With the next major revision to the iPad rumored to be announced as soon as next week, I figure I’d better get any iPad 2-specific posts I’ve had in the hopper posted quickly. In particular, I’ve been wanting to write about cases for a while, mostly because it took me nine or ten months to find a case combination that really works for me.

For a long time, I was very disappointed with the Apple Smart Cover, which to me is an example of a fantastic design on paper that in real life fell short of expectations. I always found it fell off its magnetic hinge too easily, and after toting my iPad to and from work for only a few months, its edges quickly became frayed.

But then I came across the iPad 2 Smart Feather from Incipio, a lightweight hardshell case that hugs the back of the iPad. A lot of cases do this, but this was the first I came across that also clasps around the Smart Cover’s hinge, securing it tightly.

Neither does it add much in the way of bulk to the device. So little, in fact, that when I recently bought a Logitech Zagg keyboard case, I was happy to discover that the Smart Feather fits comfortably in the Zagg’s slot. The Zagg is also designed to let you collapse the iPad on top of the keyboard for carrying them together, a configuration that still mostly works when you have the Smart Feather on the device. It’s not a perfect fit, but it does the job.

I’ve been using all three accessories — Smart Cover, Smart Feather case and Logitech Zagg keyboard — as I’ve been doing more and more of my ‘real work’ tasks on the iPad. Having a real keyboard is a huge help, and being able to carry the iPad anywhere without having to handle it too delicately has been a boon too. It all seems to be coming together… just in time for me to buy a new model.

Shockingly, last night at the Oscars, Hollywood decided to award the Best Picture prize to a film that celebrates Hollywood. Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist,” a heartfelt ode to the silent film-era, is an undeniably charming picture even if it seems unable to resist nudging the audience to constantly wink along with its own cleverness. However, I can’t help but point out that as little more than a casual fan of silent movies, “The Artist” still seems like a pale imitation of the original. It is a tribute to silents in the same way that, say, “Happy Days” was a tribute to the 1950s.

Over at The New Yorker, film critic David Denby makes a great argument as to why the year’s “Best Picture” misses the mark for what it honors. Denby’s principal complaint is that the acting in “The Artist” captures very little of the quality of acting that the original silent movie stars employed to make those films come alive in the absence of sound. He writes, “Silent film is another country. They speak another language there — a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty.”

Denby believes these characteristics escape the two leads of Hazanavicius’ film: “both characters, and both actors, move in a straight line in each scene; they stay within a single mood. The great silent actors did so much more.” He elaborates: “In the silents, you have to do something; you can’t just be. Silent-film acting drew on the heroic and melodramatic traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theatre… it drew as well on mime, magic shows, and vaudeville… Subtlety was not a high priority in those arts.” It was frequently not great acting, but it was always expressive.

I agree with this assessment, though in making his case Denby underrates my biggest complaint about the film: it just didn’t look like a true silent movie. Hazanavicius’ camera is surprisingly fluid in “The Artist.” It jumps back and forth, climbs high and dips low, draws in for surprisingly detailed closeups and pulls out with great agility for wide shots. To me, silents generally felt flatter, and not in a bad way. They made the most of the inflexibility of early camera equipment, using shots that seem static relative to today’s unimpeded camera technology, but they were very effectively contrasted with their stars’ outsized facial gestures, propeller-like limbs and ability to cut dynamic swaths across the screen. The camera could not be expressive, so the actors were. “The Artist” feels a lot more like a movie that might have come a few decades later, when camera equipment got lighter and more nimble; a movie from the 1940s or 1950s perhaps, except with the sound removed. This, for me, was its worst mistake: in a movie about movies, it could not convince me to suspend my disbelief.

The changes promised in Apple’s forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion release look promising on the whole, but there’s one that makes me sad: the next major version of Safari will sport a unified address bar. Instead of two fields, one for the URL and one for search, Macworld writes that “the browser now sports a single lengthy field that can be used to type in a URL; pull up the top result in your selected search engine from a keyword or search the Web, your bookmarks and history, or within the page itself.”

Though I spend most of my time using Firefox, which still has both an address bar and a search box, I also spend a fair amount of time using Chrome which of course, popularized the concept of the unified search bar in the first place. I find the unified search bar to be a fine complement to the way I use my browser, but I still stubbornly prefer two fields up there.

Over the weekend my family took a short trip by plane. The experience of flying — which I never enjoy — was so bad, it made me despair again for this incompetent industry that we all seem to be stuck with but have little recourse from. The ineptitudes of nearly every airline’s customer experience just boggle the mind and make me marvel at the fact that they can even exist as businesses.

When I worked at The New York Times, I used to have friendly arguments with a colleague about the role of information architects on a digital design team. The debate was over the things that an information architect does — evaluating goals, planning features, constructing wireframes — were things that should be the purview of visual designers instead. We would go back and forth over the usefulness of dividing these responsibilities, segregating the nitty gritty planning from the visual execution. Put another way, the question was whether the information architect was even necessary?

I invariably argued in favor of information architects because I’ve always felt that there is a significant population of talented designers and thinkers who can envision, plan and manage a user experience design solution even in spite of their inability to render the user interface itself in Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML etc. What’s more, there are lots of visual designers of the ‘heads down’ type, who are superb craftspeople but are not very adept at the holistic thinking necessary to plan out the entirety of a user experience, or capable of the articulation necessary to convince others of a particular UX strategy.

Things seem to be changing. For one, the term “information architect” seems to have gone out of style. What I hear a lot more these days is “user experience designer.” Now, I dislike few things as much as debating the semantics of these particular job titles, but it does strike me that part of the shift to this nomenclature has to do with the fact that, more and more, what employers want is a single person who can do both the feature planning and the visual execution.

For the past week or so, I’ve been playing with a slightly different kind of content here at Subtraction.com. This is something I talked about in a recent post in which I rambled on about the state of several different blog tools; I’m now experimenting with Tumblr-style image blogging that in most cases is purely about the image, with only a short line of additional text, if any. Here’s one example. (There are still some kinks to be worked out, so bear with me.)

This might seem unremarkable to regular readers since I already publish short, image-heavy, posts with just a bit of text. On the back-end though, it’s quite different, or at least meaningfully different. With the help of my friend Adam Khan, we’ve customized an ExpressionEngine ‘channel’ that presents a much more succinct publishing interface than the one I normally use. In essence, there are fewer fields to fill out and the fields themselves are physically smaller, which dissuades me from writing at any great length. On top of that, we’ve cooked up a bookmarklet that drives a simple script for grabbing images and auto-populating the forms, so creating a new post when I come across something I like only takes a few clicks.

None of this is novel in the least, as plenty of Web apps already do this much better than what we cooked up in an ad hoc fashion. But it’s long been a struggle for me to post here as regularly as I’d like, especially as my schedule just keeps getting busier and busier, so anything that makes it easier for me is something worth experimenting with. It’s also a useful reminder that interface design does matter — having a simpler, more concise publishing U.I. directly influences the kind of content that gets produced.

To be clear, this does not mean I’m giving up on posting longer pieces of real writing here. I still enjoy that a great deal; it’s just a matter of finding the time. Hopefully this supplemental style of blogging will help fill the void, but if you have any thoughts on how successful — or unsuccessful — it is, please let me know in the comments.