280 Slides

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A friend of mine just showed this site to me today, which I apparently missed when it first debuted several months ago. It’s a nearly perfect re-creation of the Apple Keynote presentation-making application — or as nearly perfect as can be expected within a Web browser — built with the Cappuccino Web framework, which enables “desktop class applications” through JavaScript.

280 Slides is an impressive piece of work, but I wonder if it isn’t somewhat quixotic too. Though browser applications will inevitably become more desktop-like as they become more powerful, that doesn’t mean they should be designed to look and function like the software that lives on your hard drive. It’s still important to be true to the medium and the platform. That’s why Gmail is such a huge success; it doesn’t try to ape the desktop. Rather it makes the most of the strengths and weaknesses of the browser. Trying to re-create the desktop experience note-for-note seems like an ill-advised way to create a great browser application.

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MacRumors: Apple Exploring Three-Dimensional Desktop and Application Interfaces

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“Dozens of Apple patent applications were published today revealing research that Apple had done in 2007 on many topics encompassing future versions of Mac OS X. The most intriguing is a series of patent applications which describe a ‘multidimensional’ user interface. Apple has essentially been working on true 3D desktop environments.”

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Live Music Is Dead to Me

As digital media facilitates our increasing disconnection from the old paradigms for how popular music is consumed — physical distribution is on its last legs, ‘albums’ as a concept are less convincing than ever, and the pay model is fitfully molting its old ways — I wonder whether our attitudes towards live performances are changing as well.

A little more than a decade ago (yikes) I was a pretty heavy patron of live music, seeing at least two shows a week in small clubs in Washington, DC, where I lived at the time. Perhaps I watched too many mediocre bands within too short a time span, but it only took me a few years to develop a powerful distaste for the trappings of live performances: the unnecessarily deafening volume levels, the perpetual discomfort of standing on your feet for hours, the juvenile shenanigans of bands who like to keep their audiences waiting interminably — for no apparent reason other than they’re really incredibly immature, insecure pretenders to artistry. Blech. That’s not for me anymore.

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Cartoon Modern

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Amid Amidi’s recently launched companion site to his book “Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation.” In case you missed that one, published two years ago, it’s an illuminating exploration of the mostly forgotten and/or under-appreciated talents that reinvented postwar cartoons as expressions of Modern abstraction. The result is a school of visual rendering that’s remembered with great fondness by many. Also, don’t forget Amidi’s Cartoon Brew, which is also excellent.

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Window Stars

Window Stars

Snapped in the Uniqlo store in SoHo before the sales clerk urgently told me photography is verboten in their stores. “The only reason we let you in here is so you can give us your money.” Kidding. He didn’t say that. In so many words.

Stars designed by Andy Macgregor.

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A Very Hairy Hedcut

A Very Hairy Hedcut

It was my birthday yesterday. Among the many nice things that my girlfriend Laura did for me, she also gave me one of the best and certainly one of the most unexpected gifts I’ve ever received on any occasion: an original, authentic hedcut rendering of my dog, Mister President.

The artist, Nancy Januzzi, is one of the senior illustrators at The Wall Street Journal, where Laura works. Like all of the hedcut artists, Nancy delivers a certain amount of gravitas to these manually-intensive, trademark portraits of her subjects, which is why I find this picture so hilarious.

It’s not just that I have an over-the-top preoccupation with my dog. It’s that the portrait manages to capture Mister President’s absurd, deadpan seriousness with uncanny accuracy. If you’re going to render a pet in this definitive, white glove style, his is pretty much the most appropriate expression. At the same time though, he’s a dog, and a pretty goofy one at that, too. The effect is just wonderfully ridiculous. I couldn’t stop laughing.

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