Skip to content →

Category: design

Web As Industrial Design: Painting with Code

Published December 1, 2007 by cgerrish

Juicer Prototype

 If you happen to be passing through Terminal 3 of the San Francisco Airport any time soon, check out: Prototype to Product: 33 Projects from the Bay Area Design Community. Rushing through the Terminal to my gate, I didn’t have enough time to spend with each of the pieces. The exhibit features preliminary sketches, detailed illustrations, models, prototypes and the finished product. Every time I see this kind of approach to design I think that Web design should be done in the same way.

Designers of Web sites need to take the materials, the DOM, the semantic HTML, the CSS, the javascript, the images and links into account when they design something for a person to use for a particular purpose. Industrial designers need to know and understand their materials. Will there be a new generation of Web artists and designers who can paint in code?


Comments closed

Kindle: Network Connectivity included in purchase price

Published November 25, 2007 by cgerrish

Connectivity to the network included in the purchase price of the Kindle. This is the most revolutionary part of the Kindle. It’s a product, a hunk of plastic and electronics that comes in a box with a recharger. The price is a little high for an e-reader, the special sauce is the built in complimentary network connectivity. There’s no meter running and network connectivity is essential nowadays in everything in life,  with a lot of tech advances in robotics, A “networked robot” is a robotic device connected to a communications network such as the Internet or LAN, EMS Solutions works with the latest cable and wiring connections.

It’s EVDO, Amazon calls it WhisperNet– but it doesn’t really matter what the technology is or what it’s called. The consumer doesn’t need to think about it. It’s what enables shopping for books and periodicals, and what allows delivery. It will only be noticeable when it’s slow or not working.

I’m not sure how the economics of this work, but if the cost of the network is built in to the cost of the reader and the purchased content, the issue of the price of the network disappears. And with that, a big usability problem and a big uptake issue goes away. The network is assumed. With some mass production, economies of scale and a little time we may get the price down to what a DVD player costs.

Comments closed

“Macs just work” It depends on the meaning of “work”

Published November 18, 2007 by cgerrish

Apple or Microsoft: Choose your platform

Scoble and Winer are crowing about the fact that Apple products break sometimes. And if you use them in the margins of their functionality, they break more often. Now clearly Apple products break sometimes, they have strange limitations and can infuriate developers who create in the space close to core functionality. They’re claiming that this contradicts Apple’s brand promise which they define as “it just works.”

It depends on the meaning of “works.” If you mean Macs always function perfectly from a mechanical and software perspective— well that’s simply impossible. And certainly Winer and Scoble should know that. Especially Winer, who once said: “I make shitty software. With bugs!” The truth of it is, everybody does. Apple does too.

The “it works” I like about Apple’s products is they’re easy for regular folks to learn how to use. They make it easy to get started, easy to get online and browse, easy to get into digital photography, easy to buy music online and transfer to an mp3 player. That’s the brand promise. The very idea that any company could have a brand promise that implies their products are perfect and never break is absurd. A lot of brands trade on the idea of quality and reliability. That doesn’t mean they never break. Those of us immersed in the digital sometimes lose sight of how difficult it can be to use a computer. A translation of “it just works” might be, “even I can use this computer.”

Chumby

A related thread is the introduction of Chumby. The digerati hail the hackability of the device, but that’s not what’s really interesting about it. It’s that it’s simple. It takes away almost all of the power and flexibility of a computer, but the user is left with enough value to make it interesting. It’s the beginning of a wave of single purpose websites and network connected devices.

Comments closed

Phoning in the OpenSocial / OHA on my Teleputer

Published November 6, 2007 by cgerrish

Google seems to be in the announcement business these days. Announcements of grand alliances that make a big circle around the future of our interaction with the network. The future of social, is you can take your graph with you. (That’s friends for most people) And the future of mobile computing is that Google wants to stand as the middle man between you and anything you want on the network. (and of course, monetize that position) The phone will be opened up and will be open source.

 God knows the phone needs to be opened up in someway– it’s a very crippled interface. If you view voice as just another kind of data, it changes you idea of what a phone should do. Although I think I’ve heard all this before from George Gilder, it was called the rise of the Teleputer.

And I’m afraid I have to agree with Fake Steve Jobs, it’s not a phone, it’s an alliance. Companies join alliances for many reasons, often they do it to slow down progress, maintain the current environment, and protect their current revenue stream. I don’t see alliances creating change, they’re more effective in consolidating change that has already occured.

If you want to instigate change, you need to upset the balance of power. A new element needs to be injected into the competitive mix. Apple’s iPhone has the potential to do this because it re-invents the phone interface on a software platform. This gives it real flexibility, it can learn and adapt. Google is probably looking for the same kind of environment with their alliance. But it’s a long way from alliances to making phone calls. Remember something is only useful when it has users.  Not developers, users.

One Comment