Hints, previews and sneak peeks.
They go hand-in-hand with prototypes, demos and proof-of-concept products.
These impossible-to-buy, incomplete, vaporware products – coupled with speculations – form the bulk of technology news. It’s bullshit is what it is.
Here are a few recent ones I like:
Yahoo, Nokia to unveil ‘Project Nike’ deal – Yahoo announces an alliance with Nokia. Wow. Screenshots? Mobile apps to demo? Nothing? Amazing stuff guys.
Microsoft Cancels Innovative Courier Tablet Project – Microsoft first leaks videos featuring a concept product, and then cancels it about 6 months later. Nice.
NVIDIA hints webOS tablet, rags on Apple and Intel – The title says it all. All talk, no walk.
This is just one of the many reasons Jory Kruspe and I started HEED (It’s one of my reasons anyway). HEED is about the process that creates well-designed products. It’s about how something that’s well-designed can improve the quality of life. It’s about pointing out places in world where there’s bad design and why businesses and individuals need to wake up and heed to design.
I’m not saying not to dream. I’m saying do something with those dreams. Make something. Find a process that allows you to execute your ideas. And when you find that process, use it.
The articles mentioned above are all (potentially) great ideas, but a design isn’t successful unless it’s executed.
That’s why Jory and I started HEED as Twitter and Flickr accounts. We both are busy with our jobs and haven’t been able to put aside the time to create the picture-perfect venture we’ve envisioned in our heads. So we’re starting with a seed.
Hey, at least we’re starting.

Flash Co-Creator Jonathan Gay Responds to Steve Jobs
I’m hoping to get the iPhone vs Flash stuff out of my system so I can post thoughts on other topics, but I’m still too interested in the arguments. Call me a chick, but I like drama and gossip.
In the interview, Gay rehashes all the ‘open’ talk I’m already way to familiar with. I’m going to skip over commenting on that as well as all the “Apple-is-hurting-users-by-not-providing-Flash-on-the-iPhone” talk. Enough already.
I did find this nugget funny, where the interviewer asks Gay “how much would the Flash player need to evolve before it would meet Steve Job’s strict efficiency standards”:

It’s worth noting that Flash was developed on a 66 Mhz 486 which is probably one tenth the speed of an iPhone. So I don’t think there is a fundamental architectural issue. I think the Flash architecture with the binary file format is inherently higher performance than HTML for multimedia.

Gay is absolutely right. Flash was developed for those very limited specifications way back in the day. But if I recall the days when I used to design and develop in Flash 4, cerca 1999, the Flash plug-in was around 200K (Adobe has all the versions archived on their site). Granted, it also couldn’t dynamically load JPGs or any video. It also couldn’t load XML files. Or do PaperVision3D.
Looking into my Internet Plug-ins folder today, the Flash 10 plug-in is 13MB.
Times have changed. I’m not saying Flash can’t be refactored to run on a mobile device, but Adobe still has a lot of work ahead of them.

MacNN: GQ records extremely low iPad magazine downloads
VP and publisher Pete Hunsinger doesn’t seem to get digital:

Hunsinger defends the iPad edition, claiming that it costs “nothing extra,” given that there are no printing or shipping costs. The iPad app is $2 less than the print edition, and GQ is also charging just $2 for back issues. The VP says he expects the iPad to eventually become a “major component” of circulation; one boost is anticipated with the June issue, which will feature Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr.

First off, I would argue that the iPad version should cost as much, if not more than the print version. From my experience, most people don’t understand the costs that go into building products/experiences/tools for the web. There’s an incorrect assumption that because this product isn’t physical and ‘real’, it must be cheaper to make.
The truth is that it should cost a lot of money to create an iPad version of GQ magazine if they truly exploit everything that makes experiences on the iPad great. This doesn’t mean you have to go overboard when using a new medium, but it does mean creating an appropriate experience.
And that’s what we’re talking about when talk about building for iPads and iPhones – experiences. I’ve read a number of stories in the press about the iPad being a device for passive consumption, but that’s a premature dismissal. If GQ is simply digitizing text and making image galleries that you can flick through, they’ve missed the point. That’s easy.
My second point is that the iPad is not and should never be ‘the savior’ of the print industry.
Every company is responsible for their own fate. Whether you’re Conde Nast trying to convert your print publications into digital experiences, or Adobe trying to make Flash relevant to mobile computing, blaming or praising Apple for your failure or success is to sell your company short.
Conde Nast is moving their properties onto an amazing platform. They’re responsible for creating an amazing experience.
Evolve or die.

