Sawdust & Glitter

Save Walter White

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:12:00 -0400

Save Walter White:

This is the best thing I can post on Father’s Day. LOL

How do you want to be remembered?

Aviation Vectors by Joel James Devlin: Airplanes like atoms in...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:34:00 -0400

Aviation Vectors by Joel James Devlin: Airplanes like atoms in space.

The orbits of the moons and planets form a 4-dimensional fractal...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:14:29 -0400

The orbits of the moons and planets form a 4-dimensional fractal helix in spacetime.

Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator....

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:11:22 -0400

Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator. Wandering particles on the wandering planet.

Stunning Long Exposure Photographs of Gold Fireflies in...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:05:00 -0400

Stunning Long Exposure Photographs of Gold Fireflies in Japan by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu: Nature can makes its own microcosm of Los Angeles landscape too.

The Treachery of Sanctuary by Chris Milk: Why I want to learn...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:05:54 -0400

The Treachery of Sanctuary by Chris Milk: Why I want to learn how to program my Kinect. I know, I know, birds are easy way out, but… they are so cool.

Last post for today. Life Before Death by journalist Beate...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:43:00 -0400

Last post for today.

Life Before Death by journalist Beate Lakotta and photographer Walter Schels:

The industrialization of death - die in a hospital and then be shoved into a coffin immediately - has while protected some from depression, but has also wrecked havoc on how we value death in our society, which resulted in an army of cowards who cannot live life to its bravest, and who can only fear death.

This is journalism and photography at its best.

Good night.

Chrysler Building’s Observatory by William van Alen:...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:41:58 -0400

Chrysler Building’s Observatory by William van Alen: Theater set design crosses architectural interior design, and exposes your subconscious mind in celestial fairy tales.

“The steeply tilted walls reflected structural necessity masked as pure design through a close look at Expressionst film sets, principally the angular mad-house of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

Cool Brolly by yamuhaton: The Dymaxion umbrella. And your pants...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:33:18 -0400

Cool Brolly by yamuhaton: The Dymaxion umbrella. And your pants will still be wet.

TV Barrow by CW&T: Fellow Brooklynites amalgamated a bike...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:32:28 -0400

TV Barrow by CW&T: Fellow Brooklynites amalgamated a bike and a big screen TV.

Phoenix Observation Tower by BIG: Moon Lollipop. <3

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:29:18 -0400

Phoenix Observation Tower by BIG: Moon Lollipop. <3

Hasegawa® Lucano Step Stools: If Jony Ives were to make ladders,...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:28:53 -0400

Hasegawa® Lucano Step Stools: If Jony Ives were to make ladders, these are pretty close. Yes, Jony Ives is still a great industrial designer if not UX designer.

Works by Fabian Buergy: Sculpture turns into landscape of...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:27:06 -0400

Works by Fabian Buergy: Sculpture turns into landscape of ephemeral thoughts.

Darkened Cities by Thierry Cohen: Oscar Niemeyer is still...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:25:48 -0400

Darkened Cities by Thierry Cohen: Oscar Niemeyer is still amazing. The Milky Way agrees.

TDRS-K by NASA: The shield almost look translucent black.

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:24:50 -0400

TDRS-K by NASA: The shield almost look translucent black.

staff: Tumblr for Windows Phone has arrived! Find and follow...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:58:12 -0400

staff:

Tumblr for Windows Phone has arrived!

Find and follow the things you love

Share photos, gifs, video, quotes, chats, links, and text

Jump between your dashboard and Explore with just one swipe

Display the latest images from your dashboard on your lock screen and live tile

GIFs play as you scroll

Get the app

Dear Microsoft, please stop fixing kernels.

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:38:00 -0500

Something I don’t understand about Microsoft is its obsession about new kernels. While I can see how a foundation of a building is important, changing it all the time damages the OS more so than fixing it. Imagine a hotel that does not understand why guests aren’t coming, and their solution is to rebuild the foundation of the building? That wouldn’t fix anything. The problem is in the sales, in the mismatched furnishings, and the vibe.

Mixing WinRT apps and WP8 apps on one platform will only result in one thing: A user experience disaster, found especially on Android tablets, which attempted similar integration. Most Android developers don’t bother with tablet views, and odd form factors like Galaxy Note can ‘claim’ to have many apps but all with suboptimal experience.

iOS knows a little better, but that isn’t an optimal experience either - not all iPhone apps get ported to iPad UX specs, and users can only use the apps in stretched form. Same thing will happen to WP9/Win9 if integration were to happen. Sure, now with more shared code, the programmers can code a little less - until they have to deal with the UI.

