by John Blackburn
Freek Bijl describes how Apple will revolutionize the publishing business with the potent combination of iTunes+Store+Tablet to address the respective problems of distribution+businessmodel+usability, just as it already has the music and mobile businesses.
Sounds good to me.
In June, Businessweek published Tufte’s Invisible Yet Ubiquitous Influence, an article featuring an interesting slideshow of Edward Tufte’s work, including his sculptures. The sculptures mentioned are all quite large—and getting larger: his 2007 Rocket Science is 32 feet high and 72 feet long.
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.
Wired reports that Snow Leopard 10.6.2 will not run on the Intel Atom processor, and calls this “a rather petty move from Apple which, if true, will break many netbooks which have been hacked to run as more than passable Macs.”
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.
As nice as it is to browse pages using Safari Mobile on the iPhone and iPod touch, it can be bothersome to view several links on a page in succession: tap the first link to view it, then go back to the original page to tap the second link, then go back…and so on. Unless the original page is quite small, Safari Mobile has to reload it every time you go back, slowing things down a lot.
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.
A smart look at how Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader, though well-designed, could spell trouble for the bookseller:
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
Prince McLean compares the new MacBook with older models:
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.
A patent application from Apple published this morning adds an intriguing twist to the tablet rumors where Apple is working out a deal with publishers to create a new publishing platform.
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.
Betalogue describes a bug in Snow Leopard that really is frustrating:
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.
Yesterday I opened several documents within Adobe Photoshop CS4 and was confronted with this dialog:
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.
An interesting discussion of Pixar’s rendering of Toy Story 3D, previously mentioned here:
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
