“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso
Imitation is rife. Apple may just have been inspired by Braun design from the ’60s and ’70s for the iPhone calculator, iPod and G5 tower. The Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Xerox GUI copyright lawsuits are well known.
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed more and more pieces of PC software that try to achieve one thing: make the PC behave more like OS X. The application notifiers Growl and Snarl. The application enhancers Quicksilver and Colibri. The window managers Expose and Exposer. Unsurprisingly not one of them quite match-up to the Apple versions.
Now after years of mediocrity it seems that the PC manufacturers have finally realised that good design will set them apart. The days of the big beige box are thankfully long gone but until very recently the aesthetics of the offerings from Dell, Gateway and the like have been distinctly poor. Dell have upped their product design staff to 90 (from just six a few years ago) and are already receiving plaudits from the industry for their efforts.
In this years Microsoft CES keynote Bill Gates boldly predicted that we’ll be relying less on the keyboard and mouse in the next five years. Gosh Bill, do you really think so? What a revelation! Take a look at some bleeding-edge design concepts for some examples that might just make it to market over the next few years.
Something was very familiar about the Love Mattress I saw on BuzzFeed the other week. I knew that I’d seen it somewhere before but as it was still a prototype I couldn’t think where and it certainly wasn’t going to be found on any of my favourite shopping sites.
Eventually I remembered where I’d seen it (or at least seen a possible source of inspiration). I submitted the link to BuzzFeed to let them know about the cuddle mattress in this xkcd comic.
This is a brilliant recent example of why I love Slashdot. You just don’t get this level of humour in the comments on Digg (or any other community-driven aggregator for that matter). Slashdot is also inhabited almost exclusively by nerds and geeks which makes for some fascinatingly educated and insightful discussion. Until the StupidFilter is fully implemented and actually deployed on Digg, YouTube et al. I’m sticking with Slashdot.
Of course keeping on top items of from several important news oriented sites (and entertainment like xkcd and I can has cheezburger) becomes a lot easier with the use of RSS but when relying on these feeds alone you do miss out on the interaction element and fun of the comments.
When I’m away from my computer for a few days or really busy at work (or both as is currently the case) then things like keeping up with reading RSS feeds, listening to podcasts and posting to my blog take a back seat.
I finally got around to listening to last weeks net@night podcast which started off with Jonathan Coulton’s brilliant song Code Monkey. This isn’t new but is one of the increasing things that seem to be passing me by the first time around. Kristen Shirts remix is simply the best use of the ukulele since George Formby hung his up and started flogging his grilling machines . . .
