Art tends not only to discover the truth but to exaggerate and finally distort it. And, maybe in this distortion lies the essence of art.

• Matthew Nowicki
  via NOTCOT

Pano is one of my new favorite iPhone apps. It’s super-easy to use and does a great job of stitching together all your shots, although a steady hand and far away subject matter definitely help.
As great as the app is, it still has room for improvement on the user interface. Like when you want to switch from portrait mode to landscape, you need to hit ‘Cancel’. Huh? The ‘Cancel’ button is actually the default button through the application experience.
After you’ve taken your photo series and need Pano to stitch them together, you hit ‘Cancel’ to bring up the options to: ‘Start Over’, ‘Make my panorama now!’, or ‘Resume shooting’. It makes no sense. There’s other options for button labeling to make the process less confusing, as well as plenty of real estate on the bottom nav bar if additional buttons were necessary (but I don’t think they are). Hell, even changing the button to read ‘Options’ would help out.
Here’s some shots I took up at the reservoir at Central Park today:



Pano for iPhone

My Suunto Lumi watch (Suunto calls them ‘wrist computers’) arrived this past week. It’s the first watch I’ve worn in around 8 years. I saw it posted on a gadget blog and fell in love with it. I mean, look at it, how could you not?

The only issue I have with the watch is the fluorescent orange band. I’m going to try and get a custom leather band made for it.

I wacked most of my information on my Facebook account and then deactivated it today.
I don’t find Facebook that useful anymore.
Ok, I never found it useful, but now I find it just plain annoying. It might be that I’m all growns up and have evolved my digital self. Or I could just be turning into a grumpy old man. Probably a little bit of both.
The status updates from my friends and my “friends” have been driving me postal lately. Most are updates in their lives. I guess this is good and appropriate, but I’ve been hitting the “See Less” link on my friends more and more, so my homepage feed is a tiny subset of all my friends.
My brother Mark published a great book a few years ago on the art of the away message, ‘Where There’s a Will, There’s Away… Messages: A 21st Century Guide to the Art of Absence‘. He wrote it in reference to his instant messaging methodology (back when we posted our status on AIM), but it’s just as relevent to the world of Twitter and Facebook.
Mark’s thoughts on posted his actual life status:

…Now there are two reasons I chose NOT to post Away Messages like those. Ever. The first is out of consideration to any onlookers; it’s boring. And the fact is, no one really cares where I am at any given time, they just want something to do while they’re bored or distracted. So I thought, “Why not give people something to read? Entertain them!” So I got into the habit of creating a new Away Message every day. I never repeated a Message. And each one had to be interesting in some way, so that there was a payoff for checking it. Clever, witty, funny, curious, ironic, familiar… as long as it was a nice diversion for all of 10 seconds, it was fair game.

Take some notes people, this isn’t just a plug, it’s good advice.

via loudpop

The details are not the details.
They make the design.

• Charles Eames
  via DesignAday

Roger Ebert’s review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Seems I won’t be seeing this flick after all.
…although, my reaction to this review is the same as driving by a car accident.
I have to look, if only for a second.

PC World: Coming Soon: Adobe Flash on Android, WinMo, and WebOS
All I have to say is, Flash sites kicked on my old Powerbook’s cooling fans faster than a mouse click – I can’t wait to see what it does on mobile devices.
I have no problem with a Flash-less iPhone.

“Trust me guys – it’s going to be AWESOME.”
Problem is, when you make statements like that, ‘it’ usually doesn’t end up that awesome.
‘It’ usually never gets made, or ‘it’ just ends up a piece of crap.
It’s essentially what Intel & Nokia announced in a press release on Intel’s website on their new alliance – Intel and Nokia Announce Strategic Relationship to Shape Next Era of Mobile Computing Innovation.

“This Intel and Nokia collaboration unites and focuses many of the brightest computing and communications minds in the world, and will ultimately deliver open and standards-based technologies, which history shows drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice,” said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel Corporation senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group. “With the convergence of the Internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless.”

Of course the possibilities are endless. All the big wigs at Intel and Nokia probably had some great brainstorming sessions on “the possibilities” – imagining all sorts of Minority Report gadgets that can communicate in any medium and control everything from your television to your car to your house, ‘with a push of a button’.
My brother Mark coined a term for this behavior of announcing something you eagerly want and have every intention of doing, but haven’t done – Chimera’s Lens. He introduced this to me many years ago when he asked me, “Imagine something funny …….see? Isn’t that funny?”
This is the same thing as saying “Picture the best mobile device… like, uh, picture something even better than the best mobile phone…. how fucking cool is that?”.
Microsoft is also having a bitch of a time launching real operating system updates, but they had no problem envisioned the year 2019:

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Apple continues on it’s upward track of success with the very real iPhone and the new paradigm of mobile software and mobile commerce they created – despite numerous blasts from the media over the years on their evil secrecy. The New York Times just published a new article titled, “Apple’s Obsession With Secrecy Grows Stronger“.
Nokia and Intel would benefit greatly by adopting some of this ‘secrecy’. It doesn’t even have to be secrecy, it could simply be keeping their mouths shut until that have something built to show off. This is what most of the media are referring to when they say ‘secrecy’.
The media doesn’t mind when no-name companies keep their product development under wraps do they? They don’t mind because a lot of no-name companies produce garbage.
Until Nokia and Intel actually produce some game-changing software or hardware products, their press release is really quite pointless.
UPDATE: What I forgot to mention on the positive note is I’m loving the fact that they’ve decided to use Linux Mobile as the software platform.

Richard Ziade over at basement.org has a great post on content owners and their obsession to protect their content:

It wasn’t about getting stuff for free. The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free. The mistake the content owners made was that they believed their content had value in a vacuum. It doesn’t. Content is part of the experience.

John Gruber shares my opinion on protecting your iPhone:

Is the internet awesome?

You don’t differentiate by copying the most attractive brand you can find. … No, you have to isolate that which is uniquely yours and amplify it compellingly.

Eric Karjaluoto shares an experience I think a lot of us designers have had as well and offers some sound advice. (via We are all Analogue)