every apple product intro has the same exact analysis, debate and criticism around it. I remember the iMac: “but it has no floppy drive!” Paradigm shift never is painless.
[From CrunchGear » Archive » MacBook AirHead: why Apple’s new laptop is basically useless]
Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.
Posted via web from ethank's posterous
- #["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]
If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?
- #Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.
Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.
Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.
A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.
Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?
Posted via web from ethank's posterous
- #The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.
via tuaw.com
What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.
The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.
- #[From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]
Rest in piece little buddy.
- #[From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]
Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.
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I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.
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A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.
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Ethan,
I think Apple may have another Cube on their hand.
This is form at the expense of function at a higher price point.
Had they just dropped the optical drive fine, but not being able to upgrade the ram or change a battery and no Ethernet (Still needed in some/many hotels). As the target demographic for that laptop – I’m giving it a pass.