The person(s) responsible for the design of the Acropolis included innumerable details that, while not strictly necessary to the success of the structure as a temple, combine to make it one of the most effective architectural experiences before or since. Josh Clark notes a few such details in his insightful post of May 22. Another reminder that “Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.” — Michelangelo Buonarroti
Category: Asides Main Categories
I’m going to my first Los Angeles User Experience Meetup tonight. Here’s hoping it is a good one! I don’t know what to expect.
Jim Coudal talks , among other things, about "being a company" rather than "working for a company," and how the Coudal Partners business model has shifted from strictly client work toward creating small business that are fun, involve learning a new field, and represent opportunities to do really good work (after a long intro).
Stephen Lucas analyzes English usage in the Declaration of independence . What an amazing document.
“It’s a good thing they’re dumb” used to be something county sheriffs said about would-be bank robbers. Bruce Shneier points out that this is also true of would-be terrorists in his brilliant article, Portrait of the modern terrorist as an idiot .
In his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address today, Steve Jobs announced the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. This left some people at work scratching their heads and focusing on two questions: 1) Does Jobs think he’ll bite off a meaningful chunk of Windows browser market share with this move? 2) Does he think people having a good time with Safari and iTunes on Windows will be more likely to switch to Mac?
I suspect not, on both counts. If anything, releasing Safari on Windows will make it that much easier for PC-using (or even PC-centric) developers to begin to support Safari on OS X. (Ironically, these developers will no longer have to buy Macs to do so.) In addition, he mentioned that to make an app for the iPhone, you make an app for Safari. Since there will be no SDK released for the iPhone, at least in the near future, the way to develop for the iPhone will be to leverage the Safari framework in the iPhone by making an AJAXy Web2.0 insert-buzzword-here Safari-compatible app that works on the phone’s small screen. Releasing Safari on Windows accomplishes the aim of making iPhone development available to PC-using developers, a much larger set of developers overall than the Mac crowd.
Crossposted from my comment at Metacool :
Close! Black LOWERS the Earth’s albedo (reflectivity). Good thoughts, even so. Black cars also consume more energy via air conditioning, and need to be washed more often.
Even more important to the air conditioning problem is the amount of heat accepted an stored by the materials in the cabin that make up the seats, dashboard, steering wheel, etc. We have a 2003 Mini Cooper, light blue with the white roof, but the nearly-black plastic and leather interior soaks up a lot of heat during the day and back-radiates it into the air and my body during the drive home. It takes a lot of energy to cool those surfaces and the air that they are busy heating.
Now that my beloved Treo 650 is starting to need toothpick repairs I’ve begun to cast my eyes toward WM6 and the like. The pace of Palm/PalmOS dev is just too languid. Toothpick repairs, you ask? Yes. It seems that the screw beneath my antenna worked itself out (it was the only one I hadn’t used threadlok on), leaving the antenna with nothing to hold it in and the upper left corner spreading apart ominously. Sync and audio problems followed, and I haven’t been able to find a replacement screw of the proper size. So I jammed a toothpick in there and broke it off. It is holding, but I’m definitely not feeling terribly secure in the reliability of my baby Treo…
According to Nathaniel Rich at Slate, buying “forever” stamps is a mistake .
My friends and family have been complaining for years now, which is why I’ve never purchased a Motorola phone: ”[…]the Razr turns out to be bad design, really bad design, because it has an awful user-interface.”
David Seah points us to Corrie Hafly’s Bad day? Vent with haiku! This is a fun idea. Enough coworker spam / My inbox grows distended / with corporate dreck!
Take care when browsing the site for Birdwell Beach Britches ; indiscriminate viewing may cause eyestrain. But if you escape this fate, you may well find yourself tempted to purchase many pair of custom boardshorts. The text displays significant personality and tells the story of a family-run business that is focused on making a single product and making it as excellent as they can. The semi-aggressive stance taken in the prose is at once instructive, warning, and revealing; if you order from these folks, you had better do so with care, because you will get what you ask for. If you do well, they will be the best shorts you’ll ever wear. I plan to place an order just as soon as I get back from Hawaii…
The folks at Data Robotics are getting it right with Drobo . They have taken a complex problem (multi-disk storage management) and made it pretty dang simple by removing most of the user decisions. And their demo video proves it. If you’ve ever wrestled with RAID, this product will seem especially attractive for home use. If only it came in a NAS version.
Bret Victor posted an excellent paper, Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface , over a year ago, but there are valuable lessons within that most of us have yet to learn. It is a good read, but don’t try to print it…
Iain Barker discusses a nice way to test content structures in Measuring the Success Of a Classification System today on Boxes and Arrows . It would be ideal to use such a technique on a hierarchically-organized menu-driven embedded interface .
Core77 forgets that reductivism is the essence of minimalism. Not minimal . Minimal .
Cuyahoga County, Ohio to Diebold: you suck
Three things I need to read in the next day or so: D log: The design planning skill set , D log: 11 things you should have learned in “Economics and Design” , Jeffrey Veen: Chatting with Irene Au .
Josh Porter has an insightful article about simplicity up at UIE.com. I find his tie-up, that simplicity isn’t embodied only in interfaces but in the decisions that surround them, to be especially relevant.
Excel 2007 makes some flashy charts. Charts that are maybe too flashy, and requiring of much clicking and prodding to simplify. But why cast stones when you can pick up a hammer ?
The slides from Steven Anderson’s 2007 IA Summit presentation amplify many of the things I have been thinking about lately as my team labors to coax an old-line company toward new-line thinking.
An article in the L.A. Times highlights families who have not given their homes over. This makes sense to me; the children have to learn to live among adults somehow, yes?
Very few people seemed to notice Joshua Bell playing for an hour in L’Enfant Plaza. (Thanks, Erin )
Inspirational: Bennett Robot Works . I used to make little robot guys out of discarded electronics parts (resistors, electrolytic capacitors, small PCBs and whatnot), but these are really excellent (and larger).
