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Android Dreams by Samuel Cockedey
Gorgeous tribute to Blade Runner shot in Tokyo on a Canon 5D Mark II. More details on Vimeo.
[via: TThor 15]
(Source: vimeo.com)
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Fast forward to today. The Kindle fire reviews are pouring in and it looks like a great little device. Amazon certainly has a clear answer to the iTunes Store/App Store. But in watching the videos its clear that it’s still Android underneath. Scrolling around in the browser looks more like a gesture than a one to one interaction. The user swipes, and a moment later the content moves. Just like those Windows 1 machines, you feel as though you’re interacting with the device, rather than interacting with the content on the screen. There’s no one to one, and no magic.
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Interesting observation on the Kindle Fire, I’m surprised Amazon didn’t work very hard to make sure there was no lag. Since the first Kindle users have hated the wait turning pages but they were limited by the E ink technology. Speeds have progressively increased as they improved hardware and you don’t hear many complaints about it now but I would still have expected Amazon to use the Kindle Fire hardware as the perfect opportunity to nail responsiveness and user experience.
No, you don’t get to blame it on Android. If it’s a problem with Android fix it on your own damn hardware or software instead of waiting on Google to catch up. It’s open source after all.
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Another iPhone Template?
There are a lot of those templates out there, but for one reason or another, I’ve been a little disappointed by all of them. Without naming names, they’re all decent-to-good, but I always feel like something’s a little off.
Some tend to be inconsistent with the rendering Apple uses in its own iPhone product images. With others, the proportions are off. Or the buttons are in the wrong positions. Or the image is rasterized and unscalable. Or it’s made of vectors but riddled with split pixels.
For a whole host of reasons, I haven’t been satisfied with the existing options. So I made my own with these goals in mind: [cont’d after the link…]
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Marshall Bock’s Blog: iPhone 4S Template
These look lovely.
via TThor - Issue 15 — which is, by the way, an essential subscription for anyone who cares about design.
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Worse, indiscriminate use of Due dates dilutes their value and undermines any task-planning system.
Need to pay a credit card bill today? It’s lost in the mess of other things that are artificially “due” today, and that red Due badge is no longer a respected indication that something needs to happen today.1
But there’s a better way.2 Just use Start Dates to plan what you think you should do, and reserve Due Dates for things that actually have to get done. (To keep this straight, I use a “Due” perspective to show what’s actually due, and a “Do” perspective to show what I’m planning to do.3)
The benefits of this approach are enormous. Things that actually need to happen don’t get lost in the shuffle, and (using time estimates) you can work with more realistic expectations of what can/should happen in a a day.
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All OmniFocus scripts updated for a “Start-based” workflow | bylr.net
Both insightful and brilliant. I’m definitely going to give this workflow a try, I might just get along better with OmniFocus too.
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Answer: No. Clearly, the iPhone 4S was a single rather than a home run. But that’s good enough for Cook, a low-key manager if ever there was one (and a stark contrast to his predecessor in that respect). Cook will take singles all night. He has his eye on the pennant, rather than delighting the fans.
The plain truth is that Cook is an inventory guy. That’s how he made his name at Apple: understanding the life cycles of products and making sure his stores weren’t saddled with too many of them. Keeping inventory low, unsexy as it sounds, is a big part of what makes companies wealthy. And from that perspective, there’s one major reason to release the iPhone 4S now: making sure all your iPhone 3GS customers, who have just left their two-year contracts, upgrade to a new device.
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New iPhone Blues: Why Apple’s CEO Doesn’t Care What You Hoped To See
I needed a chuckle this morning. Definitely saving this for claim chowder.
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I will not regret things professionally. The scoop was big. People loved it. If I could do it again, I’d do the first story about the phone again.
But I probably would have given the phone back without asking for the letter. And I would have done the story about the engineer who lost it with more compassion and without naming him. Steve said we’d had our fun and we had the first story but we were being greedy. And he was right. We were. It was sore winning. And we were also being short sighted. And, sometimes, I wish we never found that phone at all. That is basically the only way this could have been painless. But that’s life. Sometimes there’s no easy way out.
I thought about the dilemma every day for about a year and half. It caused me a lot of grief, and stopped writing almost entirely. It made my spirit weak. Three weeks ago, I felt like I had had enough. I wrote my apology letter to Steve.
