We decided to see what kind of assets – icons, images, sounds – ship as a part of the iOS operating system on a new iPhone. We found some 5,000 beautiful little “things” – some familiar, some not, all of them as a collection fascinating. A whole world in there.

So we thought it deserved an animation.

(Click image above to launch.)

ADG… Read the rest

Earned Attention is a new book / eBook out by Klaas Weima that includes interviews with 50 “visionaries” in fields related to interactive marketing, advertising and design including Guy Kawasaki, Joseph Jaffe, Pete Blackshaw, Tim O’Reilly, and Tim Smith of ADG (me).

Earned Attention

Click for video

Interesting in that the “book” manifests as a printed volume, an eBook, an iPhone app, a blog and a few other formats that leave you with no excuse not to take a look.

The iPhone and iPad versions of the book include the original podcast interviews. Not sure if they are all in English, but most probably are; I was interviewed while in Amsterdam.… Read the rest

So I’m not a hard-core Quora user – there are certainly many – but of the very few answers I’ve posted to Quora one of them somehow became amongst the top-ten most up-voted answers on the site. Touched a nerve out there I guess.

In an interesting and somewhat anachronistic move, the Quora folks decided to take the top voted answers of the past few years – from their website – and compile them into a rather nice hard bound volume, the so-called “Best of Quora 2010-2012“.

You evidently can’t buy this thing, they only sent them out to the original authors (although I have heard of one or two showing up on eBay).… Read the rest

Maybe one of the best definitions of “applied design” that I’ve seen: The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens a show titled “Applied Design” in March, and the show description is great.

“There are still people who think that design is just about making things, people, and places pretty. In truth, design has spread to almost every facet of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking, for a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people respond to change. A designer today can choose to focus on interactions, interfaces, the Internet, visualizations, socially minded infrastructures and products, 5-D spaces, bioengineering, sustainability, video games, critical scenarios, and yes, even furniture.… Read the rest

iTunes Match is due for launch any day now, and one of the features of Match – the option to “scale” songs in your library up 256 kbps (if matched) – got me thinking about the whole music resolution issue in general.

Over the past twenty years or so we’ve seen kind of a “dumbing down” of music quality for consumers in general, brought about in no small part by the onset of portable music devices: first the ground-breaking Sony Walkman, then of course the iPod.… Read the rest

It’s very interesting to see the resurgence of consumer-grade AI-enabled voice recognition in Siri, the new digital assistant component of the iPhone 4S. In reading the largely positive reviews of the cloud-assisted on-device service I’ve been surprised that there has been no mention of Wildfire – a service I was one of clearly very few people in the U.S. to have used back in the ’90′s. The parallels are many – the primary difference being that Apple seems to have brought the concept to the masses, where before it was an expensive, proprietary solution geared almost exclusively to professionals.

There’s not much information floating around any more about Wildfire. At the time I subscribed to the service – around the early – mid nineties – it was run in the U.S.… Read the rest

A Story

While we all knew it was inevitable, the resignation of Steve Jobs was nonetheless a shock to many of us for whom Apple has been a touchstone for much of our life – both personally and professionally. I kind of grew up with Apple.

John Gruber has posted a number of stories from others that depict aspects of Jobs that most of us have never seen – not the gruff, competitive, design-obsessed, CEO, but the personal, often sensitive, funny, real guy that only a small inner circle know.

I’m not in that inner circle, but I have my Steve Jobs story, and I’ve never thought to write it down until I realized it belonged in the domain of these other stories.… Read the rest

So it takes a controversy like this to get me – as busy as things have been lately – to write another blog post.

The uproar around the release of Final Cut Pro X – peaking now with “mainstream media” parodies by the likes of Conan O’Brien (how often does this happen with a software release?) – has gone from predictable to ridiculous.

Back before the Internet arrived on the scene I spent a fair amount of time working in the non-linear film/video editing community of San Francisco – a rarified community of pre-hipster gear-head editors who were wrangling the early Avid almost-digital tape-based monstrosities before the advent of basically desktop digital editing.… Read the rest

Maybe it’s just me, but in watching Apple’s predictably beautiful new video guided tours of the iPad I got completely distracted by knees.

Do I have a knee fetish?

But they’re everywhere.  As I watched one video after another (there are about a dozen) it was like “ok, here comes the knee shot …”.  By the fourth video I couldn’t even follow the story it got so self-conscious.

When the “laptop” came out it was pretty cool.  You could kick back on the couch and set the thing in your lap and we all thought how cool we were.  But you could also just as easily set it on a flat surface, tilt the screen just right, and work just as easily: keyboard flat, screen up.… Read the rest