A copy of Pride And Prejucide might conceivably come with videos of Keira Knightly and Colin Firth (the movie adaptation’s cast), he said, but: “We need to understand how much the consumer will pay for that, we need to engage in dynamic pricing.

— First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad, paidcontent.co.uk, March 2, 2010

“Prejucide” made me laugh, but including a video with the book sounds questionable to me. You interpret books as you read them, including envisioning the characters. A filmed version of the book is unavoidably interpretive and cannot help but color your own interpretation, even taint it.

[Natural User Interfaces] frequently need to let people know what elements are interactive. (Ideally everything is interactive in a touch-based UI but that’s a different point.) NUIs should encourage exploration and give people “permission” to touch things. Teasing people is one way of encouraging interactivity and exploration.

[...]

Transitions also help communicate interactions. When users move between screens, interaction components fly in or swivel highlighting the fact they are active and can be touched. Once someone taps on these components, they pivot or recede as if they were pushed backward into space. This animation…reinforces the fact they are active.

— Windows Phone: User Interface Teases & Transitions, lukew.com, February 17, 2010

A nice touch.

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.
— Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple’s Magic, Gizmodo, January 20, 2010

Overstated perhaps, but generally true.

Take page transitions, for example. It’s common to navigate from one page to another by tapping an item from a list to see more detail: new pages slide in from the right, while tapping Back slides the old page back in from the left.

You might think that animating in a new page to replace the old would simply slide the two in lock-step, like two cafeteria trays on a serving rail, but it’s more subtle than that. To see that subtlety, let’s slow things down for a closer look.

The pages featured here are from Malt Whisky, my new iPhone app, but the animations are the same throughout iPhone. In this example, we’re transitioning from the Bunnahabhain Distillery page to the pronunciation page to hear boo·na·HAA·ven pronounced.

These 13 frames shown at right (links to larger version) reveal five different animations for five different page elements:

Interested, I rigged up a similar page transition but with a single animation of “new page pushing out old page”, including the navigation bar. The difference was profound: instead of something that felt alive and vibrant, it felt like a Keynote slide transition. A completely different feeling.

The different timing of all five animations coordinate to make the page transition whoosh. You can barely notice the animations individually and as for perceiving them all in combination, forget it. But you’re not supposed to notice them. You’re simply supposed to get a tiny thrill of seeing one page whoosh in to replace the other, of using a device that somehow seems alive.

And you do.

Sounds good to me.

It’s unsurprising to learn that Tufte cites among his influences Richard Serra, whose Wake is arguably the finest piece here in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Both men think big with strong, clean lines. But where Serra’s work flows organically and naturally as though it just happened, Tufte’s works are studiously composed and cerebral.

It’s inspiring to see Tufte still exploring and growing at 67. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and his other books should be considered required reading for all designers, including web designers.

And the term sparkline is almost as cool as the idea.

Petty?

Wait, let me get my violin…ah, there it is… [Music starts]

This should be already clear to any reporter, but Apple sells hardware to run Mac OS. Yes, Apple makes software, but the real profit is in hardware. You buy a non-Apple netbook and hack it to run Mac OS, you’re taking money out of Apple’s pocket. In fact, if you read the licensing agreement that comes with Mac OS, you’re violating that agreement.

Having acted irresponsibly by flouting Apple’s licensing agreement to run Mac OS on your non-Apple hardware, are you really surprised when Apple comes back like an adult and says, don’t do that?

You want to run Mac OS, dry the crocodile tears and get a Mac. It’s that simple.

1. Press and hold on the link you wish to view.
2. When the dialog appears, tap Open in New Page.
3. View the page in the new page.
4. Tap the pages button in the bottom-right corner to return to the original page to load additional pages.

Comes in handy when you’re rushing for a flight and want to cache a number of pages for reading on board.

Here’s the problem: Barnes & Noble sells books, but it’s not in the same business as Amazon. The Kindle improves Amazon’s (AMZN) business in every way. The Nook will put pressure on a structural weakness in B&N’s business plan, toppling a flailing operation.

— The Nook of Doom, thebigmoney, October 22, 2009

To see the progress Apple has made on a design level over the last half decade, here’s a 2005 iBook G4 up close to the new model. No clunky port framing, no huge intake gills, no exposed screws on the side, and nearly half as thick.

There’s also considerably better fit and finish overall. The old iBook isn’t worn out, it shipped with that warped frame around its hinge. The lid didn’t come within a millimeter of the body when closed, but hovered with a big gap, held down by a clumsy mechanical catch that necessitated a big button to release it.

— First look: Apple’s redesigned 13-inch unibody MacBook, appleinsider.com, October 22, 2009

The included side-by-side photos of the old and new models show remarkable design progress in just a few years. Taken together, the improvements will make a real difference to the many teachers and others using these MacBooks.

Nowhere is Apple’s drive for elegance and refinement more obvious than in its lower-end products.

The patent details how ads could be presented in a way that requires the viewer to watch them by, for instance, superimposing something above the ad that needs to be moved or tapped. Ignore the ads and functionality is disabled until you watch them.