What’s likely to happen to the resulting Windows Store is:

Stretched up, carelessly designed suboptimal experience for either the W9 or WP9 app, which results in further inconsistency. (XAML development in Windows 8 has been way sub-par to WP8, as of now.)
Geeks can fulfill their wet dream of RDP on a phone - I have no idea what they can use to control Word on a 4 inch capacitive screen - while general public wouldn’t care less.
Lots of incompatibilities yet again due to yet another kernel change.
Games will benefit the most, as they do not require as much UX optimization. Fixing kernels to fix sales of an OS is a very engineering point of view, in my opinion.

The stronger reasons of why, say, Tomb Raider or Amazon Cloud Music or Microsoft Word, cannot be simultaneously released on Xbox, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are:

UI and interaction methods of the apps need to be optimized and tested for each type of screen - large or medium or small, touch or keyboard/mouse or Kinect or game controller.
Commercial priorities - some platforms just do not have as much users to put so much effort and resources to develop for, no matter how easy to port the code.
For small developers, each type of screen requires purchases of more devices. To release only for Windows Phone, the dev only needs 1 phone, due to its restriction of form factors. Shall form factors be more varied like Android, smaller devs are barred from releasing optimized apps for all the form factors.

So what do people actually want?

What I see most people actually want from the merging of Windows Phone and Windows team efforts is:

Seriously, the WP UX team is way better. Just compare the Music app on the Phone versus the clustermess and clutter of the one on Win8. Or the implementation of live tiles.
There are concepts in Win8 that are very useful and should be ported to WP8, i.e. Share charm, file picker contracts, and the whole app contract concept in general.
Easier porting of games between platforms. The Win8 games library is lackluster right now. The fact that Win8 doesn’t have XNA while Xbox and WP8 depends on it is very strange - and the solution now is to merge kernels, what?
Run the relatively larger and better designed WP8 app library on Windows 8 - but you can’t, since all the apps aren’t optimized for landscape view of larger screens. All the apps need to be redesigned to be port over.

In short, for Microsoft to win, at this moment, is to push sales and marketing, and in long run, is to streamline the user experience. Every time MS changes the kernel, it breaks more than fixes the issue, and it’s costly for both the corporation and the developers to fix the mess afterwards.

Let’s see if they would wise up. And I’m pretty sure they are. What I’m reacting to is probably just some fanboys’ dream.

This is an IFTTTT (IFTTT test).

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:40:47 -0500

This is an IFTTTT (IFTTT test).

Anti-Intellectualism and Design

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:52:00 -0400

Articles like this makes me cringe. A writer obviously jaded by TED’s exorbitant entry cost went on a rampage against TED, unknowingly becoming part of the anti-intellectual movement simply because of a perceived class divide. It sucks for TED Talks, which are basically free for all on the Internet, but still causes divide because of its exclusivity to entry (US$7500), because tons of opportunists want to rock the gate to get in and spew their individualism on stage.

Resources are getting scarce these days much?

With higher education getting more expensive and less valuable, and with consumerism and populist culture catering to spendthrift adolescents (thus growing increasing anti-adulthood and less responsible), is this the rise of an era of anti-intellectualism in the US?

History repeats (unfortunately) and it’s not uncommon we’ve seen China or Europe falls into eras of anti-intellectualism.

The most ironic part, however, is that we are actually all literate and educated enough this time. While I don’t think it’s necessary to go for expensive higher education for the quest of knowledge, it’s unfortunate that higher education is becoming an exclusivity to the upper class again due to its costs and lack of practical uses.

And in this age when the wealth gap widens, the hatred towards the upper class had worsen. I’m not so worried about the upper class, but combined with the lessened appeal of adulthood and the lowered interest in art, literature, science and technology versus money and opportunism, I am definitely worried that education and the quest for knowledge will go down with it in our future generations.

With all that said, how does it relate to us designers? I think designers can become part of anti-intellectualism or not, but a lot of us may not be aware of it since we aren’t being observant in humanity scale but only in project scale. Consider these whenever we design or develop a branding, an app or a web:

Is our design catering to a certain culture that does not encourage responsibility into adulthood?
Is our design going to be used to pamper one to stay in adolescence?
Does our design help people grow and become a better human being?
Would our work be responsible for further divides between humanity?

Good old days when Mr. Jobs pranks Starbucks in front of 4000...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 02:42:55 -0400

Good old days when Mr. Jobs pranks Starbucks in front of 4000 people.