Head on over to The Verge right now where they are mercilessly making fun of Qualcomm’s keynote presentation at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Or just skip to the highlights below to see the most insane presentation I’ve ever encountered.
I can’t even fathom being trapped in that presentation hall for this trainwreck.
“…in essence, bad design was both the symptom and a contributing cause of apple’s corporate disease. steve’s desire to end the disjoined approach gave birth to a strategic design project that would revolutionize apple’s brand and product lines, change the trajectory of the company’s future, and eventually redefine the way the world thinks about and uses consumer electronics and communication technologies.”
More on designboom…
Japan’s new ‘communications robot’ will prevent astronauts from getting lonely in space — by being absolutely adorable.
Yep. (Thanks, io9.)
I’m glad creator Mike Ando was so patient with his dream of building the linking book from Myst. As an ardent fan of the game and its sequels, I was beyond excited to see this story pop up on Wired – and the teenager in me flipped his shit while watching the video. I’ll take one!
Looking for a way to jazz up your used book sales? Try the Biblio-Mat, which promises to convert $2 into a randomly selected title from its inventory. Genius.
These gorgeous bubbles of scenery are by photographer Catherine Nelson. And they are spectacular. See more and learn about the technique at Wired.
Apple has recently let go of the former head of iOS and OS X, ending an era – and support for a particular kind of design, one with a reliance on skeuomorphic elements. Now that the top proponent of the opposing mindset within Apple – chief hardware designer, Jonathan Ive, is at the helm, what might we expect?
[…] the logical guess, given his interest in streamlined, relentlessly consistent design, is that skeuomorphism — the kind-of-campy mimicking of real-world details like plush leather and shiny wood surfaces — may become a thing of the past.
The bottom line: Ive has always been one of the most important people at Apple, but with this reshuffling, he gets the opportunity to become the most important person at Apple. That makes this the most important thing that’s happened at the company in the post-Jobs era.
It’s an important move, and one that is sure to herald in an age of Apple’s software taking on the sparse elegance of its striking hardware. Count me in.
(Time)
I used to buy a new computer every 6 months when I was a decade younger. I’d package up and eBay the previous generation gear and roll the money into the latest and greatest from Apple twice a year. But when I got my 13″ MacBook in October of 2008, I found that the cycle had played itself out. 2009, 2010 and even 2011 came and went and the designs were mostly the same – and my little notebook kept chugging right along without any real issues.
This last year of freelance projects and a need for occasional forays into Windows has become increasingly sluggish, though. And then the advent of the Retina display on notebooks sealed the deal: it was time to upgrade, both for my strained eyes and for my cooked lap, burned under a more and more taxed set of four year old components.
So I plunked down an ungodly sum of money and placed an order for the above 13″ MacBook Pro on launch day today. I’ll be checking the tracking site and scouting the driveway for FedEx trucks nonstop from here until up to 5 business days from now. In some ways, perhaps nothing has changed in the last ten years…
While it seems somewhat silly in the form of a grocery store with no products, just photos of items and QR codes, the Tesco example in this article from Ubergizmo does make a lot of sense:
Yihaodian has already done something similar on a smaller scale by sticking up posters in subway and bus stations, while in South Korea, Tesco has launched something similar where customers can shop for groceries at the subway while waiting for their trains.
Really big stuff, in fact. Like 20 km high towers into space big. At least that’s what Neal Stephenson is up to with his amazing Hieroglyph project. io9‘s article on the potential impact of a massive stairway to the stars led me to “Innovation Starvation“, an essay by Mr. Stephenson in which he derides science fiction – his own chosen genre – as being dreadfully lazy for a generation. Some choice quotes that sum up the gist of his argument:
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.
io9 further quotes Stephenson from another interview as saying “Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization busied itself with figuring out the Internet. While this point is certainly likely to be true, it does provide some hope. Not only does the Internet enable us to access all of the optimism of innovative science fiction thinking of the past (plug: and even take a class about it online), it also immediately connects visionaries like Stephenson with the young engineers in Israel, Finland and Japan who are itching to build something really big. (There was no Kickstarter when Clarke pitched the space elevator, after all…)
And that’s not such a small thing, is it?