Cue consumer indignation…right…about…n—

But wait, consumers don’t necessarily mind ads. Terrible ads, sure, and ads about products you’re unlikely to use or find offensive, but ads about products and services you actually use? That’s something else.

The patent includes the ability to tailor the ads displayed based on your usage and preferences, making it more likely to make the ads more palatable, pleasing both users and advertisers.

This should lower the cost of hardware and software to broaden the market and should enable new services, including the pervasive ability to try-before-you-buy without publishers having to give something away for free. You watch ads at first, then when you decide to you like the product, you pay a fee, and no more ads.

Sounds like a great system with potential to make everyone happy. Especially Apple, who presumably would get a slice of that juicy ad revenue.

Much to the dismay of every Mac OS X user with occasional bandwidth unreliability, Apple has actually managed to make the situation worse in Snow Leopard—much, much worse.

Now, when checking mail in a low-bandwidth situation and getting a lack of response from a mail server, Mail 4.x still throws the modal dialog box in your face. But then when you dismiss it, which takes the account off-line, for some reason the idiotic Mail actually really forgets the account’s password.

— Mail 4.x: Even more frustrating behaviour when dealing with low-bandwidth situations, betalogue.com, October 19, 2009

I routinely check seven different email accounts, and the modal password dialogs, one after the other, are maddening.

What the…what was this telling me? I hadn’t even known that Photoshop uses OpenGL backing for its document window (although that’s nice) and certainly hadn’t told it to do so. Why tell me about this horribly technical implementation detail?

The dialog didn’t tell me, but should have, that OpenGL makes things fast, and that any additional windows I opened would be slower. Instead, my workflow was brought to a complete halt while I parsed the terms “OpenGL”, “document windows” (if I open a second window for the same document, does that count?), “screen resolution”, “RAM”, and “graphics card”.

Imagine instead if the dialog had displayed a primary and secondary message:

You’ve already opened the maximum number of accelerated windows. Additional windows will be unaccelerated.

Photoshop accelerates windows when permitted by your graphics card. (and so on)

Even better, don’t bother me at all with a modal dialog, which is rude and unhelpful. So what if additional windows won’t be OpenGL-backed? Do you really think I won’t open another window? Worse, the one-time-only alert is incomplete because, once I’ve opened additional windows, how am I to know which are OpenGL-backed and which aren’t?

A more graceful solution would be to mark the slower windows with a badge or equivalent affordance which when clicked would explain the situation.

And that OK button just looks sad.

With Toy Story, though, it’s completely different. The great thing about computer animation is that even though the film images were rendered by computers in 2-D, prior to being rendered the films were staged and animated in a virtual 3-D environment — and all that lovely 3-D information still exists on hard drives at Pixar. For example, in a scene in which we see Andy playing with Woody and Buzz, we see them on screen from only one perspective — but the animators originally mapped out where Andy, Woody and Buzz were in relation to one another in virtual 3-D, and the computer files with that information still exist.

— Woody and Buzz in 3-D!, jimmyakin.org, October 2, 2009

And another:

[Pixar's Tom Duff, speaking 10 years ago] “Don’t forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide. NBL!

At Moore’s Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won’t be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I’ll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA’s heirs and assigns.”

Well, it’s only 10 years later, and I have no idea if Tom is sitting on his porch yet, but our “toys” are certainly getting closer to achieving this. 500MB of data per frame doesn’t sound unreasonable these days.

— Real Time Toy Story 3D?, Industrial Arithmetic, October 1, 2009

So it would seem to be a normal progression for Apple to eventually move its product lines to producing 720p content that can then be redistributed.

Today, that exporting can happen via synchronizing one’s iPhone’s GS or exporting content to iTunes, YouTube, or MobileMe from Quicktime X. MobileMe and YouTube appeared to make sense but why export to iTunes?

- Apple
Storms Hollywood, tnl.net, September 17, 2009

Here’s how a search for “Bramwell Tovey” looks on my desktop monitor. Two-thirds of that window is empty space, yet the tracks are shown in a fixed-height list with scrollbar.

Here’s a closer look at the content, with and without ellipsized text highlighted. Virtually every piece of descriptive text is ellipsized; Some display unellipsized tooltips on hover, others don’t.

Oh, and the scrollbar’s only 8 pixels wide.

Clicking on the album “New Music for Brass Band” reveals little detailed information about the album.

The missing details are significant enough to keep me from buying the album in fact, because they don’t let me see:

• who’s conducting
• who’s performing
• any description of the album
• close-up of the album cover (clicking that image does nothing but reload the page)

Given that everything’s ellipsized and these significant details are missing, how can customers decide whether or not to purchase the album? Maybe that Popularity column, which without apparent irony rates Album Only tracks as the least popular.

This new design is a disaster in many respects. I hope Apple fixes it soon.

The process of rendering the films — or translating computer data into images — was vastly accelerated by current technology. Where the original “Toy Story” required an hour per frame to create, Mr. Lasseter said, rendering the new 3-D version took less than 1/24th of a second per frame.— Disney Seeks Buzz With ‘Toy Story’ Re-Release, The Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2009

More than 86400 times faster than 14 years ago.