512 Pixels

The New York Times has posted a story about Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. Here’s a bit from it:

“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’ ” she says with a staccato laugh that has earned a following of its own in Silicon Valley. “I can’t articulate it anymore. I really love color. I’m not very knick-knacky or cluttery. My place has very clean, simple lines. There are some elements of fun and whimsy. That has always appealed to me.”

Good designers are always concerned with design and usability - not just when they’re on the clock.

Photocritic.org has put together a collection of 100 great shots taken with Apple’s iPhone.

Needless to say, I was surprised to see one of mine on the list:

The shot was like many I’ve taken with my iPhone: I simply didn’t have one of my cameras with me (I normally shoot with a Canon Powershot G9 or a Canon Digital Rebel XT) and hoped that the rather wimpy iPhone camera would get the job done. On this shot, it did.

Update: Gizmodo has picked this up.

This is a little old, but here’s why Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:

I wanted to write a site for someone it’s meant for. That reader I write for is a second version of me. I’m writing for him. He’s interested in the exact same things I’m interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he’s read it all.

If I turn comments on, that goes away. It’s not that I don’t like sites with comments on, but when you read a site with comments it automatically puts you, the reader, in a defensive mode where you’re saying, “what’s good in this comment thread? What can I skim?”

I hear “I just don’t get your site” from time to time.

My response: “That’s oaky.”

The MacOS iPhone Project is (according to their site) an attempt to get Mac System 7 running on an iPhone. Details are sketchy, but they do have photos. Here’s a blurb:

This is where we ran into one of our biggest issues, the cursor, it sound simple, but Apple didnt make it easy for us.

I have a feeling this will require jail-breaking the device, but time will tell.

Wired:

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

Bingo.

Gizmodo spent some time with Apple’s new 17-inch MacBook Pro and has posted a nice review of the machine:

Apple will tell you that the MBP17 is the thinnest, lightest 17-inch notebook in the world. We’ll tell you that for a monster of a laptop, it manages to not be too monstrous. The 17-inch (1920x1200) screen is a sharp, contrasty and colorful panorama, but it’s the little touches that make the MBP17 manageable: The system’s near-silent operation (using a 256GB SSD instead of a hard drive) is almost unnerving. Its underside gets warm, but never hot. And the unibody design makes particularly good sense in this larger size, as the wide chassis does not flex to your grip as you might expect.

The Rocky Mountain News, a E.W. Scripps newspaper, is closing this week, just shy of its 150th anniversary. Here’s a bit from the paper’s own coverage:

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

The New York Times paints a bleak picture as well:

The Rocky is one of several big-city newspapers that lost tens of millions of dollars in the last few years. Those papers now face a precarious future. Hearst, for example, said last week that it was considering selling or closing The San Francisco Chronicle, and it plans to close The Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it finds no buyer for that paper.

Changing readership habits and increasing competition from the Internet have hit the newspaper industry especially hard, cutting overall circulation sharply over the last decade. Those forces, and the severe economic downturn, have significantly eroded advertising, the primary revenue source for newspapers.

It is a bad time for newspapers, without a doubt: a failing economy means companies are reigning in their advertising dollars, readers are finding cheaper (and mostly free) news online, and the costs of paper, ink, and trucks to move newspapers around town are rising.

From Engadget’s lengthy review of Amazon’s revamped Kindle e-book reader:

All in all, the hardware has been seriously streamlined, and the result is nothing short of gorgeous. Besides being evened out and pulled in, the Kindle 2 is also astonishingly thin – just 0.36-inches – which makes it a pleasure to carry, though we miss some of the bulk of the original for reading duties. It’s not a huge deal, but besides the frequent mis-tapping of buttons, we still feel the original more closely replicates the “book holding” experience. But ultimately, the question that will be nagging most people here is, “why didn’t they do this stuff the first time around?” and it’s a valid one. It’s amazing to consider how many (original) bad hardware choices have been overcome with this new design, but also somewhat vexing if you were an early adopter.

I’m still not sold on the whole idea. Paper and ink is by far the best medium for reading - especially in long sittings.

The Washington Post:

NASA and climate researchers are weighing their options after yesterday’s crash of a new satellite designed to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide with unprecedented accuracy. A malfunction during the rocket ride toward space sent the Orbiting Carbon Observatory plummeting into the Indian Ocean near Antarctica.

“To say that it’s extremely disappointing would be an understatement. This was a really important science mission,” said a dismayed Edward J. Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

Major fail.

Macworld, on Apple’s annual shareholder meeting today:

With Jobs currently on medical leave until the end of June, the health of Apple’s CEO was very much on the minds of attendees at the shareholders’ meeting. In fact, it was the subject of the first thing asked when company executives opened the floor to shareholder questions. A shareholder asked whether Apple’s board of directors had kept investors in the dark about the status of Jobs’ health and inquired about a succession plan. Board member Arthur Levinson, who is also chairman and CEO of biotech firm Genentech, replied that the board disclaims information that it deems important and proper, and that it talks regularly about a succession plan.

Otherwise, the meeting served largely to have executives assure shareholders that the company was on the right track. Filling in for Jobs—and donning a Jobs-like pair of blue jeans and black (though collared, not turtleneck) shirt—chief operating officer Tim Cook cited strong Mac, iPod, and iPhone sales in the last year and hailed the App Store as “absolutely the envy of the industry.” He also reassured shareholders that he was “very confident of our product pipeline.”

