BGR: Samsung continues to explain how hard it is to make an iPhone 6 ‘killer’:

After explaining a few days ago how hard it is to make an iPhone 6 “killer” – the partially metallic Galaxy Alpha is considered Samsung’s response to the incoming 4.7-inch iPhone 6 – Samsung is back with more marketing nonsense in a second post on the company’s blog that further explains the way Samsung designed this new phone.
Just stop, Samsung. You’re just making yourself look more pathetic.
Also, the bezeled edge on the new Galaxy Alpha couldn’t look like more of an iPhone 5 ripoff.

via BGR

Remember when you would talk to your friend—face-to-face or maybe over the landline telephone—and make plans for the weekend? Then a few days would pass and that weekend you would actually meet your friend where you had agreed to meet? This experience is foreign to a lot of people, particularly Millenials, the first generation to have grown up with cellphones and the Internet since birth.

Generally speaking, Millenials started popping out of their mothers’ uteruses around the time Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991.

To be clear, though, Gen Xers, Gen Yers and Baby Boomers are all just as susceptible to being flaky shits.

Cellphones Make People Flaky as [Shit] via Alex Cornell

via Colossal

At Wired, Nick Stockton on why it’s so hard to catch our own typos:

You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.
Why?
The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task,” he said.
If you’ve been following Daily Exhaust for a while, you’ve likely seen many of my typos. I always miss them. Luckily my friend and DE contributor Bryan always spots them like a sharp shooter.
Ironically, I notice I’m usually able to spot my typos after I hit the Publish button and I’m reading my post live on the site. I attribute this to my brain leaving the “conveying meaning” mode (see above quote) and switching into “reading” mode. I’m no longer close to my words.

via Twitter

This week Michael and Bryan discuss apathy, smoke alarms, f!cking bagel Fridays at the office, Robin Williams, Über, Lyft and Airbnb. The episode opens with a binaural 3D sound recording from the Eau Rouge/Radillon complex at Spa-Francorchamps.
Weekly Exhaust Episode 13

My first thought when I saw the above UI Reel for Guardians of The Galaxy was, Those are incredible visual effects.
My second thought was, these graphics look familiar.
In particular, It reminded me of GMUNK‘s work (aka Bradley G Munkowitz). GMUNK has been working in the VFX world for around 15 years, most recently being the guy behind the UI in Tron: Legacy:

He’s also worked on Oblivion.
The Guardians UI also reminded me of Mark Coleron’s work that goes back 10-12 years on films like Deja Vu, Children of Men, Mission Impossible 3, The Bourne Identity, Alien vs Predator, Blade II, The Island & Mr. & Mrs. Smith:

It’s interesting how the vision of future computer interfaces has been remarkably consistent over the last 12 years.
I wonder if this will change.

PREMISE #1: Windows 8 was designed to make Windows relevant on tablets as well as desktops.

PREMISE #2: The Surface 2-in-1 was designed to assist the transition of Windows 8 from notebooks to tablets.

FACT: The current ad campaign targets the Surface at notebooks, not tablets.

QUESTION: So what purpose does the Surface serve?

CONCLUSION: None.
—John Kirk, Microsoft’s Surface Ads: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

—Yossarian
via thisisnthappiness

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.
—Ethan Zuckerman, The Internet’s Original Sin

This home page case study by John Henry Müller is a must-read for visual designers:

We released Pack last fall with what we thought was a pretty solid homepage. It had all the bells and whistles you’d like to see on a modern product website: approachable hand written headline, custom ambient background video, playful colors, benefit-led descriptions of key features, scroll triggered animations, prominent call-to-action, charming microcopy, responsive, CSS3, HTML5, blah blah blah. All of the things.

Recently we officially switched over to a drastically simplified homepage after A/B testing for 10 days.

The results of this test were surprising and frankly: embarrassing.
User experience design, or UX design, is a necessary skill for UX and visual designers alike.
Remember what Steve Jobs said, design isn’t about how it looks, but how it works.
Pretty comes later. Make sure your shit works first.

How awesome is the Surface 3?
All you need to know is that there are now docking stations on sale. Right now!
Because, you know, that’s what I look for in a tablet.
A fucking docking station.