How To Email

For what's pretty much the oldest form of online communication, you'd think we'd have gotten the hang of it by now. There's some excellent advice here.

Nothing drives people crazier than an email where someone sends over a lot of information but doesn’t say what they’d like you to do. I often respond to those immediately by asking: What do you want me to do?

Do you want me introduce you to someone? Do you want me read your blog post and give you feedback? Do you want me to respond with whether I’ll be able to attend an event? Be clear and say it explicitly up front.

The Fragility Of Brands

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what makes a brand. It's very often talked about entirely in terms of image, marketing, and target audience, and the actual product and customer experience gets left out of the picture. That this isn't a sustainable position is neither new, nor a product of the rise of the Internet.

For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance—the percentage of brand-loyal car buyers has plummeted in the past twenty years—and the price premium that a recognized brand can charge has shrunk. If you’re making a better product, you can still charge more, but, if your product is much like that of your competitors, your price needs to be similar, too. That’s the clearest indication that the economic value of brands—traditionally assessed by the premium a company could charge—is waning. This isn’t true across the board: brands retain value where the brand association is integral to the experience of a product (Coca-Cola, say), or where they confer status, as with luxury goods. But even here the information deluge is transformative; luxury travel, for instance, has been profoundly affected by sites like TripAdvisor.

Hypercard Was The Right Idea, Ahead Of Its Time

My love for Hypercard is no secret, and I like the card metaphor, though I've no desire to see it applied to everything. I suspect we're going to see at least as many poor implementations as good ones.

But as I look around the mobile landscape, I see cards everywhere. Benedict Evans wrote a good post about this trend a few weeks ago. Google is pushing cards as a UI inside Android and their Google Now UI is the best example of that. Twitter has had cards inside of Tweets for several years now, although I wish they would display them by default in my timeline. The Facebook mobile UI looks like a series of cards, although you can’t really do anything with them, yet. And, of course, my favorite example are theKik Cards that are mini mobie web apps that run inside of Kik’s messenger. I’ve blogged about them a number of times here at AVC as Kik is a USV portfolio company.

It feels like the Hypercard metaphor has arrived as the atomic unit of content in mobile, both inside of native apps and, if Kik is going in the right direction (I think they are), as the default mobile web atomic unit (cards instead of pages).

Luxi Turns Your iPhone Into An Incident Light Meter

Anyone who knows anything about studio photography knows that taking an incident light reading is the best way of getting accurate exposure metering, without having to adjust for the reflective qualities of your subject (that means you, snowmen and black cats). This is a really-neat accessory that clips right over your iPhone's front-facing camera and turns it into an incident light meter. $30, plus an extra $9 to ship to the UK (I make that about £23 at time of writing).

Serious photographers sometimes spend hundreds of dollars on an incident light meter–a small handheld device that measures the light falling on the subject. Luxi is a $30 iPhone accessory that promises to do the same job using just your existing phone.

Kinsa Smart Thermometer Opens The Way For Home Medical Devices

This looks like a great product, and if it was available in the UK right now I'd order a bunch for my family. I like Kinsa's vision too. One to watch.

Kinsa has revolutionized the world’s most common medical device, the first device anyone uses to confirm an illness: the thermometer. The Kinsa Smart Thermometer is a mobile-connected thermometer that allows us to communicate with someone who has just fallen ill, give them the information to get better faster, and collect the data we need to map human health.

Could Facebook Turn Into The Anti-Google Of Mobile?

Facebook's purchase of the staunchly ad-free Whatsapp network certainly raises some interesting questions, and plays nicely into the growing narrative that Google's ads-everywhere culture has had its day.

“I don’t personally think that ads are the right way to monetize messaging systems,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today on a conference call about the acquisition.

Facebook certainly does a tidy business selling ads to display in its apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Still, the company faces tough challenges as it tries to grow from here. Mobile ads are still less valuable than the ones seen by Facebook users on their PCs. And simple geometry dictates that mobile devices have less space for advertising than the expansive desktop web.

But there’s something else, more fundamental: a disquieting suspicion that, in the long run, advertising simply might not work for the mobile web.

Play Pokemon Red With 75,000 People

Fascinating experiment in social gaming:

TwitchPlaysPokemon is stream that lets you play Pokemon with a lot of other people by typing commands into chat. It's running a romhack of Pokemon Red that has all 151 Pokemon obtainable without trading.

