Hello, HP.

The UI of your latest TouchSmart computer says something about you. You may not have recognized your own weaving-in of meaning, but it comes across quite clearly if one reads just right: You want out. You want to escape the world of Windows to which Microsoft has sequestered you for the better part of two decades. 

Ah, but you can. No longer does Bill Gates stand guard outside your cell. Ballmer is busy in the lavatory. It’s time to ditch Windows and build a Linux distro around the TouchSmart UI.  (more…)

Former Apple CEO John Sculley unveiled yesterday, at the Consumer Electronics Expo, his company’s vision for a high-end, consumer home phone. “The iPhone of Home Phones,” sings PC Magazine of the device known as OpenFrame.

Unfortunately for Sculley and Verizon, the approach shown in the press photos is approximately as appropriate for the context of a desktop phone as a twelve-inch clickwheel is for a home stereo.

Really. Beginning somewhere around the app launcher that borrows only the iPhone’s aesthetic, ruining its meaning by expanding the icon-grid interface into an unsorted mess of similar, randomly-colored squares, and ending somewhere around the humorous mental image of an actual human being sitting before the suggested image of a Harry Potter film playing, his 46″ plasma undoubtedly sitting unused across the living room, it is somewhat difficult to imagine the OpenFrame being either a terribly usable or useful device.

Which is where most bloggers and disgruntled designers would stop. But not I, dear reader; so impressed was I at the deceptive aesthetics of this poorly designed device, I decided I could conceive of better in one evening. And so, staying up a bit too late, I believe I may have.
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Today, a Minnesota court found Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement. You might think that the 24 songs the jury found her liable for sharing could have easily resulted in $500, even $1000 in lost RIAA revenues from those dastardly pirates who, were she never to have made the songs available, would have promptly marched down to their local Best Buy and bought them at MSRP.

You’d likely be right. But you’d be missing the real reason the court set the single mother’s total liability at the sum of $222,000. It wasn’t just US Copyright Law — it allowed for, but did not stipulate the specific amount. Rather, the crippling amount was mandated by the cosmos themselves.

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Many tech pundits have suggested, in defense of third-party applications on that Barack Obama of a mobile device known as iPhone, that its fabled killer app won’t come from Apple. Steve Jobs told the world last January that there would be no such support, then amended the pronouncement this week, asserting that, since the iPhone runs a fully functional web browser, that oh, of course you could write custom apps for the iPhone because you can write custom web apps.

Thusly we find ourselves. Already, we see people writing speculative web apps for the iPhone—not that speculation is necessarily a bad thing in this case, as the runtime environment is pretty much established (320×480, AJAX standards-compliant, touch interface), right?

Right. There’s no doubt that with this early activity already taking place before the device is even available, it is almost foregone that a strong community will build within the coming months. The iPhone will get its fair share of third party software, despite this awkward path to development. And somewhere in there will be the killer app, the real reason to get an iPhone. With one exception:

You won’t need an iPhone for it. If In fact, all you’ll need is something with at least a 320×480 touchscreen that can render standards-compliant pages. And while these devs may be targeting the specifics of Apple’s WebKit renderer, there’s nothing there that a little tweaking won’t fix.

Oops. If Apple had gone the SDK route and allowed iPhone development in Cocoa, the iPhone could have its first killer app all to itself. Perhaps this may yet happen. As it stands, though, anything that runs on the iPhone can also run on a Meizu, an FIC, or anything else with the specs to handle it.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s good for the market. It’s merely a bit ironic that a proprietary move on Apple’s part should result in the leveling of its own field.

What was, not too long ago, a tepid and vague consumerlust of mine has, over the past week, metamorphed into a barely-dismissed obsession. The Apple TV, far from the impenetrable fortress of iTunes clubbiness I had once imagined it to be, guarded from any practical use by its own local-area RDF repeater, has turned out to, with some serious effort from a gleefully obsessive community, be ready to possibly out-Neuros the venerable Neuros OSD. With the introduction of USB support this eve, I took it upon myself to propose a rechristening based upon these developments.

I am not above admitting that it is likely due in part to a fear of commitment that, for my daily robot project, I chose not to register a domain including the word “daily.” In a coup of lukewarm, noncommittal dedication, I have safely set up shop under a domain with no reference to a supposed frequency of updates, leaving only the disjointed, easily mutable graphic headline of the site to offer a revocable promise of daily updates.

To be fair, my ultimate choice of domain was also motivated by a desire to keep the potential scope of the site open to future expansion. And while the words “Robot Project” may err on the side of cliché, they have, at least to me, in their evocation of childhood visions of Optimus Prime, a subtle ring of pleasant familiarity.

Over the past month, I have been readying a new project. It is one simple in objective, an exercise purely in creative visual form, perhaps with latent traces of narrative, all within a construct of regimen. Inspired by a delightfully demented project (whose delightfulness and dementedness I may only aspire to), I have resolved to initiate a daily series of original illustrations around a single, and I think happily versatile, theme: Robots.

Since the first of January, I have been adding one to the collection daily (allowing for occasional catch-up days), meanwhile planning their presentation, which I hope to have running in a basically functional form within a few days.

I frequent Illinois’ east-west corridor of Interstate 88 with a certain degree of frequency.

My spatial sense of the route has been shaped by maps (mostly Google), perhaps in significantly greater proportion than the actual act of driving it. My Place sense of the route has been shaped by the set-back structures that pass while driving. Despite this, mapping and interstate driving are similar in scope: both offer a broad, generally glancing look at the area they represent.

This week, as an exercise in experiential diversity, I chose instead to follow Route 38. 38 and 88 run parallelesque, both functionally east-west vessels, but I found the difference between them to cover far more than the mere differences in effective speed and net toll cost: The interstate was built for location. The roads were built for place.
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