On July 8, 2008 at 2:54 pm, Daniel said, via Twitter: Haiku for a hot day: Heat wave upon us. A parking lot strewn with cars. Ripples in the air.
In Kiss of Death, a designer says goodbye to his cherished design treatment.
On July 6, 2008 at 1:06 am, Daniel said, via Twitter: Twitter is the first app to make Facebook truly compelling to me.
On July 5, 2008 at 4:31 pm, Daniel said, via Twitter: Ahhh...heading off to the annual family reunion. Good times. Truthfully.
UI Nightmare
Palm developer Steven’s Creek Software vomited out this app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
The question is: will this app be “accepted” by Apple for inclusion in the AppStore or is UI design going to be a deciding factor in which apps get in and which don’t?
As leery as I am of having one gate-keeper giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down to every app I would be just as leery of having to wade through crap like this to get to the good stuff. Time will tell …
Update: pilkycrc says “no”
Original linkage, as well as the screenshot of this train wreck of a UI, courtesy of Mr. John Gruber.
Another obviously great idea from Ironic Sans: Electric Outlet 2.0
I stumbled upon and lived vicariously through this man's travel photos of his 2006 European backpacking adventure today. Someday ...
In "On pie", Dean Allen writes his treatise on the finer points of good pizza. Simple, really: a little skill, a little time, a focus on process, add just a few good ingredients and voila: good pie. Sounds familiar.
More on pizza here on Dan Markham "dot net".
That Bastyr changed my life! That Bastyr … it’ll change yours too.
I saw these damn Bastyr ads all over Seattle. I’m sure it’s an excellent education.
Two articles from WIRED -- one on the acquisition and open-sourcing of Symbian, the other on the (continuing) story of Google's Android -- centered on the inevitable "mobilization" of the computing experience.
(click image to enlarge) Satellite View of California Wildfires From June 23, 2008. From Firefighter Blog
Ferrari gets itself ready for a lighter future:
Millechili is Italian for 1,000 kilos, and thats just what the car will weigh. Not only is that 660 pounds lighter than the Enzo, its 200 pounds lighter than a Mazda MX-5 Miata and only 216 pounds heavier than the Lotus Elise.
In "Live Music Thrives as CDs Fade" David Carr, of the New York Times, gives us some coverage on the continuing metamorphosis of the music industry and suggests, through interviews with a few members of various bands playing at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, that there is an increasing amount of creative, as well, as financial, possibility in creating music for a small audience.
John Gruber mulls over the shortcomings of the iPhone as presented by Brian Caulfield at Forbes.com
Anchored
Michael S. Rosenwald at The Washington Post creates the inaugural post on his new blog “The Financial Lobe” and he addresses an issue that I wanted to address but did not have time or, probably, experience to address: why it is that a $199 iPhone sounds like a better deal than a $399 iPhone when, if you look at the total overall cost over even as short a time as a year, the average iPhone 3G consumer is going to pay at least $20 more than those that bought the original. It’s a good read and raises some excellent points but I think it still falls short in some ways.
An Incomplete Analogy
As far as Mr. Rosenwald’s restaurant analogy is concerned (read the article and you will understand what I mean), I think that it misses the mark a bit. The situation he refers to assumes that the restaurant patron is sitting down already, scanning the menu for a dish he or she prefers. At that point one is a bit of a captive audience. You’re hungry, you’re there and I am assuming that there are few people, once they decide they are going to eat at a restaurant, who are going to get up and leave because of prices. They are, instead, going to look for some menu item that will fit their budget. There are more people that will be willing to walk out of an AT&T store because they are, maybe, unhappy about how much they are going to have to pay for their phone and contract, iPhone or not.
The Cost of Entrance
Furthermore, even though I am happy that someone addressed this subject I still have a problem with the current popular analysis. I think Mr. Rosenwald’s article continues to place the consumer into the role of the unwitting victim of marketing manipulation. It assumes, I think wrongly, that the consumer is being played as they blindly fall prey to their iPhone lust. I think that, for the most part, those that choose to buy the most recent edition of Apple’s seminal phone effort, having eschewed the first edition, are not victims of marketing but instead are making a conscious decision based on the cost of entrance.
I would like an iPhone. I have wanted one since they came out. I think that I could, indeed, justify the monthly expense of owning an iPhone if I could just afford to get one. $600, even $400, was a steep amount to shell out all at once simply to gain entrance into the iPhone market. $199? Now that I might be able to do. And even though it is going to cost more, over time, to own the phone, that increased cost is going to be diffused, paid in small increments over a long period of time and that, my friends, is alot easier to handle than one large chunk of cash, shelled out all at one time, just to save $20 per year. Yeah, Mr. Rosenwald — and everyone else who has followed this same line of thinking — I am indeed thinking about utility.
I was thinking, while I was watching the keynote (via liveblog), that If anyone was the victim here it was Apple and maybe, now that some time has passed, even more so, AT&T. First, it is entirely possible that Apple came to the conclusion that there was no way they were going to reach their sales goal for the iPhone while retaining such a price premium and, so, slash the price they did. Planned at the birth of the iPhone or not, they realized that for the iPhone to explode in the U.S. market, the price needed to come down.
Second, AT&T has flatly stated that their profits, and therefore their stock price, are going to take a bit of a hit now that the decision has been reached that the iPhone is going to follow the same subsidization model every other phone they (or anyone else, for that matter) offer follows.
I am not saying that there are not some people out there blindly throwing themselves at the new iPhone but I also don’t think that the bulk of the people that are excited that the latest iPhone is cheaper to acquire than the old one was, are just brain-dead receivers of magical marketing signals. I think they we deserve a bit more credit than that. In fact, we may just deserve the credit for the presence of a $199 iPhone in the first place. Maybe.
Once again, thanks go to Daring Fireball for the link.