It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other.

It's also worth reading the commentary over at Digg, which examines the strange emergent mythologies of the experiment.

Mythology within the Twitch community grew outward. The Helix fossil — an item which players often found themselves checking in the inventory by chance — has become a totem which Red 'consults for advice' and the representation of all that is good, while its counterpart, the Dome fossil, the source of evil. Accidents are attributed to the latter and victories to the former and both are referred to by the community as gods. Monsters active in significant moments become aligned with these two deities, e.g. Flareon "The False Prophet," who was part of a major setback and is therefore ecumenically linked to the Dome Fossil.

What's The Perfect Mobile Writing Computer?

Short version: It's the iPad Air. Well worth reading Julio Ojeda-Zapata's reasoning though, along with a nice trawl through the technology he's used along the way.

In recent weeks I’ve reached for a different kind of computer when heading out of my newsroom on a reporting assignment — the iPad Air. This came as a surprise to me. The iPad, is, at least for me, an unexpected choice for mobile journalism.

Historically, I’ve leaned more toward the Mac than the iPad. Given a hard choice between a MacBook Air and the iPad Air for personal (not professional press) use, I would choose the former every time. And yet, when I’m preparing to head out for field reporting, I’ve ended up picking an iPad almost every time.

Sheet Music That Listens In And Follows Your Performance

Fabulous use of the iPad as a performance tool, and more indication of how we can go from using tablets as replacements for paper, and towards augmenting and extending tasks.

Like dozens of other apps, it offers digital sheet music, so musicians can keep their libraries on one device rather than several fraying pamphlets. But unlike its competitors, Tonara takes advantage of the astonishing power packed into an iPad, for which it is specifically designed, and in doing so sets a model for app development well beyond the world of music.

Tonara doesn’t expect its users simply to follow the tempo they set. Instead, it uses the iPad’s built-in microphone to listen to the music, even if there are multiple instruments playing, showing the musician where she is at any given time—and where she should be.

Physical Objects As Tokens For Digital Media

Over at Quartz there's an interesting story about Ozenge's Qleek system:

Not so long ago, every act of consumption began with a ritual. We pulled records from sleeves and perched them on turntables, slid books from shelves, watched as VHS tapes were ingested with a soft ca-chunk. Qleek, from Paris-based startup Ozenge, aims to return our digital media to a state in which they can be collected, stored, handled, played and shared in the same way that physical media were, once. The makers of Qleek want you to pick up a wooden hexagon printed with, for example, the artwork for an album or mix, place it on a reader, and hear the corresponding tracks play on your device of choice.

I'm rather ambivalent about this notion. On the one hand I'm of the generation that grew up collecting physical LPs, cassettes, and CDs, and who thought we'd never quite adapt to a world in which music wasn't attached to a physical format. On the other hand, when iTunes made the whole process of ripping my discs slick and easy–and when the iTunes Store made finding and buying new stuff just as easy– I adapted just fine.

So I'm unconvinced that, long term, there's any basic human requirement for something as ephemeral as music to be embodied in a physical, fileable and collectible, format. I'm tempted to suggest that our fetishisation of a physical form for music is in fact merely that: a fetish, and one that's been encouraged and manipulated by commercial interests in order to profit from something that's otherwise notoriously difficult to control and sell. That the de-materialisation of music has stripped away profits and control from the companies which invented the physical forms should surprise no-one, and shouldn't worry us at all.

Of course, as a designer of sorts, I adore what's possible in terms of music packaging, and I have no doubt that as long as there are designers who treasure music there'll be ways and means of collecting, cataloguing, experiencing and showing off the music that adds meaning to our lives. I just don't think it's a pre-requisite that it needs to be in a form that mimics pre-digital artefacts.

Netflix Found The House Of Cards Binging Champion

Great article on Netflix's approach to launching new seasons of a hit show, including this lovely nugget:

The engineers can tell, in real time, how many people are streaming the show on these devices, where they are, and who’s binging. Edberg said the last time House of Cards launched, the engineers figured out that the entire season was about 13 hours.

"And we looked to [see] if anybody was finishing in that amount of time," Edberg said. "And there was one person who finished with just three minutes longer than there is content. So basically, three total minutes of break in roughly 13 hours."

Thanks to @iamsteadman for the link.

