NYTimes: How Manhattan’s Grid Grew

via Kottke

A big congratulations to my team at Roundarch and the team at Bloomberg Sports on the new Trade Analyzer 2011 app for iPad – especially my design colleague Silvia Brown for the beautiful work she did on the interface design.
With that said, what makes this application great isn’t just the great interface design but all the technology and databases and algorithms working behind the scenes. It’s the transitions between screens, the reaction of buttons to your touch. It’s about all the data getting pulled from MLB for the player cards.
Details, details, details.
As Steve Jobs has said, design isn’t just about how it looks, it’s about how it works.

From a comment on Phillip Greenspun’s review of the Motorola Xoom (via Daring Fireball):

I invented a drinking game a while ago.
For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:

“Open” (take two hits for this one)

“expected to…”

“soon”

“when ____ arrives…”

“will be able to when…”

“update will enable…”

“in the next few ____…”

I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they’re nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it’s inconsistencies and excuses – like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn’t always perform great.

Why Leaders and Innovators Need Solitude to Do Good Work

Forty years of research on brainstorming shows that individuals produce more and better ideas than groups do. Studies also suggest that the path to excellence in many fields is not only to practice, but to practice alone. And creativity researchers have found that many highly creative people were shy and solitary in high school, and recall their adolescence with horror. (I explain all this in detail in my forthcoming book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.)

This is one of many reasons that introverts — who are more likely than others to carve out solitary time — are often very creative, and make unexpectedly fine leaders.

While a different idea, this brings to mind having one decision maker on on a project versus design-by-committee. As anyone who’s been on a project (design or otherwise) knows, when there isn’t a go-to person and everyone’s voice has to be heard and incorporated into the product, that product inevitably ends up a watered-down mess. Barely competent at many things, great at nothing.

We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

—Charles Eames

via Frank Chimero who has some interesting words in reaction to the quote:

The Eames were sharks. One just has to read what Charles said. In work, it’s not that one project leads to the next, it’s that one subject leads to the next. If we’re really sniffing out solutions to the problems of people, then we’ll be going down some serious rabbit holes.

We don’t need to say “multi-disciplinary designer” any more. If we’re truly trying to make things that help all of us to live better, it’s implied and redundant.

*I stole that title from this isn’t happiness. I laughed my ass off, it was too perfect.

Bill Cunningham New York, a film by Richard Press:

The “Bill” in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.” Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller–who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.

I love documentaries, I love photography, I love New York, and this looks great.

Without play, there is no experimentation.

—Paul Rand

via this isn’t happiness

Chrysler Turbine Car

The fourth-generation Chrysler turbine engine ran at up to 44,500 revolutions per minute, according to the owner’s manual, and could use diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline, kerosene, JP-4 jet fuel, and even vegetable oil. The engine would run on virtually anything and the President of Mexico tested this theory by running one of the first cars–successfully–on tequila.

We like to think of electric cars and hybrid cars and cars that run on alternative fuel as new concepts but there’s been people working on these technologies for a long time.
via Good Old Valves

The car is the closest thing we will ever create to something that is alive.

—Sir William Lyons, founder of Jaguar

via Good Old Valves

This lovely old tag is from the website of Dick Sheaff and boy do I love what he does:

I have always found myself keenly interested in a seemingly endless list of vintage things, especially ephemera: stamps, postal history, trade cards, billheads, trade cards, broadsides, cartes-de-visite, stereo views, tickets, engravings, chromolithographs, early American glass, Irish blown three-mold glass, patent medicine bottles, flasks, almanacs, postcards, marbled paper, early letterpress printing, typography, books, African art, record album covers, airbrushed restaurant china, Micronesian tapa cloth . . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I’ve long thought that what I’d most like to do in life, in some better world, would be to put out an ongoing series of high-quality, small publications about such things. As a graphic and publication designer with all the appropriate software, one would think I’d be in a fine position to do just that.

But it ain’t that easy. Especially in today’s publishing and economic environment, the idea of putting out a lot of
ink-on-paper is just not practical. Or even sane. Eventually I realized that what I can do–and fairly easily–is scan
the images, write the words and then simply post them online. I get it out of my system, and the material gets out there in front of the eyes of anyone who may be interested. Win win. So, here goes . . .

For years now I’ve casually collecting the same type of stuff (like the manual to my grandmother’s ’63 Ford Fairlane), although I haven’t made it as much of a focus of this site as I could.
via Still Life

Paleofuture: Tesla Predicts the Portable TV (1926)

NEW YORK, Jan 25 – (AP) – Application of radio principles will enable people by carrying a small instrument in their pockets to see distant events like the sorceress of the magic crystal fairy tales and legends, Nikola Tesla, electrical inventor, predicted today. Mr. Tesla, who on several occasion has tried to communicate with the planet Mars, made his predictions in an interview published in the current issue of Collier’s Weekly.

“We shall be able to witness the inauguration of a president, the playing of a world’s series baseball game, the havoc of an earthquake, or a battle just as though we were present,” Mr. Tesla said.

Once again, another reason for me to love Telsa. He was always overshadowed by the more popular and business-savy bully who was Thomas Edison but the dude needs credit where it’s due. I even admire him trying to contact Mars.