Hilarious, fictional letter-to-the-future from a decade ago reminds us all what idiots we were way back before Facebook and how our use of Facebook definitely does not make us all idiots, definitely not. Yay Facebook.

Longtime Firefox user interface designer Stephen Horlander offers an update on his continuing work on the browser’s next Windows version. It’s a fascinating peek behind the scenes at how an intensively scrutinized design project balances platform evolution, user feedback, team input and new ideas. It’s well worth a read, as is this wiki page that more formally documents how the user interface is changing with upcoming releases.

When Allan Cole and I released our WordPress theme back in November, we set the price slightly lower than we originally intended, in order to make it as affordable as possible straight out of the gate. But the response was so great that we ended up just leaving it there at US$45 — until now. As a sort of holiday special, Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. That’s a terrific deal for a one of the very finest blog themes around on any platform. If you haven’t already got your copy, here’s your chance to get a great deal on it. Click here to buy.

An eye-opening account of how the Santa Claus mythology evolved. I had no idea that the first iconic rendering of Santa Claus was drawn by the same illustrator — the legendary Thomas Nast — who gave us the Democratic party’s donkey and the Republican party’s elephant. Anyway, happy holidays, everyone.

Terrific cinephiles’ site The Auteurs rounds up the ten best of the 2000s, along with twenty honorable-mentions. They’re right to put the brilliant poster for “Funny Games” at the top of the list; its off-kilter close-up of star Naomi Watts is sublime, as is its matter-of-fact typography. See the full list here.

A beautiful, letterpress-printed calendar for the new year from Antonio Carusone in a limited edition of fifty. The year, the days of the week, and the edition number line are all printed blind, and typeset in Helvetica.

Fantastic, insider-y preview of promising movie scripts that the film industry is keeping an eye on. “Compiled every year from the suggestions of 311 film executives, each contributes the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.”

Randall Stross digs deeper and finds that despite customer satisfaction surveys that suggest Verizon has a clear advantage, independent research shows that AT&T actually has better data throughput and signal strength than any of its competitors. In fact, design flaws in how the iPhone connects to cell towers — and the device’s massive popularity — may contribute to the poor network experience that most consumers attribute to AT&T.

“AT&T’s besting of Verizon in these tests is all the more remarkable considering the sudden jump in the volume of mobile data that its network has had to handle with the introduction of the iPhone 3G in 2008: approximately 4,000 percent.”

Waiting to hear the alternative arguments…

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve tested a number of online backup solutions, and found them all lacking. Some are disappointingly constructed and others seem feature-poor, but no matter how well they were designed they all share a single fatal flaw: consumer broadband in the United States is insufficient for backing up the dozens of gigabytes that an average user requires.

Still, the fact that broadband is the problem is progress, given my past experiences with backing up my data. I used to find that backup solutions were expensive or complicated to implement — a decade ago, I used the completely bewildering Retrospect and a prohibitively expensive tape backup system to back up my files — or tried to, anyway. The setup was unwieldy enough that I ran backups erratically, at best, and an erratic backup is not much better than none at all.

The evening of next Wednesday, 16 December, I’ll have the honor of being on stage as a guest for AIGA New York’s twenty-fifth annual Fresh Dialogue event, alongside Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss, Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting. Our mandate will be to cast an eye on the design world through the lens of each of our respective blogs, and to take a look at how social media is impacting the way design is practiced. The evening will be hosted by the design writer, critic and chair of SVA’s Masters in Design Criticism program, the remarkable Alice Twemlow. It’s going to be a blast.

Find out more about the event and register for your tickets here.

From several months ago but still worth a read. The magazine’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Greenwood on the quality limitations of today’s dominant music delivery format.

“I’d feel frustrated if we couldn’t release CDs as a band, but then, it only costs us a slight shaving of sound quality to get to the convenience of the MP3. It’s like putting up with tape hiss on a cassette. I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles. If I’m on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they’re finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.”

Though he’s talking specifically about the esoteric world of high-fidelity sound, Greenwood is effectively casting a critical eye on the whole idea of high definition.

“I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow.”

The essence of his argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience. As a parallel example, I couldn’t be happier with my HD-TV and I wouldn’t mind owning a Blu-Ray player one day when the prices are more reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m consuming tons of not particularly high-resolution content via streaming media. It’s the convenience of media formats that matters so much more. And you could re-interpret the idea of convenience as a format’s interface — if it’s easy to use, if it provides affordances commensurate to the needs of real users in actual use cases, then it will win over higher resolution. Actually, it’s the content that really matters.

Gawd, I’d kill to be able to do this: “Spend two weeks studying visual communication — especially typography — in Venice and Rome, the birthplace of Western typographic tradition.” This is another outpost in Steve Heller formidable design education empire, and he’ll be teaching there, but the rest of the faculty roster looks damn impressive on its own.