Without Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple is still doing fine.

I stumbled across this Time article from 1983, about Steve Jobs and his young company, Apple Computer. Here’s a bit about the origins of the Apple // computer:

“Steve didn’t do one circuit, design or piece of code,” says Wozniak, who was widely regarded as the true technological wizard in Jobs’ corporate Oz. “He’s not really been into computers, and to this day he has never gone through a computer manual. But it never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them up in the air and sell a few.’ ”

It’s a long article, but a good look at the early days of Apple and (more interestingly) a look at the relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

I’ve been a notebook user ever since my first Mac - a 1GHz Titanium PowerBook G4, until about 18 months ago, when I bought a 20-inch aluminum iMac as my main machine. It’s a beast of a computer, but I still need to be portable from time to time.

I’ve also always been a fan of smaller notebooks, but never used anything under 15-inches across, until I bought a 12-inch PowerBook a while back. I loved that machine, but I really wanted something small enough to toss in my bag and ride my bike somewhere without the weight of a PowerBook.

The idea of putting OS X on a netbook had crossed my mind several times, but I didn’t really like any of the hardware out there. I had an EeePC 701 when the first came out, but the thing was impossible to work on for long amounts of time - the keyboard and screen were simply too small to be useful.

Then I came across the HP Mini 1000 - it’s got a 10-inch widescreen display, a great keyboard, and the fit and finish is far nicer than most netbooks out there. It’s as close to an Apple netbook as we may ever get as far as touch and feel.

After some research, however, I learned that the MSI Wind is the easiest netbook to run OS X on. It requires very little work to get Leopard fully functioning - wifi, sound, Ethernet and USB included. But I hated the hardware. The word “clunky” comes to mind. (The Dell Mini 9 is nice looking, and seems to be the new “cool” netbook to run OS X on, and it seems easy to do.)

At the time, the HP Mini 1000 wasn’t a great choice to put OS X on, as pretty as it was. Some people online had reported success to a degree, but most forum posts included tales of endless kernel panics and lots of crying. I bought the little notebook anyways, hoping the online community of HP Mini fans would get the bugs worked out. (I’m a sucker for nice hardware.)

In the meantime, I put Ubuntu on the Mini 1000 (instead of XP, which it shipped with), upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and kept an eye on the online forums devoted to getting OSx86 (the name of the hacked version of Leopard designed to run on non-Apple hardware) and the Mini 1000 to play nice.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a forum that promised the answers, so I jumped in. After downloading the altered OS X installer, several various programs and kernel extensions (known as kexts), I now have 10.5.5 running on my HP Mini 1000. There are some bugs (Ethernet and sound don’t work, and I can’t adjust my screen’s brightness, but thankfully the default is full-brightness.

Here’s a closer look:

Why?

Ubuntu is perhaps the perfect OS for netbooks. It’s free, runs well, has a good-sized user base (and really good online support), and is usable even to people who haven’t heard of Linux. But the truth is, I love OS X. It’s nimble, and I’ve used it daily since 10.1 was the new kid on the block.

But OS X on a netbook isn’t like OS X on a MacBook. Things don’t always work. I can’t run updates easily. I can’t run higher-end apps due to the Mini 1000’s hardware (which is in-line with other netbooks).

So why bother if Ubuntu is a better choice? Because I can. Because putting round pegs in square holes is fun. By playing with OS X on the Mini 1000, I’m learning more about kexts and other system-level components that I’d taken for granted before, because they just worked. Now that things require tweaking, I’m learning what makes OS X run so smoothly on Apple hardware.

How?

Installing OSx86 isn’t as hard as it used to be. There are several custom OS X installer and EFI bootloaders that take most of the hard work out of the installation. I ran the whole thing off of a USB hard drive with very few problems. I had to hop into the command line only once, but even then I was in the good hands of the dozens of user forums that discuss all sorts of pitfalls and issues.

I’m not going to link directly to any directions, but Google is your best friend if you’re looking at running OS X on your own netbook.

How’s it Run?

10.5 takes forever to boot on the Mini 1000 - over twice as long as it does on my 2.4Ghz iMac with 4GB of RAM, but no longer than XP took to load on the same machine. Once it’s booted, the Mini 1000 feels somewhere between an iBook G4 and a 1st generation MacBook. The Mini 1000’s 1.6Ghz Atom Intel processor with 2GB of RAM puts the little machine right between those two Macs hardware-wise.

I’m not going to run iMovie on this thing. No way. But for browsing and writing, it’s great. The uses of a netbook aren’t really dependent on the OS it’s running. I wouldn’t run Movie Maker under XP on it. Anyone who would want to run any type of video or photo editing software on a netbook is just asking for a painful experience - it’s a $450 machine, it will only do what $450 worth of hardware can do. Expecting anything past that is foolish.

That said, running Safari, Office, Twitteriffic all at once is quite stable. I can stream flash videos (Hulu, YouTube) just fine - like I could in XP and Ubuntu, and I get about 3 hours of battery life out of the 3-cell battery (better than in XP, worse than in Ubuntu).

Now What?

So what does the future hold for my little machine? I’m working on installing 10.5.6, so I can install iWork ’09 and ditch Office. I never wanted the Mini 1000 to be a workhorse, but anytime I’m headed to school, a meeting or coffee shop and don’t want to lug my work-granted MacBook Pro, the HP Mini 1000 will be in my bag, ready to boot into Leopard.