There’s something very thoughtful about this montage.
The word calculated comes to mind too.
check out somersetVII’s YouTube channel and lose yourself in some great work.

Looking at photographs and illustrations on the iPhone is a great experience. It helps if the artwork is great, of course. It’s such a rich, bright screen that images almost feel like little flat jewels in your hand as you flick through them.
I’ve banked a considerable collection of images that I’ve dragged and dropped from ffffound and other places to a folder on my desktop. Some of these find there way onto my phone as wallpaper.
This week I struck a little pocket of gold when my friend Promila posted a link to the work of Shinichi Maruyama. I went ahead and screengrabbed all his work, set up a 480 x 360 pixel Photoshop file and proceed to crop the photos to my liking.
Next step was to save out all the images as PNGs and drop them into a new collection in iPhoto.

The final step was changing the Sync settings in iTunes to include this iPhoto collection on my iPhone.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
found via David Kelley on TED.com:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

–Alan Kay
Alan was right.
This quote came to mind recently on I project I’m doing the visual design for, but my company is not building. The development of the project is being done by another vendor.
I don’t think splitting the design and development between 2 companies is a guaranteed recipe for failure, but it doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy either.
Whenever possible, always execute the design AND develop of projects you’re working on. Handling it all under one roof gives you no excuse for projects turning out wrong.

I ran across a post on Engadget this morning, Bumptop gives Windows 7 touchscreen PCs purpose.
I wrote about BumpTop 2 years ago. I wasn’t convinced back then on the utility of it.
I’m still not.
My thoughts remain the same – BumpTop it going too much in the direction of a literal desktop with their interface, and losing any benefits that come with a more abstracted desktop metaphor.
It’s likely that BumpTop will find a niche industry for their product that lends itself to such an interface, such as kiosks & Microsoft Surface apps in museums, science centers and other such public locations.
My problems with BumpTop echo sentiments my friend Bryan has told me when we were discussing the evolution of video games. We were talking about one of my old favorites in particular – Grand Theft Auto. According to Bryan, Grand Theft Auto 4 for the Playstation 3 is amazing. Amazing story, amazing graphics, amazing sounds, amazing effects. The problem is – it’s too much of a simulation and it begins to approach real-time and real-detail. It’s enough that I have a wife and a job and a computer and a dog in my own life, but now my video game is demanding an almost equal level of attention.
Applications don’t have to imitate every aspect of nature to feel natural and enjoyable.
Be selective in the features you choose to crank up the fidelity on when creating engaging products in experiences – that’s where the true art lies.

OK – there’s no other way to say it – THIS IS RAD.
Assissin’s Creed 2 has launched a teaser site. After a beautiful video intro, featuring some bits of Da Vinci’s sketchbooks, you arrive at screen with a symbol in the center.
When you click on the symbol, it downloads a PDF.
The PDF features the same symbol from the website, with instructions in the bottom left:
1. PRINT ARTIFACT SYMBOL
2. LOCATE WEL LIT WORK AREA
3. ACTIVATE LOCAL WEBCAM
4. INITIATE VIRTUAL INTERFACE
5. DETERMINE MATCHING PARTITION
After I begin the steps, this happens:




It might be hard to tell, but in the last 2 photos, the virtual hand is actually mapping in 3-D space as if it was attached to my piece of paper.
Much like the world of multi-touch computing, this is just the beginning of virtual interactions and camera manipulation we’ll be seeing on the web.
*On a related note, check out the sites Pioneers and Publicis & Hal Riney, which also explore alternative navigation techniques with webcams.

You know what the difference is between you and me?
…I make this look good.

• Agent J, Men in Black

via ffffound

I came across a great word in a recent post on GigaOm (referencing an NYT post):

Kaizen (改善, Japanese for “improvement”) is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life.

According to the post, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is a big proponent of kaizen.
The United States auto industry executives? Probably not so much.

So it looks as though my little experiment was fairly successful.
I posted an entry in September of last year with a layered Photoshop file containing the iconography for the mouse hand and arrow. I figured since I always have needed those assets when showing various interaction states for projects, others probably needed them too.
Looking at my stats since then, I’ve observed a steady stream of hits from Google Images with search terms ‘hand cursor icon’, ‘link hand cursor’, ‘arrow cursor icon’… and so on.
While my agenda with Daily Exhaust isn’t to acquire the most hits by posting trendy buzz words and topics, I knew this post might attract some visitors.
I hope this means people have found what they’re looking for.

I enjoy intellectual discussion about philosophy, technology and art, to name a few. I read books, articles and blog posts that stimulate my imagination. I also like to express my views on these subjects on this site.
As much as I like ‘high cuisine’ items such as these, sometimes I’m just in the mood for a Kit Kat.
This made my day today, via ffffound:

Amazon releasing a Kindle application for the iPhone was a very smart move. Like a lot of the news I’m reading today, I’m happy to see Amazon make this move and not try to wall off other devices. While it’s not going to replace the Kindle 1.0 my wife bought me for Christmas, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to read e-books I bought from Amazon on my iPhone.

Now some of you are thinking right now, ‘But Mike – you don’t seem to have any problem with your beloved Apple and their gated community of iPhone applications? Why aren’t you demanding the same openness Amazon is showing with its Kindle app from Apple and its iPhone?”. Ah – but I’m a proponent of the content being open, not the platform. Amazon is selling media files for the Kindle (books, magazines), the same way Apple is selling media files in iTunes (music), and if you remember, Apple didn’t want DRM on their music, the record executives insisted on it because we’re all nasty little thieves. Google made the same move with Google Docs publishing out to standard (albeit Microsoft proprietary) formats like .doc and .ppt instead of inventing its own.

With each succeeding year, it becomes more and more clear why Amazon isn’t just a website that sells stuff, they’re clearly a company focused on innovation.