The Size Of A Pixel

I remember when my Mac Plus's 72-pixels-per-inch display seemed like it would be all we'd ever need.

The size of a pixel had remained pretty much constant for 10 years. We had spent so long knowing that our pixel was roughly the smallest dot we could see at arms length, that we took it for granted. We used it as a unit. We used it all the time. We used it in our raster graphics for logos, we used it for buttons and icons in our software. We used it to get perfectly aligned layouts in websites. We used it to decide the size of our text. We knew we shouldn't but we did it anyway.

Amazing Illustrated Pictorial Alphabets

An excellent collection over at io9. Fascinating how many letterforms have been based on the human body, but there are plenty of other beautiful approaches too.

These incredible pictorial alphabet designs look like artistic madness, but they were actually used historically as mnemonic devices to help people memorize their letters. If you are a font fiend, or simply love weird imagery, you must check out these demented illustrations of the ABCs.

Designing Fake Video Games For "Her"

Fascinating interview with the designers of the two video games in the imagined-near-future world of Spike Jonze's "Her". I'd pay to play "Perfect Mom". Nintendo should option this stuff.

Spike wrote all the Perfect Mom stuff, including the messages that pop up (“You’re Failing Your Children!”). He was really open to suggestions though, and we came up with some visual gags he liked, like the kid dumping the cereal on his head or the HUD in the corner of the screen that monitors the kids' love for their mom.

Major Tom: The NASA Investigation

Brilliant.

Multiple lapses by Ground Control, compounded by astronaut error, led to the stranding in space of U.S.A.F. Major Thomas D. Ogletree (MAJOR TOM). Established procedures were not followed, flawed decision-making was rampant and systemic.

Aronofsky's "Noah" Cut Wins Out

Some folk are never going to be happy. Big win for Darren Aronofsky, and for anyone who appreciates his work. 

Aronofsky's big budget fantasy has been plagued by reports that Paramount bigwigs cut their own versions following negative reactions from test screenings for US religious audiences, a demographic the $130m film needs to address if it is to stand a chance of recouping its gargantuan budget. But in the new issue of the Hollywood Reporter, the director of Black Swan and The Wrestler insists that the final version audiences will get to see in multiplexes is entirely his own. His victory might be a somewhat pyrrhic one, however, since Paramount appears to have given up the fight after its own versions of the film tested no better with Christians than the director's cut.

Small, Incremental Gains, For Big Results

Pretty impressive story, which backs up some of what I've been teaching today. The media (and human beings) love to think of great leaps forward, but they're usually the result of many incremental improvements over time.

In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job.

No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), that’s what Brailsford was asked to do.

His approach was simple.

Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

Greenpeace Praise For Apple Environmental Leadership

In other news, hell froze over. 

"Apple's increased transparency about its suppliers is becoming a hallmark of Tim Cook's leadership at the company," Greenpeace Energy Campaigner Tom Dowdall said in a statement. "Apple has flexed its muscles in the past to push suppliers to remove hazardous substances from products and provide more renewable energy for data centers, and it is proving the same model can work to reduce the use of conflict minerals."

Good to see that Greenpeace has halted its previous tactic of calling out Apple rather than anyone else, just to get headlines, and especially good to see Cook living up to his word on this important stuff.

Apple's Progress Report (PDF) is here: http://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2014_Progress_Report.pdf

The Paradigms Of Magazine Cover Design

Handy top-down guide to the anatomy of a much loved and persistent form. One interesting question that George Lois doesn't address here: How (and how much) does reading on a digital device affect what's been a remarkably resilient approach? 

Magazine covers are a challenge to design, since they have to be both ever-changing and also consistently recognizable. For this reason, most publications stick to a standard set of practices.

This is the anatomy of a magazine cover, starting from the top. Literally.

Coding For All?

Or just a more inquisitive and thoughtful approach to technology? I have my own misgivings over the "everyone learn to code" mantra, but Stef's intelligent and informed commentary is optimistic and worthy of your time:

I can see amazing stuff coming just over the horizon and I really want my kids and anyone else in school right now to have access to some of it in their education. It can only lead to good things. Maybe coding isn’t for everyone, and as far as I can tell, the curriculum doesn’t even make it sound like it’s code-literacy that’s the aim. We’re not talking about computer science for ten-year-olds but an education that teaches that technology is an integral part of our culture, software is in and of everything we want to do as people, and that we’re able to manipulate that software to change things.