NYTimes: ‘Selfie’ Trumps ‘Twerk’ as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year
Seriously, what’s going on?

What’s the non-iPhone smartphone world baking up these days?
Curved displays and 41-megapixel cameras:

I guess you can argue that some consumers need the 41-megapixel camera that Nokia introduced a few months ago. But the number of people who care about that is a sliver of the overall market. Things get even murkier with the Samsung Galaxy Round and its curved display. Technically, this feature does have marginal utility. When you rock the phone as it lies on its convex side, you can glimpse messages on the display if you happen to be looking at it sideways. This is pretty much the definition of “grasping at straws” when it comes to feature innovation.
It’s seems like companies are just spinning their wheels while they wait for whatever Apple might announce in 2014.

The 23-year-olds at Snapchat rejected a 4 billion dollar buyout offer.
In other news, Kanye West gives a lecture on design (?!?!?!) at Harvard Business School.
Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on in the world?

I recently downloaded the LucasArts iOS game, Tiny Death Star. I blame it on the double-pronged nostalgia attack of 8-bit graphics (a la the NES) and Star Wars, two integral elements of my childhood.
Tiny Death Star is a freemium game. Shit, I hate that word. Freemium means technically, superficially, it’s free, but in order to play at a reasonable pace and acquire upgrades and rewards, you have to make in-app purchases.
I can’t make a blanket statement and say I object to every app with a freemium business model. I specifically object to in-app purchases for games. My reason is simple: in a game, I expect progression based on my skill in playing, not on the size of my wallet.
In Tiny Death Star, acquiring certain properties is only possible if you buy in-app ‘bux’ and ‘credits’. The alternative is intially waiting hours and eventually waiting up to days to accumulate credits. As for bux, the only way to acquire them is to follow instructions from the (tiny) Emperor. Based on the price of certain items and the slow rate at which you’re awarded bux, it could take months and months of gameplay to make minimal progress.
Below is a screen grab of the Imperial Bux Store:

The fact that there is even the option to buy $99 worth of bux is bullshit.
This is not fun.
This is being squeezed, nickel-and-dimed, dare I say extorted, on a tiny scale (and by tiny I mean big).
I tried this game for a week but have since deleted it from my iPhone as it was clear I was getting nowhere fast. The only reason this game seems to exist is to jam more money into LucasArts’ pockets.
Count me out.

BatKid saves San Francisco.
I love this city.

My studio mate Brock Daves at Big Umbrella Studios here in San Francisco recently had a photo series published on The Bold Italic.
Subject matter? Dramatic Portraits of Dogs Pooping.
The series has proved so popular, TBI readers are submitting photos of their own dogs dropping deuces.
You never know what form a new meme will take.

—from Mr. & Mrs. Smith

The Scanadu Scout promises to allow you to keep tabs on your (or someone else’s) health. A small, hockey-puck-shaped device, it works through bodily contact. Hold it to your forehead and it displays, via a smartphone, your temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and plenty more.
The Scanadu Scout

Earlier this year Matt Gemmell defended the flat, buttonless UI aesthetic of iOS 7:

The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content.
Nigel Warren calls bullshit:
I appreciate some of their other insights, but I call bullshit on this specific point. Who, exactly, has grown up? In the past 30 years of traditional desktop GUIs, no one questioned the need for basic visual cues to demonstrate interactivity. When it comes to smartphones specifically, billions of people around the world have never used one. To take an example of a particularly smartphone-happy country, almost half the population in the U.S. has yet to buy one.
I’m with Nigel.
The lack of visual affordance in iOS 7 is just one of a handful of problems I have with iOS 7 (Fitt’s Law, anyone?).

Context looks like a great design tool:

Use the design tools you already know to create stunning photorealistic onscreen mockups with a click. Context links with Illustrator to allow you to see your concepts realized side-by-side, while you work.
Subscription licensing starts at $9 a month.

Via The New Yorker:

A new study released today indicates that Americans are safe from the threat of gun violence except in schools, malls, airports, movie theatres, workplaces, streets, and their own homes.

Also: highways, turnpikes, libraries, places of worship, parks, universities, restaurants, post offices, and cars.

Plus: driveways, garages, gyms, stores, military bases–and a host of other buildings, structures, and sites.
America, Fuck Yeah.

John Maeda on making decisions in the post-Moore’s Law world:

But we are now starting to wake up and look at the “Or else!” list and realize it reads like a “Do I care?” list. Do I care if my iPhone has enough storage to hold every bit of data on my laptop that is already synced to the cloud? Do I care if my desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to edit a few hundred full-feature films at levels of cinematic quality? How much smoothie do I really want to ingest right now? Back in the day when we all felt like we needed more horsepower and storage to do all the wonderful things we dreamed of doing in the digitalverse, the answer was always, “Hll yeah! More please!” But now, like many other areas of our lives, the answer is, “Well … do I really need that?”
The tech press and analysts are perplexed Apple is able to sell 3-year-old iPhones. Sure the iPhone 5s is faster and has more features, but that doesn’t change the fact that the 4 still offers a great *experience.
It’s similar to buying a new BMW versus one from 5 years ago. Move past the bells and whistles—what does it feel like when you’re driving it?

I received this email last week from a Kickstarter project I backed earlier this year, KLINE. LAYERED SKETCHBOOKS & JOURNALS:

We want to acknowledge here that we are experiencing discrepancies from the manufacturer between the prototypes and final products that are currently being delivered to Kickstarter backers. We are aware of many of the issues and are actively seeking to correct them. We have a large inventory to sort and send relative to the small KLINE team, and we are doing our best to send out only good books to you, our excited backers. These hours reviewing books has led to some delays in shipping, and also has seen some defective books elude our oversight and get into the post. If this happens to you, please let us know and we will work to quickly get you a KLINE that is deserving of the aged sedimentary stone name.
This goes to show there’s more to a successful Kickstarter project than the money you raise and the quality of your pitch video. In the end you have to ship a real product to real people. It may sound like I’m trivializing money, but getting it is the easy part.
Putting that money where your mouth is and creating and then shipping your creation the way it was envisioned takes skill and hard work.
Projects you see on Kickstarter are often (but not always) the appearance of reality, not reality. The goal of the project creator is to get the real thing to come as close as possible to the ideal they presented.
When I funded my Kickstarter project last year, it was straightforward with few variables: screen printed posters and decals. Paper and ink.
Even working with just those two materials can be hard as shit.