Photos 6.9.2007

After a long lapse in shooting photos, I got back out on the streets of New York with my Canon Rebel and shot some photos. I brought along with me my telephoto and 50mm lenses (like the one we used to have on our Pentax K1000’s in college, damn that sounded old).
Cutlass - East Village

A beautiful, shiny Cutlass in the East Village.

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iTunes Account Required for iPhone

Most of the articles I’ve come across regarding AT&T’s stipulation that an iTunes account is required for iPhone setup are pretty negative. People seem to be under the impression that Apple has some sort of evil intention, or trying to lock them into something.
From Engadget:

This should come as no surprise to those familiar with the practices of Apple, who regularly confines its users to fairly enclosed systems out of “ease of use” or “privacy” concerns, but anyone who was hoping to manage the iPhone and its contents with open and free (as in speech) software should probably give up hope now.

Despite all the outcries from haters, this is actually a good move, and particularly beneficial to the owner of the iPhone, regardless if they buy anything from the iTunes Store.

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Decisions, Decisions

Comment overheard between 2 Human Experience people today:
“Did you decide on radio buttons or check boxes?”

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CNN Redesign

Looks like CNN, has started posting links to its new Beta site. The new site has definitely been simplified and is much less cluttered, but doesn’t seem to have eliminated those ‘Latest News’ short absurd news headlines, like “Tests show zilch about dead whale shark”.
Guess I can’t have it all.
Check out screengrabs after the jump below.

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Links For Today 6.15.2007

iPods to blame for total eclipse of the art, says Hockney (via Engadget)

Speaking on the eve of his 70th birthday, Britain’s best-loved living painter said the proliferation of iPods – Apple has sold more than 100 million worldwide – and other digital music players has combined with a decline in art education to create a “fallow period of painting”.
“We are not in a very visual age,” Hockney said. “I think it’s all about sound. People plug in their ears and don’t look much, whereas for me my eyes are the biggest pleasure.

Dude, Hockney, what are you talking about? Not a very visual age? I guess Hockney has only been watching the proliferation of iPods and hasn’t been observing plasma/LCD television sales. Or computer displays, or time spent playing video games by people 13 to 40.
The reason we’re in a ‘fallow period of painting’ is because everything has been done in visual arts. Occasionally I’ll see a contemporary artist doing a good rehashing of abstract expressionism or minimalism, or something faintly resembling the collages of Robert Rauschenberg.
We might be in a fallow period of painting but I’ll bet you sales from painting retrospectives are high. The great art exhibits I can recall recently are all retrospectives the most recent being Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005 .
It’s the end of an era for painting. What will be interesting is to see what comes to fill the void.

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Links For Today 6.14.2007

The New Disruptors (via Business 2.0)
The Minister of Information (via Kottke)

Microsoft’s PowerPoint software is an all-conquering monster of crumminess, a threat to life as we know it. Most of all, if you are making a presentation, you can probably say everything you need to on a single folded sheet of eleven-by-seventeen copy paper, and you ought to.

IA’s are History (via Design View) – true?

Information Architects are often put on the defensive by spears flung by peers and brethren in elated disciplines. In taking the accusations seriously and accepting the truths within them, Grant Campbell reveals our greatest strengths – shallowness, insularity, and being “relegated” to history.

Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos

On professional behavior:
“You don’t think. You disrespect this place. That’s the reason why you were passed the fuck over.”

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No Extremes

(this is more of a stream-of-consciousness entry than it is a well-structured essay, so I apologize if I jump around a lot)
There seems to be an inverse relationship to the natural evolution of a company on a progressing path and the perception of this company by the public.
I think people are funny, what they complain about, what they react to.

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No Comparison

original Olympics logo:
original Olympics logo
London 2012 Olympics logo:
London 2012 Olympics logo
Dropping a pile of shit into an ice cream cone would make for a memorable (albeit foul and inappropriate) logo for the Olympics. Just because it’s memorable and would provoke a lot of arguments doesn’t mean its good.
The bottom line is a logo’s responsibility is to distill a huge amount of information and ideas into ONE MARK that conveys the essence of a product, brand, company or event.
The London 2012 logo not only miscommunicates, but needs the original Olympics logo embedded INTO it in order to put it in context! I don’t call that a ‘design element’, I call that a crutch.
End of discussion.

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Links For Today 6.11.2007

Agencies Behaving Badly

Why are the vast majority of agencies looking merely for people who know how to use certain tools? Why aren’t they looking for people who know how to produce modern product and truly functional results?

Adobe Launches AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), the artist formally known as Apollo (via TechCrunch).
Adobe has also dropped Flex 3 Beta (via MacNN) – this makes sense since it kinda ties in with their whole AIR product, letting developers create cross-platform RIA’s in browsers and on the desktop.
Microsoft is (read: wants to) going head-to-head with Flex/AIR with Silverlight. That’s great Microsoft, we’re up to version 9 of Flash and you decide to get into the RIA game. Flash has over 95% penetration and you’d like to to switch to your Silverlight plug-in why?
Video: Aero (Vista) vs. Beryl (Linux) – Ignore the crappy techno music and check out this amazing GUI for Linux. The 3-D rendering of application windows in particular blew me away.
I don’t think I want to post any news items relating to the iPhone. The tension in the air is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

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