Last week while I was looking through my site referrals I came across an interesting writer. Her name is Elmo Keep.
How could I not dig deeper with a name like that?
Like most good writers both her words and the words she recommends you to read are solid.
Here’s a bit from a piece she wrote on technology and culture called Don’t Fear the Reaper:

A lack of knowledge of the technology being critiqued is evidently not a reason to not espouse your thoughts on it. Aaron Sorkin deigned to use Facebook for a two-week research period in preparing to write the almost hysterically overwrought Social Network. He compared it unfavourably to reality TV, as only two weeks of cursory use will allow. Jonathan Franzen will call Twitter the antithesis of in-depth thought without so much as being connected to the Internet. Roger Ebert is happy to declare video games exempt from the “real art” canon without ever having played one. All these failures of imagination seem to spring from an age old knee-jerk reaction to the New: it is far easier, and takes less time, to dismiss something foreign outright than to properly interrogate and investigate it.

So far, the few pieces I’ve read by Keep resonate a lot with me.
I also dug her piece in The Age on the new HBO series ‘Girls’ which I’ve been watching because, well, my wife’s been watching it.
Keep also has a well-designed website. In the same way I think it’s important for designers to write well, I also think it’s as important for writers to know how to present their work on the web. I don’t expect either to master the other’s craft, but shit, at least try. She seems to be trying.

There’s been a lot of discussion on how Apple is getting aggressive at getting Google off of iOS, ever since the Steve Jobs “thermonuclear” comment.
Many have been focusing on this snubbing of Google in an almost soap opera kind of way. John Gruber got a keen “fuck you, Google” feeling about the whole keynote and I agree there’s absolutely some strong, healthy rivalry going on. No doubt.
But after watching Scott Forstall walk through the new features of Siri, I realized it really doesn’t require a lot of justification on why they’re not using Google, it just makes good business sense.
Have a look at these screen grabs from the keynote:



You catch some of the logos in those images?
Yelp. OpenTable. Rotten Tomatoes (we also know they’re getting a good chunk of horsepower from Wolfram Alpha).
Apple hasn’t snubbed Google like a teenage girl, they’re merely cut out the middle man.
In much the same way as Apple rethought what a smartphone is with the iPhone, they’re now rethinking search.
A smartphone no longer means having a dedicated (hardware) keyboard on your device and search no longer means having a dedicated search box on your screen.
I can envision a time in the not-too-distant future where many people start replacing the term, “Just Google it.” with “Just ask Siri.” You watch.

After watching the WWDC Keynote, a few great things stood out to me:

• Unified Alerts and Notifications (like on iOS) which automatically disable when you plug into an external projector – for anyone who does presentations regularly, this resolves the distracting email and IM/Growl alerts that pop up
• Unified Search Field in Safari – Address Bar and Search Box have been combined
• iCloud Tabs – any web pages you have open on any of your other iCloud-connected devices are accessible from your desktop computer
• AirPlay Screen Sharing – so much better than connecting to crappy projectors with dongles

The greatest thing to see in OS X is the bleeding over of iOS features to the desktop environment in ways that make sense. This is the opposite of Microsoft, who’s abruptly moving their users to a completely new environment in Windows 8 (they even killed the Start Menu, even in their ‘classic mode’), Apple is taking little steps, year-by-year to merge the mobile and desktop operating systems.
Slow, careful iterations.
John Gruber pointed this out in a Macworld article he wrote in 2010:

This is how the designers and engineers at Apple roll: They roll.

They take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity. At an anticipated media event, Apple reveals this core product as its Next Big Thing, and explains–no, wait, it simply shows–how painstakingly thoughtful and well designed this core product is. The company releases the product for sale.

Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they’ve got a snowman. That’s how Apple builds its platforms. It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement–so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.

Design isn’t just how it looks. It’s also not just a solution to a problem. Design is having a plan.

Great post by Kyle Baxter on how crucial iCloud and Siri are to Apple’s future and why you don’t need all the new shiny products:

It sounds like I’m complaining that today’s event was a let-down, iOS 6 isn’t introducing much worth upgrading for, and the new MacBook Pro is a boring update. That’s not what I’m saying. Actually, each thing Apple announced is impressive and took a massive amount of work. The new MacBook Pro really is the best notebook Apple’s ever shipped, but here’s the thing: their line-up as of 9:59 AM this morning was really, really good too. Apple’s hardware is getting to the point where it’s so good that it’s good enough for nearly everyone, so dramatic improvements like a retina display for Macs is a relatively minor improvement for users. The same goes for iOS.

Remember, Apple makes computers. Every year. That’s how they make money. This does not mean you have to buy them every year. The same way you don’t have to buy a new car every year. Or a new house. Or new boxers.

Sometimes you can go years without buying new versions of those things.

Michael Mace gives the good, the bad and the ugly on Windows 8 Preview in a very short 8,300+ word review.
Here’s one of many insightful conclusions Mace comes to:

Because of its problems, Windows 8 isn’t fun to use, at least for me. Whatever sense of joy I get from the cool new graphics is outweighed by a feeling that my productivity is being reduced. Think of the best new app or website you’ve ever discovered; the feeling you got the first time you understood the power of Twitter or you created a presentation and it came out looking great. That feeling of empowerment and excitement is critical to getting people started with a new technology. But Windows 8 makes makes me feel limited and cramped. It isn’t a launch pad, it’s a cage.

If Windows 8 is a problem for me, what’s it going to do to a typical Windows user who just wants to get work done and doesn’t have time to learn something new? And what sort of support burden is it going to put on the IT managers of the world?

It’s going to be very interesting to see how Windows 8 does when it hits virtual shelves.

The NYTimes is reporting Nokia is cutting 10,000 jobs as part of an “emergency overhaul”.
Remember this Fast Company cover from a few years ago:

Remember, the technology world is volatile.
Shit changes quickly.

The people blogging over at the Wall Street Journal appear to be eating retard sandwiches, like Clint Boulton:

But it may also wreak havoc on CIOs’ networks and connectivity budgets — better quality displays require more network bandwidth, which allows users to increase data consumption. Consider that experts told CIO Journal earlier this year that the new iPad, which includes a Retina display of 2048-by-1536 resolution with 3.1 million pixels, would slow enterprise networks to a crawl and increase data costs from carriers. Now imagine how a Macbook with 5.1 million pixels — two million more than the new iPad — will increase data traffic in office networks.

This statement is up there with the shit former Senator Ted Stevens said about the Internet being a series of tubes, although not as entertaining.
I take that back. Mr. Boulton is more dumber.
via The Loop

via asaucerfullofwheels

Isn’t the bottom of our computer prettier than the top of anyone else’s computer?
-Phil Schiller, WWDC Keynote 2012

Update – For those who didn’t catch what I was referencing with the title of this post, it might have been due to the fact my memory of Jeff Goldblum uttering it in the movie Annie Hall was fuzzy.
The correct line is, “I forgot my mantra.”

Guitarist Pete Cosey died a couple weeks back. He did his most well-known work playing with Miles Davis during his most manic electric phase in the 1970s. Here’s a great vid of the band from a show in Vienna in 1973. Cosey gets into it at 6:10. Very, very evil.