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The Art of Apps

Opening a week from Monday, at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art here in New York City: an exhibition of beautiful user interface designs for iPhone and iPad apps called “The Art of Apps.”

This is an idea that came from my friend Benjamin Hindman, a master events impresario and CEO of of One Clipboard. Ben wanted to create an exhibition around great digital design, and together we decided to focus it on some of the gorgeous user interface design work being done for iOS. Together, we pulled in a few of our favorite app designers, who all graciously agreed to lend work to the show: Piictu, Tweetbot, Paper, Path, Behance and forthcoming (and beautiful) app Cameo. I’m humbled that none of these stellar folks balked at the idea of including Mixel too.

The R.S.V.P. list is open right now at this Splash page, so if you’ll be around on 14 May, please come by and see the show.

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Salvaging a Blu-Ray on My Mac

One of my daughter’s favorite movies is “The Sound of Music.” We bought it for her as a Blu-Ray disc, but it stopped working in our player recently, owing I think to one of the periodic firmware updates that the manufacturer sends down the pike to us. It used to work wonderfully, but now gets caught on a loading screen and goes into an unending loop. Another strike against the addled monstrosity that is the Blu-Ray format. (I wrote about my major Blu-Ray complaints last year, so I won’t repeat them here.)

A software glitch is little consolation to a toddler who has her heart set on singing along with Julie Andrews though, so I resolved to somehow get a digital copy of the movie off the disc and free ourselves of the trappings of the Blu-Ray version we owned. Apple of course has decided to stay as far away from Blu-Ray as possible, so this took some work.

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Ikea Takes on the Living Room Problem

Home furnishings mega-retailer Ikea is intent on remaking the living room. This fall they will start selling Uppleva (apparently the Swedish word for experience; you have to admire its inherent optimism), a home theater furniture system that integrates a flat-screen television, a 2.1 channel sound system, a Blu-Ray/DVD player and wi-fi-based networking. The Verge’s write-up is an excellent overview of what we know so far about this just-announced line.

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Me on Design Matters

A few months ago the prolific Debbie Millman, design honcho at Sterling Brands and chair of SVA’s new Masters in Branding program, invited me to be a guest on her awesome Design Matters podcast, where she’s been interviewing notable design professionals for years. It was an incredibly flattering invitation, and I had originally been slated to guest back in February, but a family emergency forced me to cancel at the last minute.

So late last month I was finally able to make it to Debbie’s studio, which is located in the swank new offices for her masters program, and sat down with her to record an interview. It aired last Friday but you can listen to it at your leisure here. Based on all the episodes I’ve listened to in the past, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that Debbie had questions for me across the full span of my career. What struck me was that she was so well prepared though; she really does her homework in advance of these interviews, which I think was why it was so fun. Have a listen for yourself.

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Reading “Game of Thrones” in the Real World

Just about every book I’ve read over the past few years I’ve read in electronic form, either on my iPhone or on my iPad. But for a recent weekend getaway, I bought a paperback copy of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” on a whim, so that I’d have something to read on the beach. It’s nice to not have to worry about a book overheating in the sun or electrically shorting from water.

“A Game of Thrones” is a long book. A really, really long book. I’m still reading it, which means I’m toting it around with me on my commute. It’s a supermarket-style paperback, small and compact enough to fit just barely into my jacket pocket, but it sticks out just enough for people to see.

One thing I had completely forgotten about is how communal popular books can be. A few people have spotted “A Game of Thrones” in my pocket or saw me reading it on the subway and then started friendly conversations with me about it, something that never would have happened if I were reading it on my phone, where every book is effectively invisible to everyone but me. I remember reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on my iPhone just after it came out, at a time when lots and lots of people were reading it too, but I realize now that I was reading it in a kind of isolation, where people around me were unaware of the concurrency.

I’m not sure that this communal feeling is enough to outweigh the benefits of reading books electronically, but I know I’ve enjoyed it while reading this novel. I’m not a sword and sorcery fan, really, and I find “A Game of Thrones” to be frustrating and somewhat ridiculous even as I admit it’s extremely well-crafted and probably more entertaining than it is tedious. It’s been fun debating this ambivalence with both friends and strangers, most of whom I never would have guessed were fans of the series.

It would be nice if there was a way to replicate that part of the reading experience electronically too, that kind of real world happenstance that doesn’t require signing up or signing in to anything, just carrying around whatever book you’re reading and being open enough in your body language to welcome small talk from perfect strangers. It just goes to show you that the electronic reading experience has a long way to go, and all the time and effort we’ve been putting into crafting perfect layouts might be better used fleshing out some of the things that really make reading a rewarding experience.

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The Mad Men Fairytale

I bet I know what many of you will be doing this Sunday night: tuning into the season 5 premiere of “Mad Men,” AMC’s pop cultural (if not exactly popular) hit about the advertising world of the 1960s. Anticipation for this delayed season has been running high; I know at least one person who has been re-watching the previous season’s episodes to ‘get ready.”

That level of dedication astounds me. I count myself as a “Mad Men” devotee, but personally I couldn’t justify spending another thirteen hours of my life simply studying up on it. But, hey, more power to those who can afford the time.

It’s still not exactly clear to me why this show, whose ratings are modest, exerts such a strong pull on our collective imagination. I tried to unpack some possible reasons for this last year when I wrote that “Mad Men” was really about furniture, and suggested that it taps into the interior decorator fantasies that many of its fans hold. I still think that’s true, but I think the larger point may be that the series is not really a daydream that all of its fans share, but rather it’s a daydream of old media. In this age when the old brands that once ruled American commerce are now diminished, and with so much of the coming century feeling unsettled and uncentered, “Mad Men” is a kind of bedtime story that media tells itself about how powerful it used to be. It’s something like the inflated tales of lost motherlands that immigrants tell their children; we’re in an age now when the landscape of “Mad Men” seems like a grand old folktale of kings and queens. This is what happens when old ways die; we start telling nostalgic fairy tales about what they used to be.

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Get on the Bjango Wagon

Marc Edwards over at Bjango is an extremely knowledgable and talented app designer and developer. If you make apps and you’re not reading his blog, you’re missing out on a great education. Last year he wrote a phenomenally helpful article on “pixel-perfect vector nudging” in Photoshop that was probably the single most useful tip I read anywhere in 2011. These articles are free, but I’d pay real money for them, just as I paid for his excellent Skala Preview, a Mac OS X desktop application and iOS app that lets you send real-time previews of your Photoshop work to your iPad or iPhone. It’s simple, elegant and awesome. This morning he also updated his shockingly comprehensive iOS Photoshop Actions and Workflows to version 1.2, with some minor tweaks and support for Photoshop CS6 (already!). In short, Marc is making incredible contributions to the field; give him a bit of your attention and, if Skala Preview strikes your fancy, a bit of your money. You’ll be well rewarded.

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When High-Def Goes Low-Res

It used to be that we assumed companies had access to better technology than consumers did, and therefore understood it more deeply than us, but I think that’s no longer the case. Very often, it seems to me that ‘regular’ people now understand technology better than many companies do.

This occurred to me over the past few days as I traveled to Austin and then Minneapolis. In each city I stayed in a pretty nice hotel, both of which had flat-screen televisions in the rooms. Of course it’s not unusual that hotels will have LCD or plasma televisions these days, but what I’ve found is that no matter how nice the hotel is or how many stars it might rate, they all fundamentally misunderstand what a flat-screen television is for.

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Me On the Road

You’ve read my blog, now see the road show. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be making a number of appearances, not just in New York, but all across the country: Austin, Minneapolis and San Francisco, too. Here’s a roundup of what’s happening.

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