Friday irreverence

No excuses, this won't win any prizes for being a thoughtful or insightful post, but it made me smile.

My colleague Julia sent me this copy & image she'd found and loving a good bit of mashing and mischief  as I do, it appealed to me at the end of a mad week.

In the not too distant future, YouTube, Twitter & Facebook will merge to form one giant, idiotic,super time wasting website called... 

Putting things in perspective

It's the 14th March, and the first time I've posted this month. Shocking. So much going on, so little time. My reading list is stacking up, I've barely caught up on last month's Mobile Congress, let alone last week's SXSW, so many things I have good intention of writing posts about.

It's so easy to feel caught up in the never ending stream of data and information around us, we all have to develop our own protocols and process for coping or keeping up in our own way.  But iPad 2 launch last Friday or not, everything slips into real perspective when you look at the terrible events surrounding the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan last Friday. I am incredibly thankful that all my friends in Japan have got in touch and reassured me they are ok, even if some have some pretty incredible stories to tell. It should be "sakura" season in Japan, a time for spring celebration and cherry blossom picnics, but with more aftershocks expected and lots of very "now" issues to contend with the Japanese will have little time for that sadly.  My thoughts are with them all a lot.

Watch this scary and amazing video of the tsunami flood waters rushing through a town. Don't just do what so many of us do so often and just watch the first 30 seconds. 6 minutes of your life are few in the grand scheme, and it will put everything else in your day in perspective.

Check out this series of before and after earthquake pictures too.  

You can make a donation to the relief effort via the British Red Cross, via Facebook Causes  and via an assortment of other methods including iTunes too.

Google have set up a Japanese earthquake and tsunami crisis resource aggregator too.

iPad 2 Live 2011: iPad 2 Release Accompanied By Flood Of Accessories

[The Smart Cover And Combination Charger and HDMI Out Cord Set To Accompany the iPad 2 Release]

If you’re considering buying an iPad 2, and after what all you’ve seen today you just might be–even I’m thinking about it and I’ve been a staunch PC user since I was 14–then you’ll want to know that Apple’s got some added accessories ready to go out to help you make the most of your Apple experience (not to mention lay a few more bucks in Apple’s pocket) a clever combination charger and HDMI cord, and a magnetic angled stand and case called a Smart Cover.

The Smart Cover isn’t really so much of a case as a cover–hence the name–but what it does is fold in a series of points to allow you a variety of different configurations for your iPad 2. For instance, one such configuration will let you set the iPad 2 down on a tabletop with a slight angle trending up and away from you, like a keyboard might be, thus allowing you an easier time of typing on the device. A second configuration would serve as an easel, putting the iPad 2 up in the air and giving you access to its controls, or letting it work like a giant digital photo frame. Plus, it wakes the iPad when you open it and puts it to sleep when you close it, working entirely by magnets that grasp and automatically align the iPad 2. There’s even a microfiber lining that cleans the screen while the cover’s down. They come in your choice of colors, and either in polyurethane, which costs $39 each, or leather, which bumps that up to $69.

Also, we mentioned that Apple’s put an HDMI output on their iPad 2, which is a very welcome inclusion for those of you think most any tablet screen is too small, but this brought in a whole new accessory that will actually be pretty valuable–a combination charger and HDMI output cord that plugs into the dock connector, allowing you to use that charge-and-use function. You’ll have to put out $39 for one of those, but considering what it does, it’ll be a terribly valuable cord to have.

So while you may have your own preference in casing, the cord will pretty much be a must-buy, and you’ll be able to get these yourselves when the iPad 2 itself emerges.

Source: http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/03/02/ipad-2-live-ipad-2-release-accompanied-by-flood-of-accessories-the-smart-cover-and-combination-charger-and-hdmi-out-cord-set-to-accompany-the-ipad-2-release/

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The challenges of design

Bad design costs the same as good design, so why oh why do so many people insist on the bad type??  In fact if anything bad design costs more because of the number of revisions often involved in getting from the good type to the horribly compromised approved version.

Many many years ago I took a cheap £3 standard two armed corkscrew and £27 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew to a product development meeting to try and ram into the heads of the dullard American design team I was working with the difference. The material product and tooling cost was slightly greater for the latter of course,  but the retail selling price differential and the product margin was far greater.

I so often see the same issues repeating themselves, people lacking vision, or understanding of design principles, or even just the importance of taking time to get the brief right in the beginning.  Fail to achieve that and you end up with a design dogs dinner or a user experience that sends people clicking elsewhere faster than you can say bad navigation.  Not to mention the designer wanting to shoot themselves over scope creep and client meddling.

All of which was prompted by my friend Fran sending me this link to The Oatmeal (click here to read the entire cartoon story, it'll only take a tick and if you work in anything remotely creative you'll smile and nod knowingly).

Far beyond the looking glass

When Lewis Caroll wrote children's classic Through the Looking Glass, circa 1871, I very much doubt his imagination could stretch anywhere near as far as the possibilities that glass surfaces can take us today and will take us in the future.  There's always lots of talk in thedigital and tech worlds about multi-screen devices and platform agnostic content, Smart-TV's that are web connected, tablet this, touchscreen that (it is the Mobile World Congress this week after all)  but component manufacturers' vital role in the innovation chain often get overlooked.

Fair play therefore to Corning (a glass manufacturer) for publishing this nice (if a tad long) video showcasing the role of glass in our ever increasingly digitally connected future. Can't help but make those shareholder meetings more interesting.



Well worth reading this interesting interview yesterday with the super smart Helge Tenno on the connected future too.

Save the trees one PDF at a time: Digital Treasure

My friend Mark just flagged up this brilliant idea from the World Wild Life Fund.

Download the software to give you the option to save your documents as a WWF rather than a PDF - essentially the same format except the former is nicely branded, giving you an eco-prod into good behaviour every time you see it, AND means the print menu is disabled so you can't waste trees and energy on printing out stuff un-necessarily.

Yes, technically you can enable this setting in Adobe already, yes, there will still always be people that want to print documents, and just occasionally there are documents that really do need reviewing on paper but in a world of e-readers, tablets, netbooks and laptops, the excuses are getting fewer and fewer.

I think this is a brilliant example of someone having a BIG idea and using technology to facilitate it.

Super smart. I hope it catches on.

Elasticity of distance and discounting

The fact that people will shop around and will make a degree of effort if a potential saving is perceived to be significant is hardly surprising. What is interesting though, is this attempt by JiWire (found via Techcrunch) to start to quantify the model  particularly in this era of Groupon type social buying models, Facebook Deals / Foursquare offers and smartphone based price comparison services. Location based services are here to stay and it will be interesting to see how they are developed and exploited.