There’s good things you can do when you speculate and there’s stupid shit you can do.
Stupid speculation involves the mindless shit you see in stories like this on CNet: Apple’s rumored iWatch delays due to manufacturing issues?
A product can’t be delayed unless the company making the product has issued a launch date. Apple has done no such thing. So this speculative headline is a waste of time.
Then there’s the other kind of speculation. The fun speculation. The creative speculation that involves your imagination. I’m talking about when people imagine what a supposed product might look or work like. Or, if they’re disappointed in an existing product, showing you what’s possible in an alternate universe.
Of of my more recent favorite examples is the Microsoft rebranding done by (then student) Andrew Kim. This work landed him a job on the XBox team.
The newest Apple rumor, as mentioned above, is Apple’s supposed iWatch.
Designer Todd Hamilton created a beautiful animated 3-D rendering of his vision of the “iWatch”:

Now, we can argue about the practicality of Hamilton’s idea and poke holes in all the things he might have done wrong, but to do so would be to miss the point. Design is iterative. Hamilton’s iWatch video should be seen as a baton in a race someone else can pick up and run with and improve.
The Version One of anything is usually not what the Shipped Version looks and works like (neither are a lot of Version Twos, Threes, Fours and Fives).

I used to think it was forgivable for a director to be ‘flexible’ with the facts when creating movies based on historical events. The job of a movie is first and foremost to entertain, right? Facts are optional.
I’m not sure I still agree with this perspective.
It’s one thing to portray scenes where characters are behind closed doors—where there are no accounts of what was actually said and done. It’s another thing to inaccurately depict scenes based on events which actually took place and for which we have confirmed records of what was actually said and done.
What got me thinking about this topic were comments on Google+ by Steve Wozniak back in August of 2013, where he reacted to the inaccuracies in the movie Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher:

Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me. I was an engineer at HP designing the iPhone 5 of the time, their scientific calculators. I had many friends and a good reputation there. I designed things for people all over the country, for fun, all the time too, including the first hotel movie systems and SMPTE time code readers for the commercial video world. Also home pinball games. Among these things, the Apple I was the FIFTH time that something I had created (not built from someone else’s schematic) was turned into money by Jobs. My Pong game got him his job at Atari but he never was an engineer or programmer. I was a regular member at the Homebrew Computer Club from day one and Jobs didn’t know it existed. He was up in Oregon then. I’d take my designs to the meetings and demonstrate them and I had a big following. I wasn’t some guy nobody talked to, although I was shy in social settings. i gave that computer design away for free to help people who were espousing the thoughts about computers changing life in so many regards (communication, education, productivity, etc.). I was inspired by Stanford intellectuals like Jim Warren talking this way at the club. Lee Felsenstein wanted computers to help in things like the antiwar marches he’d orchestrated in Oakland and I was inspired by the fact that these machines could help stop wars. Others in the club had working models of this computer before Jobs knew it existed. He came down one week and I took him to show him the club, not the reverse. He saw it as a businessman. It as I who told Jobs the good things these machines could do for humanity, not the reverse. I begged Steve that we donate the first Apple I to a woman who took computers into elementary schools but he made my buy it and donate it myself.
I believe it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too: you can have a historically accurate movie and have it be highly entertaining as well.
The two are not mutually exclusive.

—Aldous Huxley

Cory Doctorow on the future of the Web as we know it:

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.
Scary shit.

Interesting data from Next Big Sound on Artist Distribution:

Wells Baum says it’s not your fault:

91% of artists remain undiscovered. It’s not your fault, it’s the algorithms.
Algorithms play a part in this, but so does the basic distribution of talent among humans. As George Carlin said:
Not all children are smart and clever, got that? Kids are like any other group of people: a few winners…a whole lot of losers.
When I taught at Rutgers and FIT, I found this to be the case as well. I naively expected every kid in my classes to be a passionate, talented and curious designer.
Not so. I quickly discovered I was lucky if I had 1 or 2 talented—and more importantly, hungry—students in a class of 15-20.

via Bombtune

People are all up in arms about Google buying Nest and knowing even MORE about you, but don’t forget about Amazon:

Drawing on its massive store of customer data, Amazon plans on shipping you items it thinks you’ll like before you click the purchase button. The company today gained a new patent for “anticipatory shipping,” a system that allows Amazon to send items to shipping hubs in areas where it believes said item will sell well. This new scheme will potentially cut delivery times down, and put the online vendor ahead of its real-world counterparts.
Hey, Amazon, I do want that Rancilio Espresso Machine, but I can’t afford it, so don’t you dare ship it to me.

BGR on iOS 7.1:

Additionally, iOS 7.1 should help unify iOS 7 better graphically, with various user interface updates across the entire system and in apps for a more cohesive feel.
Please fix this stuff.
And this stuff.
And this stuff too.
(If you didn’t know, the title of this post is a great Beatles tune)

via NOS

Drake Baer, for Fast Company, on how the brains of creative people work (via Bombtune):

While most have us have a fair amount of latent inhibition helping us to filter out irrelevant data, creative (and maybe also psychotic) people aren’t quite so ordered, making for what Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson calls cognitive disinhibition. She defines it as “the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.” In other words, it’s allowing for more info to come in than seems immediately beneficial.

For example:

A person with low latent inhibitions would not only see a yellow desk lamp, they may also think of bananas, Spongebob Squarepants, or Spongebob Squarepants eating a banana, or possibly concoct a whole dissertation in their head about whether or not Spongebob likes to eat bananas, or how he could get them down in the ocean
Weird? Weird like how?
Like screen-printing a poster of George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television?
That’s completely normal.
What?

Links, links, links. Life is a series of links. Shit happened this week. Here’s a few things that caught my eye:
Tobias Frere-Jones is suing Jonathan Hoefler (via everywhere). The typography duo that brought you THE typeface of the 2000s—Gotham—is in court. This should remind you never to be envious of a perfect company or perfect marriage. They don’t exist.
DENHAM PSYCHO (via Quipsologies). Well-executed (no pun intended) hipster remake of the business card and axe scenes in American Psycho (It’s incredible how many guys in San Francisco look exactly like the ones depicted in this video).
Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee with Jay Leno. This episode is great. Most of em are. I’m happy Jerry is back with a new season.
MAMP. It let’s you use your Mac as a server for local testing. I’m using it to work on a new WordPress site. It’s been around a while, but it’s new to me (Hey, cut me some slack, I’m a designer, not a dev).
One-third of the 8,500 or so taxi drivers in San Francisco … have ditched driving a registered cab in the last 12 months to drive for a private transportation startup like Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar instead. Woah.
The Bacon Method. Set oven to 400 degrees. Toss in tray of bacon. Set timer for 20 minutes. Then you have perfectly cooked bacon.

Image taken from The New York Times
via Twitter

…of Common UI Symbols