So last week, Paul Thurrott posted ‘near-final’ screenshots of Windows Phone 7.
I have the same opinion now, as I did last month when I posted and reacted to Edward Tufte’s thoughts on the mobile interface design.
They’re still just wireframes.
Jack Moffett astutely observed, “There isn’t enough variation between what is tappable and what isn’t.”
Just to be clear, this isn’t me wanting or expecting the WP7 interface to be shiny and polished like iPhone interface. There’s many ways to design a GUI, and these just don’t look designed. At all.
It’s impossible to ignore what you’ve seen from your competition, but I’m hoping that the Windows Phone 7 team didn’t deliberately rage against the machine and decide to reject all implied dimensionality within the WP7 interface. If you want things to look clickable, you need to make them look, um, clickable. This doesn’t mean you need to use bevels, gradients, reflections and gloss. A lot can be achieved using just one of those effects.
A minimalist interface would be amazing, but WP7 isn’t minimalist, it’s empty.
Which brings me to my next point about WP7. In an interview with Steve Jobs back in the 80’s, he comments that “… they [Microsoft] don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture to their products …”
When first watched the interview, I understood what he said in theory, but it wasn’t until I saw the WP7 screens that I truly ‘got’ what Jobs was saying. The WP7 interface is completely uninspired and has a complete lack of culture.
Given WP7’s lack of real design, I was shocked at tweets from Khoi Vinh and AisleOne:


I’m waiting for another company to give Apple some real competition to the iPhone. I love Apple products, but Apple needs competition and there’s so much more room to innovate with the mobile space.
Let’s not get excited over wireframes posing as finished designs.

Brian Chen for Wired GadgetLab, 26 Feb 2009, Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone:

What’s wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it’s not Japanese.

Bloomberg Businessweek, 23 April 2010:

Apple Inc.’s iPhone shipments to Japan more than doubled in the past year, capturing 72 percent of the country’s smartphone market, a research firm said.

Granted, some of the missing items from the 3G iPhone Chen mentioned in the Wired article were subsequently added to the 3GS — like MMS messaging, a better camera and video recording — but the Wired article was still way off-base.

Jay Parkinson’s Awesomeness Manifesto:

The vast majority of companies — in my research, greater than 95% — can only create what I have termed thin value. Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.

Heed to Design.

I don’t have a PS3 yet, but I want this game:

Playing the first sections of our preview disc of Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time, it was easy to become somewhat jaded. The platforming is, of course, wonderful. The graphics are attractive. The writing is well above average. We’ve long known that Insomniac knows how to create a strong 3D platformer, and for an hour or so, this feels like more of the same. The same is very, very good, mind you. But we’ve seen it before. …Then Clank, the robot sidekick, enters his own head, and the above-average takes a turn for the incredible.

(my emphasis)

This has been sitting in my Instapaper queue forever:

When one becomes obsessed with a beautiful object, it isn’t because we want that object to come into our own personal world. It’s in fact the reverse. We want to enter its world. Of course, that thing that we found to be so beautiful at first glance may actually have some awful flaws. Really expensive yet excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes come to mind. We want it to work out so badly.

Many people think the electric car is a new development in transportation, but the picture above shows Thomas Edison next to an electric car built by S.R. Bailey & Company that he developed his nickel-iron batteries for.
The photo was taken around 1910 (New York Times article on the event).
Over one hundred years ago. Not horses. Not bicycles. Electric cars that had a range of 100 miles.
Here’s a film from 1900 showing a parade of automobiles that include steam and electric models.
With the weight of the emerging global oil economy behind it, internal combustion automobiles eventually surpassed their electric counterparts in speed, range and price in the 1910’s.
Very little is ever mentioned on how the electric car was killed off, but in his book, Internal Combustion, Ewan Black explains in detail ‘How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives’.
One can imagine living in a very different world today if electric automobile and battery technology were not prematurely stopped over 100 years ago.
This was not the only time in history the electric car was prevented from making progress. In his 2006 film, Who Killed the Electric Car? writer and director Chris Paine examines the creation and subsequent destruction of the electric car in the mid 1990’s.
It’s important for people to not just be aware that something happened, but why something happened the way it did. It’s easy to dismiss electric cars in the 1910’s as not economically viable or as mature a technology as gas-powered cars, but imagine if Edison were allowed to continue his pursuit of the electric battery technology. Imagine if his Edison Plant in Orange, New Jersey didn’t mysteriously get destroyed in a fire (even though most the buildings were concrete and Edison claimed they were fire-proof).

Via Ars Electronista:

Nokia is developing a new tablet that would compete with the iPad, Rodman Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar claimed in a currently questionable note. He didn’t describe the form factor but said the Finnish phone maker was hoping to have a tablet on the market as early as the fall.

What? A tablet to compete with Apple? They don’t even have a product to compete with the iPhone.
Pay attention to the road Nokia, not the other drivers.

This is so, so, so important to understanding human behavior, especially how financial disasters happen (via 37Signals):

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

2. You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

3. I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

4. I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

via MacNN:

Apple has won one of its USPTO patent claims for the iPhone, specifically covering the device’s iconic steel bezel. While appearing superficial, Apple claims that the bezel is actually essential to impact resistance, and innovative in part because it merges utility with aesthetics. The part is flush with an iPhone’s housing, inserted into a brace and held with a spring. It is also manufactured with cold worked steel, said to better accommodate design limits while reducing the need for machining.

I know people who would laugh at this and call it ridiculous and trivial.
But it’s not ridiculous. As Charles Eames said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”