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.

1. In the top-left corner of the window, click the badged Applications item in the sidebar.

2. In the bottom-right corner of the window, click 2 Updates Available.

3. In the top-right corner of the window, click Download All Free Updates.

4. In the middle-left of the window, click the badged Downloads item in the sidebar.

In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new – “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked – the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going. — The truth about grit, boston.com, August 2, 2009

The article says that people with great focus are often great achievers. But what the article doesn’t mention is that, when pursuing a goal for which their own skills are inadequate, great achievers often call upon others and in turn help them to become great achievers as well, one person of great focus in turn focusing the efforts of others towards a goal whose ambition lies beyond any of them separately.

Chapter One describes how, in order to make the food look delicious, the set designers had to figure out to how make it sag naturally:

…computer models built by hand or by code tend to have a rigid posed look. They lacked a “found in nature” feel to them, which one might describe as weight or contact or sag or rest. Our hand sculpted models tended to not adequately show that the soft objects had a weight to them, causing them to sag and droop and deform according to their surroundings. Piles of food tended to not look natural. They looked as if someone had carefully stacked them together (which was true!) More importantly they didn’t actually look like soft objects were pushing against each other. In the end we had hard plastic toys carefully stacked together and not a crate of soft vegetables randomly thrown in. — Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen , pixar.com

They refined their solution by simulating how sacks of potatoes lie against each other and by how fruits and vegetables pile naturally in a container, then applied what they’d learned to, among other things, a poached scallop dish with a dollop of cavier on top:

The caviar dollop was a new problem. There is an overall shape that feels like it has weight and is resting on top of the scallop. In turn the dollop is made up of a multitude of individual eggs, that each needed to feel as if they were truly squeezed in together.

Consider the level of detail here: in a feature-length film running 111 minutes, in one of many scenes with food on plates, one plate containing scallops has cavier on top. Making the individual eggs in that cavier lie naturally posed a new technical problem interesting enough to include in a technical paper.

Pixar is an amazing group of artists. If good cooking starts with good ingredients, good animation about cooking surely starts with passionate attention to detail like this.

The challenge of shading food for Ratatouille was to work with a stylized look that fits into our world, yet is still readable and recognizable as something appealing to eat. We, as humans, have a built-in sensory system to know what looks edible to our eyes and stomach. Finding that acceptable (and tasty) appearence was the main focus.
— Ratatouille: Shading Food, pixar.com

My favorite bit: to make the baguettes look believable, they took the trouble “to compress air bubbles which were closer to the crust, then give a slight twist to the pattern of air bubbles, as often seen in real bread.”

Update: Turns out this is an excerpt from the 58-page Anyone Can Cook – Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen. Read more…

The important thing to note (when comparing Apple retail stores to future Microsoft retail stores), is that Apple sells BOTH their own software AND hardware. Apple has a variety of products to sell, from the Leopard OS, to iPods, to AppleTVs, and then to Macintosh computers.

Microsoft has Zunes, Windows 7, and the XBOX 360. It’s no secret that MS doesn’t manufacture computers.

So, when someone comes in looking to buy a PC, what do the copy-cat-renditions-of-Apple-Specialists… do? When someone books an appointment at the ‘Answers Bar’ because their computer is acting up, what happens when the issue is discovered to be a hardware problem? How will Microsoft tell a customer that their issue can’t be taken care of in-store because the company only sells the software on the broken laptop, not the laptop itself?

I’m less concerned with the store design and recurring motif of Microsoft borrowing inspiration from Apple. I’m simply curious how the company plans on getting around the major issues I mentioned above.

— Leslie Capobianco (user comment), gizmodo.com, July 25, 2009

Good question.

Observing how well Microsoft executes on the details in their retail stores should be fun. One curious choice: the document as posted devotes considerable attention to Surface, an expensive product few retail customers are likely to buy.

• Swipe four fingers up to reveal your desktop, and down to hide it again.
• Swipe four fingers left or right to display the application switcher, just like Command-Tab.

The training video is nicely done, too.

In any case, there’s no going back. The information sea isn’t going to dry up, and relying on cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow—and limited information access—is futile. Strengthening our fluid intelligence is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity. — Get Smarter, theatlantic.com, July/August 2009

In addition to serving as map, compass, camera, and dictation device, iPhone is now also being used to report police speed traps and traffic cameras. Trapster, available for iPhone in addition to other popular mobile platforms, uses your geolocation to monitor whether you’re approaching a speed trap and alerts you with iPhone 3.0’s new notifications.

You can report your own points, too:

Trapster is a clever reconceptualization of speed trap detection that lets drivers pool knowledge. It’s interesting to see another dedicated hardware device, the traditional and often illegal radar detector, replaced by the combination of networked software and GPS.

Interesting too that, though it has limitations when compared to the radar detector, the app offers compelling features that the radar detector cannot. And unlike the radar detector, the app can be trivially updated with additional features.