Television without the Television

iMac G5Today, Apple announced the addition of new video capabilities to its one-two entertainment punch of iPod hardware and iTunes software, satisfying a long festering demand for portable video and providing an inevitable method for buying video content. They’re significant first steps in monetizing broadband content and I think they’re cool, but they leave me basically nonplussed.

What’s got me in a lather, though, is the new iMac G5, which is tantalizingly, frustratingly close to a great media center… but still miles short of what I had in mind. Where is the TV tuner functionality, first of all? If there’s something glaringly missing from this offering that in so many respects desperately wants to be a television, it’s the ability to actually be able to use it as a television.

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Thinking about The Times

The New York TimesWhen Behavior was working on our redesign of The Onion, we would frequently look to The New York Times for hints on how a publication should present itself online, how content should be organized, how the user interface to an archive of articles should be manifested, etc. In so many ways, The Times is a de facto standard that leads the way in best practices: the decisions they make in developing their user interface can effectively validate a design convention.

For instance, their recent decision to provide, from articles, access to all the paper’s sections in a DHTML pop-up menu is a convincing argument for a navigational method that might previously have met with skepticism from any client I proposed it to. In my experience, the fact that “the Times does it” is proof enough that a convention is widely understood and acceptable.

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Paragraph in The New York Times

ParagraphRun out and get a copy of today’s New York Times and turn directly to the Sunday Styles page for a big feature article all about Paragraph, the writers’ space recently opened by my girlfriend. It’s a huge, early win for her and her partner: an in-depth piece that talks about writers’ spaces in general, but that prominently features Paragraph and quotes from both Joy and Lila. I’m kind of beaming, if you can’t tell.

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