When Apple introduced the iPhone, it was like Steve Jobs reached through a mysterious wormhole and pulled from within it an object from five years into the future; its design and user interface were like nothing seen before.

With the iPad, it’s like Jobs picked up a five year old magazine article about what Apple might have in store for the future, and based their new product on that. It’s even called iPad.

Many of us who are underwhelmed, however, may remember that the iPod was met with similar disappointment (and derision for its name) when it was first released.

Or maybe we’re all just Apple obssessed idiots.

I doubt the Apple Tablet will be much bigger than the iPhone hardware. In the past, tablet PCs running Windows have been large and expensive devices, which is not a good combination for a hand-held product.

My prediction is something bigger than an iPhone (and just as thin and sleek), but no bigger than a Kindle.

Innovative product design and great photography at black+blum. Site design by Presence Multimedia.

CPP | 2000 – a half-finished greyscale dhtml site by me.

According to Corey Eisman [toegristle], you can download a WebTV emulator from
here. Thanks Corey.

Another Matt Jones weblog [Creative Director of news.bbc.co.uk no less]. Although I think the BBC News site is excellent and I read it regularly, I have one quibble: why don’t any of the articles contain hypertext? I would have thought a public service organisation like the BBC would be the first to maintain web design standards that help make the Web what it is. Presumably, the reasoning is that people might click on a hyperlink to another site, not like what they see and think to themselves ‘I’m not paying my licence fee for this rubbish!’, hence the list of related links to the right with a disclaimer underneath.

After all the hype, the xbox looks like a disappointing piece of product design.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Jakob Nielsen’s argument in his latest alertbox and I’m having trouble pinning down what it is. I agree that mobile phones are poor devices for viewing online content and that their ‘form factor’ does not lend itself to interfacing successfully to the Internet. But he goes on to suggest that the future of mobile voice communication is through hand-held devices – primarily for Internet use – which have an ear/microphone arrangement for phone calls. I’m sure that if Jakob was to do a survey of mobile phone users, the percentage of those asked would prefer to speak into a small brick-like object than through a microphone on the lapel. This is simply to do with the fact that – in my opinion – people prefer to look as if they are on the phone speaking to someone rather than walking around seeming to speak to themselves. Mobile phones are annoying enough and I certainly don’t want to see a future when everyone in the street is speaking into the ether rather than to each other.

Teaching students how to use the Bezier tool in Illustrator is damned tricky. It’s one of those things that takes a while to master and when you do get good at it, it becomes second nature to do loads of fancy key presses that do different things. I made the mistake of teaching it in reverse; I showed them all these keyboard shortcuts before explaining the tool itself. It confused a few people, but I think they appreciated the fact that I was willing to assume they weren’t all halfwits and that they’d pick it up quickly. Thankfully they did and unlike me they can actually draw (Design students are all good drawers), so I’m sure they will put the Bezier tool to good use (I tend to use it to simply trace over things because I’m a useless drawer).
::.


I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend away from the screen (although I have got a big bag load of work to do including finshing off this site, so the irresistable lure of the computer might get the better of me if I’m not careful). I’m definately going to the Tyneside Cinema to check out Memento, which looks like a pretty interesting film (if you’ve seen it let me know), and also Straight Story which I definately want to see again at the cinema (I could watch this film all day). It’s sad about Richard Farnsworth though, commiting suicide because of the pain of his illness, he was a brilliant actor. I find it ironic that what he did mirrors the impetuous nature Alvin in Straight Story… ‘art imitates life’ and all that.

Oh dear… what has happened to Netscape? Not only have they produced one of the worst-looking pieces of software I’ve ever seen (although Cleaner 5 is getting close it), it also looks as though they’ve failed to implement the standards that promised to make life easier for web designers. Why?