As soon as the day ended, I knew that date would be stuck in my head forever.

I walked to work—from the East Village down to Mercer Street in SoHo. The weather was 70 degrees, zero clouds, zero humidity. It’s sadly ironic, but whenever I feel perfect weather, I think of 9/11.

I watched the towers fall from my boss’ roof. I could feel the ground shake when each tower fell. In the distance you could hear people screaming. When I left work later in the day, the streets were deserted. Lower Manhattan felt like a movie set. No cars. Very few people. It was surreal.

My girlfriend, who would later become my wife, lived in Queens and since the subways had all been shut down, I couldn’t get to her. So I put on my rollerblades and rollerbladed from East Village, over the Queensboro Bridge, to Astoria Queens, about 5 miles. Every now and then a police car would pass me coming from Ground Zero, tossing dust and debris in my face. For the next month, the smell of burning iron swept through my windows.

Below are some photos I took on my walk to work 11 years ago today.

Going on at Kickstarter right now, Impossible Instant Lab:

Your digital images transformed into real instant photographs. That’s impossible, right?

Right! We are Impossible and we love instant photography. We love it so much, we were crazy enough to buy the last Polaroid factory in order to save instant film for the future. If you’ve ever held an SX 70 in your hand, you probably understand. It’s such a beautiful piece of design and the photos it makes are so different from any other camera – unique and magical. But even we instant film aficionados take a lot of pictures with our iPhones, so we wanted to find a way to turn those digital iPhone images into true instant photos.

via ISO50

via asaucerfullofwheels

When Apple makes a new product, usually the message is, “Can you believe how great this is?”
And when Amazon makes a new product, usually the message is, “Can you believe how cheap this is?”

—Marco Arment

The work of Deadboy

I quoted to this piece by Michael Lopp back on June 28, but I’m quoting it again:

Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there – anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful.

More bad news via metaphors. Your enticing success has your competition chasing you, and that means that, by definition, that they need to run harder and faster than you so they can catch up. Yes, many potential competitors are going to bungle the execution and vanish before they pose a legitimate threat but there’s a chance someone will catch up, and when they do, what’s their velocity? Faster than yours.

Shit.

As sucky as it is to watch HP copy the design of the iMac, and Samsung copy the design of the iPhone and iOS (and their retail stores and their dock connectors and everything else) and Jeff Bezos copy Steve Jobs’ presentation style to introduce the new Kindles (last year and this year)—none of these companies will be able to create anything better by copying.
Things get interesting once you leave the copying phase and start mutating ideas to fit your vision. All of these companies copying Apple are acting like me in design school, when I imitated my favorite painters and sculptors and designers while I developed my own artistic vision.
The problem with Apple’s competitors is most of them seem to have no interest in developing their own vision and that is unfortunate because we could have a much more diverse and creative spectrum of technology products on the market right now.

William Moggridge, Designer and Laptop Pioneer, Dies at 69

Most people have been focusing on how shameless Samsung has been in copying Apple’s product design given the recent Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit.
We shouldn’t overlook HP, who just announced their Spectre One desktop:

Just in case you forgot, this is Apple’s iMac and the Magic TrackPad, 2010:

Quick thought: Does the fact that we call programs on mobile devices ‘apps’ have any correlation to how cheap people become when debating buying one for $2.99?
By truncating the word application, I wonder if it loses some of its weight and professionalism. It’s like the difference between taxi and limousine.
People have no idea what goes into some of their favorite and best built ‘apps’. The testing, the QA, the underlying databases and coding.
No idea at all.

The Kindle Fire HD 7-inch is fairly responsive.
It’s d√©j√† vu all over again.
via DF

I respect this man’s enthusiasm for his new Chevy, but he needs to focus on eating and not making models out of the dinnerware.
via Blog de Carros Antigos

via Blog de Carros Antigos