How Much Design Is Too Much Design?

As we await the launch of Apple’s latest attempt at creating a credible cloud computing service, an editorial at Ars Technica asks whether Apple can really succeed at this game. Writer Timothy B. Lee argues that Apple’s “centralized, designer-driven culture can be a serious weakness when building scalable network services,” and that analysis and iteration is what is truly necessary to make these things work.

This may or may not be an accurate assessment of Apple’s predicament, but I think the debate about whether designer-driven network products — not just cloud services, but social networks too — can succeed is an interesting one. I wouldn’t say that a strongly designer-led corporate culture makes it impossible for a company to create network products that people really want to use. But it does seem to me that, as much as we talk about the cruciality of design to the success of software that it’s also true that having too much design is often counter-productive.

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The Rise and Fall of Tower Records

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Celebrity son and actually pretty good actor in his own right Colin Hanks is working on a documentary that tells the story of one of the most hallowed institutions of my youth: the now defunct music and media chain Tower Records. This nicely sums up my experience browsing the aisles in Tower branches in nearly every single city I visited that had one:

“Tower Records had a monumental impact on millions of people, worldwide. It was ‘the place’ to escape for a few hours; a sanctuary, a haven. Tower Records was a place to meet your friends, your co-workers or a place to meet new friends who shared a common love of music, literature and all things cultural.”

It was really sad for me when the company closed down just five short years ago, and shocking to think that a chain with such reach and that played such an integral role in so many people’s lives could just disappear.

Hanks’ movie is a Kickstarter campaign, and I pledged a small amount, but they reached their goal fairly quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product. Read more here.

By the way, I nearly didn’t post about this because the number of fascinating Kickstarter campaigns has skyrocketed in the past few months, and if I blogged about every one of them I found interesting, it would quickly get out of control. We’re going to need some kind of Kickstarter filter soon…

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Roger Ebert: “The Dying of the Light”

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

From a few weeks ago, a powerful essay about how theater film projection has become a neglected craft.

“Do you remember what a movie should look like? Do you notice when one doesn’t look right? Do you feel the vague sense that something is missing?.”

The culprit is the recent mania for 3D projection, which generally produces a visibly darker picture than traditional 2D projection. Worse, Ebert charges that many theater owners are leaving 3D lenses on even when projecting 2D films; though they serve no function in those instances, those 3D lenses are nevertheless absorbing fifty percent of the projected light.

This reminds me a bit of the quality of voice telephone calls. With the proliferation of mobile phones and VOIP it’s hard to remember now that voice calls carried over land lines used to much, much clearer.

Read Ebert’s full article here.

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Useless Beauty

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

My favorite bit of yesterday’s 2011 WWDC keynote happened during Phil Schiller’s segment on Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X Lion update, which can be viewed at timecode 27:30 in the now available video stream. In making the case for Lion’s new peer-to-peer file sharing feature AirDrop, Schiller argued that it represents a marked improvement over good old ”sneaker net,” that reliable but unsophisticated method of copying files to a USB thumb drive and walking them across the room to a colleague. This was the image projected on the screen behind him:

Thumb Drive

The only purpose of this picture was to illustrate that USB thumb drives are inefficient, undesirable and obsolete, that these drives are an inferior solution to the one Apple was introducing just then. And yet they didn’t choose a stock image to make this point, but rather a beautifully executed illustration in the Apple style, with every detail exquisitely accounted for, including the little ring at the end. They put real work into it. Only Apple would go through the trouble of rendering the objects of its disdain so well.

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The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Cloud Computing Problem

Even though Apple’s new iTunes Match service, announced today during their 2011 WWDC Keynote, falls short of the potential that I see for music in the cloud (outlined in this post I wrote last month), I’m still generally encouraged by iCloud, the company’s enthusiastic new push into moving the computing experience off of our local hard drives. If nothing else, Steve Jobs’ tacit acknowledgment that its previous products in this arena have been less than dazzling is a satisfying new sign of self-awareness.

It’s no secret that MobileMe, the company’s current offering, as well as its predecessor .Mac, were both so underwhelming that they left most of their users only to despair that Apple truly didn’t understand the modern Internet at all.

The worst part of MobileMe though — indeed, the worst part of any of Apple’s cloud-based endeavors to date — was the company’s complete and utter unwillingness to acknowledge how bad their efforts were. For the most part, Apple remained impassively tight-lipped about poor performance, gaps in functionality and market-trailing features, all the while moving glacially slow (if at all) to make improvements. If over the past five or so years you were, like me, a user of any of either of these services, you probably felt — again like I did — that aside from paying your annual renewal fee, Apple pretty much didn’t care that you were a customer at all. Four years ago I wrote this rather snarky post that, while a bit sophomoric, still stands as a good summary of what it felt like.

Thankfully, in an offhand but very enlightening remark, Jobs spoke about the considerable and understandable skepticism generated by that approach, supposing that most of us would think “Why should I believe them? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe.” Too right. Such an open admission is a huge step forward. I hope iCloud follows up with a truly substantive execution.

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Vacation Over

Vacation Over

My daughter Thuy, now 21-months old if you can believe it, riding on my father’s shoulders in Paris last month.

As you can see we went to France again a few weeks ago to visit family, which explains the lack of posts around here. We’ve been back since the middle of last week, but crossing multiple time zones with a toddler makes jet lag exponentially harder to recover from. Anyway, sorry for the quietude. I’m sleeping a normal schedule again (I hope) and as of today back in the saddle and resuming posts.

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4CP Fridays

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Earlier this year I wrote about the prolific comics blogger and Web gallerist John Hilgart, known as Half-Man Half-Static. In truth, his comics-related projects are so interesting to me that I find it hard to resist writing about every single one of them, especially the ones centered around 4CP, his fantastic blog/gallery of extreme details of comic book panels.

Here᾿s another project he’s doing over at the online magazine HiLobrow: every Friday, the site is running a themed selection of 4CP images, assembled by a guest curator. The first installment, last Friday’s “Lonely Crowd” featured moments of 4CP’s trademark stillness within renderings of crowds of people.

4CP at HiLoBrow

This Friday’s installment is all about shadows and the wonderfully expressionist conventions that comics artists have used to render them. As populist expressions of real art, I would take any of these over the paintings of the overrated Roy Lichtenstein any day. See more here.

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Steve Forbes on Pay Walls: They Won’t Work

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Forbes media chairman and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ thoughts on digital publishing: paid subscriptions cannot match advertising revenue, “unimpeded access to content and conversation” is paramount, content apps are a non-starter, and the browser is the way forward for publishing content on tablets. It’s weird for me to be in pretty much total agreement with a guy who believed in the flat tax, but hey, life is a box of chocolates.

More details at PaidContent.

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Forecast for Music in the Cloud

The just-announced Google Music Beta offers a cloud-based storage locker for your music, theoretically letting you play your files from anywhere or on any compatible device. The initial reports seem to indicate that it doesn’t work very well, but it’s sure to improve. Amazon already offers something similar in its Cloud Drive product, and Apple, it is rumored, will join in at some unspecified point this year with an offering of their own.

There’s an inevitability to storing music on the cloud, but what I’d like to see is something a little more ambitious. It’s great to eliminate the need for local storage of music files, but why simply move those files to a server somewhere? If music can be served with near ubiquity, why not serve more than just the music?

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