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Steve Jobs Was Always Kind To Me (Or, Regrets of An Asshole) | The Wirecutter
I wasn’t a fan of how Gizmodo handled the iPhone 4 scandal, I still think nearly every decision they made was wrong and they hurt too many people over the course along the way.
Maybe I’m naive, maybe Brian Lam is truly sincere — either way, this post shows some of the integrity and respect that was so missing a year ago. I’m impressed that Brian’s publicly taken responsibility and expressed regrets.
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Steve Jobs didn’t invent the Mac on his own. He didn’t invent the iPhone or the iPad on his own either. But none of them would have existed if it weren’t for him, and this world would be a smaller, duller, less beautiful place without them.
— The Macalope Daily: Giant | Computers | MacUser | Macworld
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Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.
He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged, because my partner Kara Swisher and I had assured both men that we hoped to keep the joint session on a high plane.
In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.
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The Steve Jobs I Knew - Walt Mossberg - Mossblog - AllThingsD
I’ve always been amazed that Gates and Jobs did that live interview together. Two of the most influential men of our time and very strong competitors had the grace and dignity come face to face despite the rocky start.
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Paying my respects, leaving a candle. (Taken with Instagram at Apple Store)
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10:34AM - Side note! We’re doing a TON of traffic right now, which is awesome! But if you should happen to see a hiccup in the auto-updating, don’t be afraid to refresh the page real quick to kick. Don’t do that right this second though, or you’ll probably take us down. Okay? Okay.
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Live Apple iPhone 5 event coverage – gdgt live
Can’t believe how hard traffic is hitting everyone!
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Adobe Edge Prototype Demo
Looks impressive but from the demo the UI appears to be Air or similar to the Flash parts of the Flash IDE, judging from the dodgy tooltips and font rendering. Now thats perfectly fine for a prototype, but from my experiences with the non-native elements of the Flash UI and the Fireworks UI are horrible to work in.
I’m not saying all UIs should be Aqua or Aero, I mean I love the After Effects UI. *I’m just saying they shouldn’t be running in a vector engine originally designed for cartoons and slideshows.*
Wonderfully articulated, emphasis mine.
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An online group of gamers has correctly deduced the structure of an enzyme that AIDS-like viruses use for reproduction. By playing the online-game Foldit, the group figured out the structure of an important viral protein that has baffled scientists for more than a decade.
The enzyme is a retroviral protease and plays a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and proliferates. Gamers, who weren’t experts in viruses, solved the puzzle in just three weeks.
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Gamers Solve Stubborn Viral Mystery: The Shape Of A Key Enzyme : Shots - Health Blog : NPR
Absolutely fascinating. I’ve believed that gaming forces you to develop problem solving skills and helps you to adopt creative, unconventional perspectives to work through challenges posed by different games, conventions, developers and genres. This is just another example of the positive benefits of gaming.
Gamers bring a different viewpoint to the table when it comes to solving scientific puzzles: freedom from scientific convention. “Humans can outperform the computers when you have to make a drastic move in order to get to the correct answer,” Khatib says.
Sometimes to get to the right answer, a drastic or seemingly illogical decision has to be made. But a computer trying to solve a problem won’t make an illogical decision that leads it down the wrong path because it can’t always see that far ahead, the researchers say.
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A fair question to ask is whether or not moderate amounts of alcohol are really good for you, or is the better health due to, say, a more relaxed lifestyle, a more affluent lifestyle, better education, or drinking Bordeaux instead of Boone’s Farm. The authors of the study used statistical tools to control for a great number of would-be confounding variables. Age, smoking status, weight, amount of physical activity, diet, marital status, education – even husband’s education – and family history of several diseases are some of the variables they took into account (One would have to assume that the relative benefits of Bordeaux and Boone’s Farm were beyond the scope of the study).
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Another Study Shows A Glass of Wine A Day Keeps The Doc Away | Singularity Hub
I love it when research tells me to drink more (often).
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Paying homage to the colorful world of comic books, superheroes and villains… we wanted to take a closer look at the colors in comics and see if they too can tell a story…
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An incredibly fascinating look at colors used in comic books. I love that the infographic covers the changes in time, the difference between DC and Marvel and the colors most often associated with heroes and villains.
