New Interview at Design in Flight

Design in FlightThe November issue of Andy Arikawa’s resurrected Design in Flight magazine is up. Until recently, I had missed its relaunch this past summer, which transformed it from a PDF-based, pay-for-download publication into a Web-based magazine with free access to its content, but I’m glad it’s still around.

This newest edition also happens to feature a new interview with me, and for those tired of me talking about Behavior’s redesign of The Onion, rest assured that topic is never broached in this piece. Instead, I fielded several tough questions from Justin Goodlett about grids, practicing design in New York City and the nature of opposing factions within the profession, among other topics. It’s probably my most articulate interview yet about my thoughts on design in general, for what that’s worth. Go read it.

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G5 Numbers

Power Mac G5In his excellent and characteristically exhaustive weblog post on the pros and cons of owning an Apple PowerBook, Jon Gruber advises: “Anyone already using an aluminum-era PowerBook G4 would probably be well-advised to wait” before buying a new Macintosh laptop. He also goes on to say that, in spite of Apple’s pending move to Intel processors, there are still at least “a handful of reasons why someone might want a last-generation PowerPC Mac instead of a first-generation Intel… The current versions of Adobe’s and Microsoft’s suites should run under Rosetta, but I strongly suspect performance won’t be as good as on last-generation PowerPC machines.”

As it happens, all of that is perfect advice for the situation in which I currently find myself. My 1 GHz PowerBook G4 is quickly approaching its second birthday and it’s starting to show its age. It’s noticeably slower than I’d like it to be, and it has no hope of running Apple’s forthcoming Aperture photo editing software. Still, it functions ably for portable computing needs, so I know it’s not quite ready to be replaced by a new PowerBook. On the other hand, if I want to offset the big bill coming my way from the Internal Revenue Service next April, now is the time for me to invest in new computing horsepower.

So I’ve been thinking more and more about buying a desktop machine. Notwithstanding the several desktop Macintoshes I’ve had at my various jobs, this will be the first desk-bound computer that I’ve bought for my personal use since my first Mac, a lowly Power Macintosh 6100/60 purchased back in 1994.It will also be the first time in over eight years that I’ll keep a desktop machine in my home office, such as it is.

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