There’s a great interview with Bruce Sterling at The Well (via NoahBrier.com).
It starts out:

For the eleventh time, Inkwell rings in the New Year with a visit from Well
member Bruce Sterling, to address the State of the World and Things Various
and Sundry. Bruce used to write novels when there were bookstores, and used
to write for magazines and newspapers when magazines and newspapers existed.
Nowadays he travels a lot when trains are running and when airports aren’t
clogged by security theater. [emphasis mine]

What first caught my attention, before I even hit the interview, was a word the interviewer used in reference to the bullshit we endure at the airport – security theater.
And that’s exactly what all those metal detectors, fluid requirements and jackets-and-shoes-off procedures are – theater.
Airports don’t provide security, but the appearance of security.

Delayed post – the boys over at Analogue launched this site a few months ago for the artist Ben Wisch.
Simple, elegant and immersive.
As usual.
Nice work guys.

From a few months ago (but the price is still the same), Palm Pixi one step closer to free, now $25 on Amazon.
Let me first say that I don’t know what profit agreement Palm and Sprint have for Pre and Pixi sales, but offering the Pixi for this low a price just smells like the Motorola RAZR all over again.
What I mean by this is when the RAZR rose to become the most popular clamshell phone of all time, Motorola continued to slash prices until they, as the Pixi now, started to approach zero. They had sold over 50 million RAZRs by 18 July 2006.
From Forbes, 20 February 2007:

Because Motorola has not recently had products that cellphone companies wanted to offer, it has sold tens of millions of Razrs and their offshoots by slashing prices. Margins have collapsed in the process.

I agree with John Gruber, the future of Palm depends on a genuine hit to keep the company alive, and I don’t see how slashing prices on their new models is going to help their business.

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.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change — Charles Darwin

Yes, I love that quote, it makes me sound cool and sure, I’m a little late to the game in having found out about it only a few months ago.

But is it true?

Better yet, in what context is it true and to what degree of change are we talking about? My interests lie in interactive design, web technologies and mobile computing so I’m going to this as the backdrop for the topic of change and mutation.

As an interactive designer I have to be able to adopt, interpret and reject various new technologies, web services and gadgets in order to keep myself relevant/marketable/employed.

I consider myself a ‘hybrid’ designer – one that has an understanding of both the technical and aesthetic sides of a project. Coincidentally, I also consider this one of the most important traits for all interactive designers to have. You almost inherently have to to be one. As a hybrid, you’re always in flux. Jumping from design to technology programs. Testing new web sites and web services. Hybrids are constantly mutating.

Because you don’t always know what the next project is going to require. It could require Flash or XHTML or AJAX or PaperVision3D or XML or MySQL or Java or an iPhone SDK or a Palm webOS SDK or a 3-inch screen or a 30-inch screen. While there’s plenty of fundamentals that are still relevant after 10 years of doing interactive design, I’m constantly having to learn new things, be it design-, technology- or Human Experience-related.

Since there are so many new things happening within the (broad) fields of design and technology I have to cherry-pick which technologies, user interface paradigms and gadgets and therein lies the secret – isn’t how many new ‘things’ you adopt and understand but which ones. Which brings me to the other quote I came across on Ars Technica regarding mutation rates among bacteria:

For the first week or so, normal strains actually outgrew the competition. But, after a few weeks, mutator strains began to pick up helpful adaptations, and quickly came to the fore. By 30 days, only 8 strains (out of 66 initially) survived in culture: all the wild type and low-mutation versions had been driven out by the competition. But so had the strains prone to the most mutations; instead, all the strains fell in a narrow range, with somewhere between three and 47 times the normal mutation rate, with most on the high end of that range.

I think we share a lot in common with bacteria and this is one example from which we can learn. Be open to mutating within your chosen field, but be selective and don’t learn new technologies just for the sake of it. Don’t buy an iPhone if you think it’s crap. You almost need to become a curator of design and technology. You have to know how to spot talent and innovative ideas 10 miles away.

And that brings me to my final point, Apple’s rumored iTablet. We know it’s coming and that’s all we know. Victor pointed me to a a discussion that happened last month on “how developers can proactively prepare their place in a new market”. Smart move if you ask me.

Much smarter, I would say, than preparing for a Microsoft Surface market.

Nokia’s new mobile chief, Rick Simonson, on his predictions for mobile growth (via mocoNews):

I can even make a prediction for 2010: In Latin America, we will grow faster than (RIM). By 2011, our efforts will start producing results, as we will be at par with Apple and RIM in smartphones. Not only we draw level with them, we will also win the war because, in addition to email, we will be adding content, chat, music, entertainment and several other features, which will soon become very critical for success of any company in this space.

