So Adobe has (officially) launched Acrobat.com. I’ve been playing with this service since last year and I love it (I actually posted about BuzzWord back in November 2007), but now they’re offering business subscriptions and it’s officially out of beta.
I’m going to avoid the hyperbole that’s all over the web right now. I won’t entertain questions like ‘Will Acrobat.com bitch-slap Google Docs and Microsoft Office?’.
What I’d like to focus on is the quality of services offered and their attention focus on design.
BuzzWord, ConnectNow, and the rest of the suite are all offered as online Flash (Flex) applications. While a pixel-perfect GUI, smooth interactions and tight engineering aren’t guaranteed with Flash applications, they are certainly possible and Adobe has achieved all of these.
While I don’t consider Adobe a ‘design’ company, I definitely see a distinct difference between Adobe and Google.
It’s the same difference I see between Apple’s iPhone operating system and software and it’s competition – Google Android – there’s a level of sophistication and design that just isn’t present in Google Docs or Google Android.
I wouldn’t quite put Google in the same category as Microsoft, but there’s no question that they’re both engineer-driven, not designer-driven. Earlier this year, we heard from the former Visual Design Lead at Google, Doug Bowman, on what’s it’s like to be a designer inside Google:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Now I’m sure Adobe is filled with hundreds of engineers as well, but it’s clear from the execution of Acrobat.om that there’s much more of a designer-engineer balance.
As there should be.

NYTimes.com: The Case for Working With Your Hands
On the fruits of our labors:

Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.

On focus:

Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

I’m 32 years old and I still have trouble sitting still at work.
And on taking responsibility and having some balls:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain …So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions.

This made my morning:

via Design You Trust

Nicolas Felton updates his site for 2009 (via ChangeTheThought).
…and of course he did logo for one of my favorite lower east side bars:

The Beasties are getting old, but they still got it.
From the Jimmy Fallon Show, May 25, 2009:

UPDATE – I switched out the broken YouTube link for a Hulu link. Their performance of Whatcha Want kicks in at around 19:30.

PSFK: SoHo Loses Iconic DKNY Mural
I won’t lie, I’m kinda sad about this, but we residents know New York is a city of constant change. Destroying and creating. Destroying and creating.

from BBC News:

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of
300,000 users found.

How is this even remotely surprising?
Isn’t this consistent with millions of other scenarios in life?
This 90/10 ratio follows the basic theory Joseph Juran coined for this phenomenon back in the 1940’s, after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.
via Wikipedia:

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule,[1] the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

This is not to be confused with Ms. Jackson’s Pleasure Principle.

The new iPhone 3GS.

This week Adobe released a new service – BrowserLab. Type a URL into the address field and it takes screengrabs of it in web browsers for Window XP (IE7 & FF3) and Mac OS X (Safari 3.0 & FF3).
It’s a Flex application, published in Flash format, meaning that anyone can use it (you do need to sign up for an an Adobe account).
I don’t do as much cross-platform/browser testing as I used to, but I’m still excited that this service now exists. How long have we designers and developers been waiting for this type of service? Sure there’s BrowserShots and other Windows-only applications, but BrowserShots usually has a delay on screen renderings and I’m on a Mac so I can’t use the Windows-only apps that do exist.
It’s still new and a bit buggy for me – some screengrabs take a minute or 2 to get created, but I’m exciting to see where this goes.
Nice job Adobe.
(found via CNet)
UPDATE: I missed this before, but BrowserLab does have other browsers to pick from:

Brand New: Bing sets New Record in Horizontal Scaling
Armin tells it like it is on the Bing logo:

This is like setting the resolution of your screen to 6,000 pixels wide by 1,000 high. I can’t even imagine how someone arrives at a design solution like this. The shapes resulting from the strenuous horizontal scaling are simply too unflattering and unattractive. There is bad taste and then there is this.

I came across this photo at one of the many Tumblr photo blogs I now follow, big fun.
It reminded me of something i vaguely remember hearing/reading about Deniro actually driving a cab around NYC in preparation for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
From Wikipedia:

While preparing for his role as Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900. According to Peter Boyle, he would “finish shooting on a Friday in Rome…get on a plane from Italy, fly to New York”, whereupon he got himself a cab driver’s license. He would then go to a garage, pick up a real cab and drive around New York, returning it before he had to depart for Rome again.[2] Robert De Niro also acknowledged that while working on Travis’s accent, on his days off from shooting 1900, he would go to an army base in Northern Italy and tape-record the accents of some of the locals there as he felt they would be good for Travis’s character.

Daring Fireball: Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration Can’t Be Legit

Third, if you’re still holding out any sort of hope that Palm is using some sort of heretofore sanctioned, semi-sanctioned, or even maybe-sorta-kinda-sanctioned-if-you-squint-your-eyes means for a third-party device to sync with iTunes via USB, note that the Pre, when connected to iTunes, is labelled as an “iPod”. If you think Apple would ever allow the use of “iPod” to describe anything other than an actual iPod, you’re nuts.