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Just a reminder I’m on Twitter (been since ’07).
It’s where I post exhaust that doesn’t warrant a full blog post.
I guess you could consider them more like solid backfires that full exhaust streams.
I usually make it worth my while, and yours.

This looks absolutely gorgeous.
But until I see something besides (great) Photoshopped 3-D renderings and (shitty) After Effects video demos, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Vaporware.
Syncing? Responsive touchscreen? Integrated mapping, email, contacts, media and browsing? Easy to use? Great applications?
I hope so, but something tells me LG is going to let me down.

Flynn Lives

You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you… even in the face of our death. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything I feel… all this, and more, I… I bequeath you, my son. You will carry me inside you, all the days of your life. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father, and the father the son. This is all I… all I can send you, Kal-El.

—Jor-El aka Marlon Brando aka The Greatest of All Time, Superman

I came across this photo at one of the many Tumblr photo blogs I now follow, big fun.
It reminded me of something i vaguely remember hearing/reading about Deniro actually driving a cab around NYC in preparation for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
From Wikipedia:

While preparing for his role as Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900. According to Peter Boyle, he would “finish shooting on a Friday in Rome…get on a plane from Italy, fly to New York”, whereupon he got himself a cab driver’s license. He would then go to a garage, pick up a real cab and drive around New York, returning it before he had to depart for Rome again.[2] Robert De Niro also acknowledged that while working on Travis’s accent, on his days off from shooting 1900, he would go to an army base in Northern Italy and tape-record the accents of some of the locals there as he felt they would be good for Travis’s character.

Cameron Moll contemplates, Is it time to move beyond 960?

So what’s the ideal width? I’m not sure yet. Let’s figure it out together. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
• 1020 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15 but not 8 and 16. It’s not much wider than 960.
• 1040 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16 but not 3, 12, or 15. Yet it has a reasonable width that sits somewhere between the lower end of 960 and higher end of users browsing full screen (many don’t, of course).
• 1080, which is what I’m taking for a spin with a site right now, is divisible 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 but not 16. It pushes the upper end of the width spectrum, and measure (line length) could become an issue if not dealt with appropriately.

I’ve actually used the 960 CSS framework he speaks of on my last two projects at Roundarch.
I remember the day my friend Jory IM’d me when Apple launched their new 984 pixel-wide website a few years ago. It was a sign, at least for us, that we could officially, safely, move beyond 800×600.
Laugh if you want, but 184 pixels is a big deal when your life revolves around those tiny, square sons-of-bitches.
Now CNN, NYTimes, BBC and Amazon all are optimized for at least 980 (Amazon is an elastic layout, but locks to around 980 on resize).

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.

So Khoi Vihn, over on his blog, Subtraction, has a post about design magazines and how he perceives – and inevitably handles them differently than the beat-up copy of the New Yorker in his bag.
With regard to publications such as Eye and Print:

It’s taken me years of subscribing to these magazines or buying them on newsstands to finally admit to myself that, more often than not, they sit on my desk upon arrival and don’t get read. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I consider them to be objects to be stored and protected from the ravages of reading.

This calls to mind one of my favorite quotes, from the book, The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he
does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless
thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

My advice to Mr. Vihn is to do his best to get over his phobia of using magazines. I’m not saying he needs to go as far as to dog ear the pages, but use them, break them in like a good baseball mitt. Believe it or not, the books and magazines I’ve knocked around a bit tend gain more value to me than the museum pieces I haven’t touched for years.
I feel the same way about electronics. The more you try to keep them scratch-free and perfect, the more upset you’ll be when they get scratches, nicks and dings (I’ve written about this before).

It’s a trivial feature, but the fact the I can screengrab anything on my iPhone is great.

Continue…

Dell’s Zing hopes to rival Apple in ecosystem, launch two players early next year
From the article:

Dell’s hoping to partner up with Apple’s rivals to build a new ecosystem that will create better interoperation between PMPs, phones, cars, satellite radios and the multitude of online music stores out there. From the looks of things, that ecosystem is in good hands: with the acquisition of Zing’s Tim Bucher, formerly of Apple fame, and the 120 person team he’s built to help Dell put Apple in its place.

So, let me get this straight. Apple has created the most successful media management software (iTunes) and the highest selling media player (iPod) through a closed-source ecosystem where they tightly develop and integrate both these ends (software and hardware) – BUT somehow, Dell hopes to do this through partnering with a bunch of other “rivals” (oooooh) in hopes of creating a better alternative?
Listen, this isn’t like Voltron. Dell’s not going start connecting itself with other companies to form a MegaTechBot and wield its blazing sword of mediocrity at the evil Apple.
Based on my subway ride every morning, people seem to really, really, really like iPods. And iPhones. I think maybe they use Apple products because Apple focuses on making technology that people like to use. Crazy idea I know.
I also love the fact there are still some people DYING for Apple ‘challengers’. It’s not impossible people. Apple is not perfect by any means. If these companies start focusing on making great products and turn their attention off of Apple, they just might end up giving Apple a run for their money. Ah the beauty of paradoxes.