There’s 2 reasons I think this quote is awesome.
One, the fact that one of the global leaders in mobile phones is predicting when it will be ‘on par’ with an entrant (Apple) who’s only been in the game a little over 2 years.
And two, they’re making predictions, which is always dangerous – especially in an area like consumer electronics and entertainment. All the points Simonson notes – content, chat, music and entertainment – Apple is leading the way with thanks to iTunes, the iPod Touch and the iPhone. As Om Malik has pointed out, it’s the iPod Touch, running the iPhone OS, that is Apple’s “ace up it’s sleeve“. Nokia has no such ace. Maybe they’ll get one?
It took them 2 years to launch the Ovi Store and that didn’t fair too well.
It’s certainly possible for Nokia to take over Apple’s incumbency in mobile music and entertainment, I just don’t think they can do it.

I was catching up on a few of the TED Conference podcast videos this weekend, one of which was, Steven Cowley: Fusion is energy’s future. It’s a great (and scary) presentation on why nuclear fusion will be one of our only solutions to the fossil fuel crisis. One part that grabbed my attention was where he he explained one of the easiest methods of creating a fusion reaction:

There is one reaction, that’s probably one of the easiest fusion reactions to do. It’s between two isotopes of hydrogen – deuterium …and tritium. These two nucleii, when they’re far apart, are charged. And you push them together and they repel …but when you get them close enough together, something called the Strong Force starts to act and pulls them together. So most the time they repel, but you get them closer and closer and closer and at some point the Strong Force grips them together.

That sounded like a great metaphor for some relationships I know, but prior to the fusion clip, I watched James Geary, metaphorically speaking, so maybe that had something to do with it.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

— Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)
(via Daring Fireball)

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway… I’ve started to make a tape… in my head… for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.

• High Fidelity, 2000
  I made a mix MP3 CD for my little sis for Christmas, and it makes these rules for a compilation tape exponentially harder given that it can hold hundreds of tracks. I decided not to fill up the CD, but go for impact.

Just a little snippet I shot over the holidays en route to see my nieces and nephews. The video camera on the iPhone 3G S is really handy.

As anyone who reads this site knows, I love great design and thus – I love all things Apple (I also own a handful of shares of AAPL) and I have a deep respect for Steve Jobs.
As much as I love Apple products, the press really needs to ease off the amount of published speculation going on with regard to the supposed iTablet.
I’ll be the first one consuming real press on the iTablet if/when Apple announces it, but until then I’d like to see actually reporting, not second- and third-hand speculation on a device no one has ever seen.
All the press are accomplishing with this pseudo-coverage is showing that they’re a bunch of clueless monkeys.
Enough is enough.

While it may be true that there’s some developers abandoning the app model for HTML5, there’s certainly some that are sticking with the app model and making a nice living at it, like Tapulous, who it was discovered this month, is making over $1 million per month in App Store sales.
It’s no doubt that Apple has some fixin’ to do with it’s App Store approval process, where rules of what’s allowed and what’s not is unclear at times, but for those that choose to stick with it, the rewards can big huge.
While some argue that the success stories are few and far between for Apple’s App Store, at least there are winners profiting off of engaging games and applications. Try finding any runaway success stories for the app stores of RIM, Palm or Google Android. You’ll be hard-pressed.
But back to the issue of local apps or web apps. The bottom line is that you’re not going to get the same level of experience from a web app that you do from a local app. Perhaps there will come a day when the internet pipes will make this a moot point, but for now local apps are king. This is because JavaScript and HTML (even HTML5) can’t match the power from the iPhone OS Technology Layers. You won’t get the same level of 2D, 3D, speed or smoothness of animation in web apps.
It’s like having your front axle and rear axle connected by a drivetrain that’s 50 feet long. Sure you’ll eventually start moving, but with a fraction of the response time and speed of a normal sized drivetrain.

Nokia’s EVP of Markets at Nokia, Anssi Vanjoki (via NYTImes.com):

So why didn’t Nokia move more quickly to counter Apple and Research in Motion in smartphones? “We didn’t execute; we were aiming at too geeky a community,” he says. “Apple is made for the common man. It’s more for Joe Six-Pack than techno-geeks. But we understand Joe Six-Pack too.”

That’s really interesting. So that’s why the majority of Flex developers, Flash programmers, front-end developers and back-end developers at my company all have iPhones.
Far from the techo-geeks Mr. Vanjoki is talking about.