According to Wikipedia, Grimace, the beloved purple milkshake thing from McDonalds, has been banned from evil, Communist China for “being too much of a free spirit and was rumored to have strong ties to the capitalist West.” God, I love Wikipedia.
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Remember Origami, the overhyped ultra-mobile pc? It was supposed to retail for super-cheap, and be a fantastic extension of your existing in-home PC infrastructure. Unfortunately, the devices ended up retailing for about a thousand bucks instead. I’ve always loved these things, still, and am quite interested in buying one at some point. I think they’re awesome. And finally, it looks like Origami has come into its own. jkOnTheRun has kind words for the Vista Origami experience, and thinks that this thing may be a killer:
So far, the Origami team has knocked my socks off with the demo I saw; I just might have to give up and say “we’ve got a winner here!” It’s obvious that the team has listened to user feedback and matured the new Origami Experience far beyond the original Touch Pack.
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I ran across this a couple days ago, and have been trying to find time to blog it ever since. It’s an interactive ‘periodic table’ of visualization tools and techniques, chunked into data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor and compound categories. Need to know the difference between an infomural and and a rich picture? It’ll show you everything you’ll need and much more.
Visual Literacy’s Periodic Table of Visualization
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There’s a bit of a hullabaloo going on out there in the blogosphere about Edelman mailing out free Ferarri laptops with Windows Vista to bloggers. Scoble thinks it’s an awesome idea, and Joel Spolsky thinks Scoble’s completely wrong on the basis that this laptop giveaway constitutes an unethical arrangement, and that it is destroying the nascent credibility of blogs everywhere:
This is the most frustrating thing about the practice of giving bloggers free stuff: it pisses in the well, reducing the credibility of all blogs. I’m upset that people trust me less because of the behavior of other bloggers.
Whatever is right or wrong in this case, Joel stated something after this that rankled me beyond belief:
Joel on Software is really a non-profit, advertising-free site
Meanwhile, right next to this is a HUGE friggin block informing you that you can find cool jobs on the Joel job board, or post them for only a few hundred bucks.
You can also try out FogBugz, a product made by Fog Creek Software, of which Joel is CEO.
Or, you can even play around with Copilot, which costs ten bucks a day. Or buy the associated DVD. Or buy Joel’s two books.
Do you see the hypocrisy? I don’t mind that Joel pimps the hell out of Fog Creek on his blog. In fact, I expect it. It’s the best advertising Fog Creek could possibly get, and all it really costs is hosting fees (paid for by Fog Creek?) and Joel’s time. I only wish Joel would remove this one statement from his post. He is not running some little rinky-dink blog as a labor of love; it is a seriously valuable piece of advertising that also appears to be a labor of love.
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As I predicted on the 31st, Apple just announced the iPhone, and boy howdy is it ever sweet. I want one but, as I suspected, it totally lacks integration with Exchange. Most business users will probably yawn and go back to their Blackberries (even though RIMM is down 8% at the time that I write this…ouch).
The iPhone looks absolutely beautiful, and seems to run some variant of Mac OS X, which is quite shocking to me. Hopefully there will be an open application ecosystem for the phone, and I will be able to port iRooster over to it (the Windows Mobile version should be coming before too long, by the way).
But…Apple has dropped the word “Computer” from their corporate name. As their website has informed us for the past few days, the last 30 years were just the beginning. Apple, Inc. is a consumer electronics company. One of their products happens to be the Macintosh. No more and no less. The fact that we heard nary a word about Leopard or new Mac hardware doesn’t bode well for the future of the platform.
Sure, it’s not like Apple will kill off the Mac (anytime soon, at least), but Steve only has so many hours in the day to nitpickingly approve each critical Ux decision in the OS and hardware. If he’s off spending the majority of his time on iPhone, I find it hard to believe that Leopard could offer the same laser-like focus of past releases, like Panther.
Just a few weeks ago, Think Secret reported that:
significant stability issues persist [in Leopard], all but arresting any hopes for an early release at or around Macworld Expo San Francisco next month.
No substantial pieces of information have come out since Leopard’s official unveiling at WWDC last summer. Everyone expected MacWorld to have some updates on its progress, but we were all disappointed. We’re coming up on almost two years since the last major release of OS X, which is quite surprising. If you check out the table below, you’ll see that Leopard has taken the longest of any of Apple’s OS X releases (with the obvious exception of Cheetah, which arguably took 4 years).
| Release | Date | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Cheetah (10.0) | 24 Mar 2001 | N/A |
| Puma (10.1) | 25 Sept 2001 | 6 Months |
| Jaguar (10.2) | 24 Aug 2002 | 11 Months |
| Panther (10.3) | 24 Oct 2003 | 14 Months |
| Tiger (10.4) | 29 Apr 2005 | 18 Months |
| Leopard (10.5) | ??? | 21 Months and counting |
I wonder what version of OS X the iPhone will be running… If it’s Leopard, then we could surmise that iPhone and Leopard may ship simultaneously in June. In any case, I’m sad to see the Mac get the shaft at Apple.
Other interesting coverage:
Frogdesign:
Apple has created one of the most accessible development platforms for data transfer and productivity apps to date on a mobile phone.
Gizmodo: 50 photos of the Jesus Phone
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A while back I wrote about a new snipping tool included with Windows Vista. I just found an even cooler one just now that leverages Vista’s DWM to create perfect screen captures on Vista every time, as seen in the screenshot below:
You’ll notice that the background doesn’t bleed through, nor do you get ugly rectangular black borders around your screenshot. Many thanks to Kenny Kerr for providing such an awesome, useful utility!
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A co-worker of mine was nice enough to update my Windows system color chart with the Royale theme from Windows XP Media Center Edition. You can find the updated chart at its original location. Thanks, Moneta!
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I’ll be the first to admit it: I don’t know the first thing about drawing, and it never ceases to irritate me. For this reason, I was incredibly excited when I ran into Drawspace by way of Hillel Cooperman’s weblog, today.
They cover everything from positive and negative spaces to a case study on how Leonardo da Vinci drew noses.
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