Two from Tom Hume:

On how creativity is often shaped by ones tools:

“When I first moved my weblog over to MovableType from Radio Userland, I wondered what difference a new tool would make. Nearly 6 months on, I think I know.”

And a great post on mobile application design:

“Interaction design for mobiles is IMHO more like appliance design than web, or even application, design. Focus on core tasks, simplicity, and elegance… try to avoid forcing the end-user to think more about interfaces than getting the job done.”

I have moved over to Typepad, as my MT installation was getting broken, complicated and onerous to fix.

It means I have lost the design temporarily that Tom coded for me, but I’ll try and edge back towards that as time and Typepad’s training-wheels allow.

Comments should work again now, although I’m a little wary of the lack of comment-spam control that Typepad has, and the reports of deeply unpleasant amounts of deeply unpleasant comment-spam that friends have gotten, so we’ll see how we go.

The RSS feed for this site is now http://blackbeltjones.typepad.com/work/index.rdf

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading.

Erik Spiekermann has a blog!

And it looks bloody awful!

However it is very endearing in tone. Kinda Raymond Chandler meets typegeek:

“The redesign of The Economist was the reason to take a look at Officina Sans. While that was good as an “information” face, it was too goofy as a headline. Enter the Display version…”

[via whatdoiknow]

• Kobot: “News on interaction design, HCI, mobile internet, robots, and much more.”
• Standanddeliver:
  

  “Meanwhile, a lot of other music lovers have subsequently started to come to their senses, realising that there is more to recorded music than just the music: there is also the packaging, and the sentimental value invested in it. While Japan has begun to reissue CDs in miniature replica album sleeves, complete with facsimile inner sleeves and posters, there are people who are keen to just own their favourite records again, with the cover art and sleevenotes they don’t have to go blind trying to enjoy, and – if pressed to admit it – the ‘warm’ sound.”

Gene has a skatelog:

“A nice long run, marred by an inglorious crash. No heroic high speed downhill flameouts for me, just a stupid crack in a flat stretch of pavement, trippedfellslidstopped. A nasty bit of road rash, and some ugly thrashed spots on my skates and pads.”

The skated city has been the subject of study and system-building for a decade or so, but accesibile personal sensors and mapping tools could generate great new art, complementary experiences and stolen knowledge.

Emergent Quokka?!?

» Fredshouse: Skatelog

and technology prediction / futurism:

“At the time of writing his essay Bush knew more about the state of technology development in the US than almost any other person. During the war, he was Roosevelt’s chief adviser on military research. He was responsible for many war time research projects including Radar, the Atomic Bomb, and the development of early Computers. If anyone should ever have been capable of predicting the future it was Vannevar Bush in 1945. He is an almost unprecedented test case for the art of prediction. Unlike almost anyone else before or since Bush was actually in possession of ALL the facts – as only the head of technology research in a country at war could be.”

» VirtualTravelog: Vannevar Bush and The Limits of Prescience

…because the other one is holding an ebook.

Russell Beattie seems to have outed Christian Lindholm from Nokia’s blog, which is a relief as I can start pointing to it too. A nice little observation here around e-books. Maybe he should go to Cory Doctorow’s Etech session.

“I believe that Smartphones have a good chance of evolving into reading devices. The Series 60 screen is now big and bright enough for rather comprehensive reading. Many users have read e-books on their Palms and I used to do it on my Newton back in 1993. One of the things that attract me with mobile e-books is making book/document reading one-hand operated, which books typically aren’t.”

I’m not sure it’s impossible to read a book one handed, but it’s neither that confortable for you or the book’s spine. I’m not sure either it’s that comfortable to read a book on a phone just yet, but I’ve never tried it.

I guess I was holding out for the nice, crisp, rollable eInk displays.

Is there any service or site that aggregates and compares just the categories used in blogs?

can be found here. Caution: the background pattern makes it a little hard to read on a PC…
[via Chad]

New(-to-me) blog on mind and idea stuff found via Seb’s Open Research, which I gravitated towards purely because of the nostalgia-value of the URL, but stayed for stuff like this:

“Modern preconceptions have it that simply by applying our brains and concentrating hard enough on a problem (e.g. a crossword clue), we should be able to see the solution. This is the “Hare brain” approach.

The book says that there are two types of solution moments. Yes, one is when we sit down and just think hard. But there is another solution moment which comes seemingly out of nowhere, when we’ve been staring out the window, or having a shower, going for a walk. This is the tortoise mind approach. This is a result of a) having done the hare brain thinking in the first place and b) just relaxing your frontal lobes, and letting the rest of your brain “background render” the solution.

» Monkeymagic: December 2003 Archives