) at InfoWorld.

by Alex

As I was saying…

Adobe releases touch-based SDK for Photoshop. Great things expected, and probably rightly so.

As I was saying eons ago…

And probably before any of that, we’ll start seeing people using iPads as “controllers” for their desktop computers. I can’t imagine software developers haven’t been thinking about “tethered apps” already. Think of an application running on your computer’s big screen(s), and interacting with that with the companion software running on your iPad.

by Alex

The Atavist

The Atavist (iTunes link, also available on Kindle, nook, and others) publishes long-form nonfiction: shorter than a book, longer than a magazine article, that they sell individually for $2.99 per article.

Their publishing platform, Periodic Technology, also looks really interesting: write once, export to a bunch of formats and devices. In other words, give away the app, then sell the content within it.

I love that they point out that it’s easy enough for an editor to use, too.

by Alex

Mac users listen up! Enable certificate checking

Mac users listen up! Enable certificate checking.

Do it now. It will take you a minute if you’re slow, and there’s no downside to speak of:

The only downside to this extra checking is possibly a slight delay to perform the request the first time you go to a web site and when the cache expires. This should be less overhead than downloading a small image, so I’m not worrying about it.

I am very surprised that OCSP (online certificate status protocol) hasn’t been enabled by default in every version of OS X and Safari ever. I’m also surprised at how weak and uninformative the warning from Safari is.

(Via O’Reilly Radar’s Four Short Links today.)