Back in 2007, I imagined what it must feel like to build an amazing piece of electronics only to have it loaded with a shitty piece of Windows software to run it.
With a lack of options and expertise in software development, PC vendors have to use Windows.
Now lets switch focus to mobile phones. It’s 2010, and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen. Sure, there’s word that they’ll be releasing Windows Mobile 7 by Q4 of 2010, but their current offering (WinMo 6.5) is an embarrassment.
Luckily phone makers have an alternative – Google Android.
Now I’m not surprised that phone makers have adopted Android. What I’m surprised at is the degree they’ve embraced it. I love Om Malik’s term for it – the Androidification of Everything.
LG plans to use Android on more than half its smartphones. Motorola Plans 20-30 Android Phones for 2010. And it’s no secret how HTC feels about Android.
If Microsoft has proven anything, it’s that they eventually get up to speed with the rest of the market. After 8 years of XP and the duds since (notably Vista), they’ve launched a solid Windows 7 and the Zune HD is a big improvement over it’s brown ancestor. It’s very likely that Windows Mobile 7 will be ready to compete with the big boys by Q4 of this year.
But this time around phone makers will have a choice.

I visited my family this weekend and my parents and I got on to the topic of family history and artifacts. Then my father broke out the Envelope.
The envelope contains documents, certificates and other printed matter from his family. I’ve seen it before, but we decided to look at the contents again (with my prodding).
I explained to my father that these papers are important for reasons other than his designer son loves retro graphics and typography. It would be great to get these things framed and protected so we share them and have them last. To my father’s credit, aside from the old envelope they were kept in, he’s done a great of keeping everything safe, dry and away from sunlight.
Below is one of the more interesting documents that belonged to my great, great Uncle Michael, whom my father (Michael Mulvey) was named after.
It’s a Declaration of Intention, in which my great, great uncle renounces his allegiance to the King of Great Britain after leaving Ireland for the United States of America (click on the first image to see a bigger version):



Particular details I love:
– His color is white, but his complexion is dark
– He renounces his allegiance to any foreign leader particularly George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland (remember, Ireland used to be controlled by England)
– He is not an anarchist or a polygamist

Via Engadget:

The biggest bombshell so far is the ITC complaint, in which Nokia’s asking the commission to ban imports of basically every Apple mobile product from the MacBook to the iPhone for infringing its device patents

In related news, Nokia also told the ITC that Apple’s been cheating and looking off their pages during the final exam. ITC told Nokia to stop crying, keep their eyes on their own paper and ignore what Apple is doing.

What do I think about ActionScript 3.0, as someone who hasn’t really coded a (micro)site in over a year (save for the splash page I just made for one of my clients at Roundarch, I hope no one ever has to see the redundant, convoluted code I created to make it work)?
I like it. I’ll be getting up to speed for another few months with my new copy of Learning ActionScript 3.0, but luckily the side projects I have right now will help me figure it all out. That’s how I learn new technologies – I need a problem to solve first.
Sometimes these problems are self-imposed, like when I was unemployed for 6 months in 2002 and decided to teach myself how to build database-driven Flash sites with MySQL & PHP (which I installed and ran locally on OS X 10.1). And other times these problems are directives from employers – back in 2003, I was told we needed to make the Flash navigation bar for a client website XML-driven, so I grabbed a FriendsOfEd book and figured it out.
But back to AS3. It’s good. From what I can tell as a non-programmer, it’s all growns up. A real scripting language. At first syntax seemed verbose, but now I’m starting to appreciate adding event listeners and strict typing for variables (Actually, I got used to strict typing in AS2).
What I’ve also become a big fan of is how the whole display list has been rewritten and how you add and show objects on the stage using the addChild() function (check out the DisplayObjectContainer). What I like about adding children to the stage is that they’re not displayed until you load them. In the past, you had to make sure a movieclip’s visibility was set to false, or it’s alpha was 0.
Again, it seems like an extra step to explicitly tell Flash to show an object that’s been loaded, but it’s really an extra level of control.
After I get up to speed with AS3, I plan on checking out in more detail what Joshua Davis and Branden Hall are doing with HYPE. The gist is – they’re trying to reduce the complexity and bring Flash back to the designer.
This is what they say:

HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.

Sounds like a good objective to me.

…and even if they hadn’t told me, I would have known it was the coldest winter ever …because …I have not had one THOUGHT …I have not been able to complete a sentence in my own head. I find myself walking around going, ‘You know what I should really — FUCK IT’S COLD!’

via the NYTimes.com:

The underlying problem, Mr. Anderson said, is cultural. “Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn’t have consumer DNA,” he said.

Microsoft, surrender the whole battle for the consumer markets.
Lose the Silverlight, you don’t know how to make emotional experiences. Put that Surface table out on the curb for recycling to pick up. The XBox? Leave the gaming to Apple, Sony and Nintendo. Expression Studio – no, Adobe has the Creative Suite covered. The Zune? Apple has had that covered for a long time, you can trade that in too.
Stick to beige PCs and speadsheets and email programs. Oh, and that Solitaire game my father loves to play, did you make that? That’s a good one. Stick to software – although I do admit I like some of your mice and keyboards, but you don’t make much in profits on those, so drop em.
Oh yeah, Exchange Server – you seem to have a stronghold on corporate email, hold onto that, but stay away from the ‘cloud’. Clouds are pretty high up, and you might get a nose bleed, Google is much better with clouds.

When I first read this Mashable post on Rupert Murdoch wanting pulling his online properties from Google’s indexes I immediately went on the defensive, laughing at how these old media guys don’t get the Internet.
But being the devil’s advocate that I am, I played devil’s advocate to my own opinion. Who’s to say you can’t pull your site from Google’s indexes? Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. I mean, in order for Google to ignore your site content, it’s just a matter of changing a META tag in your source code to say “NOFOLLOW”.
So I was both pissed at Murdoch for having the audacity to suggest pulling his properties from Google results and simultaneously exciting that someone was (thinking of) going up against a company that is making it’s way into more and more aspects of our lives and finding it increasingly hard to stay true to their ‘do no evil‘ matra.
Now it’s great if you have the balls to suggest making your content un-indexable, but you better have an amazing fucking plan in place to maintain relevance and profitability. NBC, CBS, Fox and other TV networks were able to pull their content from Youtube by banding together and forming Hulu. Perhaps the news media will do something similar.
…but part of Murdoch’s closing of the Google Juice hose also involves charging for content.
Good luck with that.