—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.

I installed the latest iTunes update the other day. Later on, I watched a movie in fullscreen. I hit the ‘esc’ key, and, instead of closing the video, as the app had been doing, it windowed the video. Oh, happy days.
All over the internet, and in VLC or Quick Time player, when a video is in fullscreen and a user hits ‘esc’, the vid backs out of fullscreen. But not in iTunes. It used to, but since at least Lion was released, hitting ‘esc’ closes a video. Man, I hated that.
But, in their infinite wisdom, Apple has decided, with this latest release, to restore what has become an expected function to a common action. Well done, sirs.
It’s too bad the Safari update is so buggy, though.

Great little essay on the value of Design by Mike Monteiro:

This is the value of good design. We understand it in common objects like chairs, clothes, shoes, watches. But when it comes to web sites, we tend to think of it as a surface layer that can be applied at the end. But in truth, design is happening from day one.
Related to the problem of people treating design as a veneer is mobile ‘app’ design. Those who don’t understand application and UI design think it’s just glossy buttons and drop shadows (or now, frosted glass and buttonless Helvetica Light buttons).
It’s just a 99¢ app, it doesn’t require a lot of thought, right?
Wrong.

—Wednesday Addams

Looks like Samsung is drinking Google’s milkshake:

To give an idea of what Samsung is doing, just look at the new Mobile SDK: It supports Samsung’s pen, gestures, multiwindow and motion features with 800 APIs available to developers. If that number doesn’t grab you consider what Samsung said about opportunities for developers. Simply by adding the digital pen to a phone in the first and subsequent Galaxy Note handsets, more 1,800 pen-enabled apps were created. And the company sells two televisions every second. Clearly, Samsung is trying to entice developer attention for its platform.

Wait, isn’t Samsung’s platform Android? Absolutely! Samsung has effectively built an individual, closed environment of apps and features on top of the open Android. Amazon has done much the same with its Fire OS on Kindle Fire tablets but the approach was a little different.
Wait, open always wins, right?

Tim Kreider on being asked to work for free:

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enough, evidently, to pay one cent for it. “Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to offer compensation to our contributors…” is how the pertinent line usually starts. But just as often, they simply omit any mention of payment.
Reminds me of Harlan Ellison’s strong opinions on this topic.