Author Archives: Khoi

MobileUs

MobileMeApple’s MobileMe is such a shoddy, poorly implemented product that I’m long past hoping that any complaining about it will help the situation. It is what it is, and I make my own bed every year when I renew my subscription to it.

At the same time, I also feel that there is a nontrivial subset of the Macintosh population who, like me, are beholden to MobileMe, who rely on it and continue to renew annually in spite of Apple’s flagrant neglect. Some might say that we should vote with our wallets and leave the service altogether. But for whatever personal or professional reasons, MobileMe is the best solution we have. For those folks, I kind of think we owe it to one another to fill in the gaps that Apple leaves.

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Livraria da Vila

This astonishing example of retail architecture in Sao Paolo, Brazil — designed by local architect Isay Weinfeld — is probably the most visually stunning commercial space I’ve ever seen, and certainly the most impressive book selling environment. If it’s real, that is. The pictures make it seem ingenious, futuristic and ideal, which makes me wonder how (and whether) it really works in practice as a bookstore. Still, there’s no denying: the pictures are beautiful.

Livraria da Vila
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Reference Guide on Netflix’s Freedom & Responsibility Culture

“This slide deck is our current best thinking about maximizing our likelihood of continued success.” A massive, ambitious and remarkably thoughtful corporate manifesto on the culture and business that Netflix is building. At one-hundred and twenty-eight slides, its main fault is perhaps that it’s too long to consume easily, but every slide seems worthwhile. This, to me, is further evidence that Netflix is quietly building one of the best brands of the next decade, and that it will soon become as readily referenced as Apple on lists of most admired businesses. Raise your hand if you wish your company would adopt these same principles. Via TechCrunch

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Be Consistent

A timeline comparing Pepsi-Cola versus Coca-Cola logotypes. The contrast speaks volumes about the wisdom — or lack thereof — of change for change’s sake, and reflects my general position on branding. Via Swiss Miss.

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Flip Flop Fly Ball

A startlingly rich array of visualizations of baseball data from Craig Robinson. “A love of baseball plus a love of infographics…Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was twelve years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me.” Via Capn Design.

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NetNewsWire’s Stinkin’ Synching

RSS readers used to be amazing, wondrous portals into a novel, rich trove of original content. When that was the case, when they were still new and our expectations for them were relatively low, the leading Mac OS X application for aggregating them was NetNewsWire and I used it loyally.

But as RSS evolved and the sheer volume of feeds I collected became more and more of a management challenge, I began to sour on NetNewsWire. It may have started strong, but its development momentum lazily petered out, its gaps in functionality growing more egregious every six months or so. Today I regard it as a not particularly good application at all, and it sits on my virtual junk heap of software that just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — evolve along with its users’ needs. Especially with recent revisions, wherein its developer has apparently focused on cosmetic changes to the program at the expense of true improvements, I regard it as a squandered, mishandled opportunity.

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