No Compromise Design

A Toblerone-shaped music player. No compromises.

The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built, portable, high-resolution digital-music player designed and engineered in a "no-compromise" fashion to allow consumers to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible, bringing to life the true emotion and detail of the music, the way the artist recorded it. It also features a convenient and simple LCD touch screen interface that is totally intuitive. The audio technology in the PonoPlayer was developed in conjunction with the engineering team at Ayre, in Boulder Colorado, a leader in digital audio technology.

Source: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f8-gener...

Desperate For Page Views? Just Add Apple.

Attempts to write Apple (and Amazon) into complete non-stories don't come more blatant than this. Neither company is connected to the story in any way (Google is, very loosely), and the whole thing makes little to no sense. Salon, you should be ashamed.

The technology industry has manufactured images of the rebel hacker and hipster nerd, of products that empower individual and social change, of new ways of doing business, and now of a mindful capitalism. Whatever truth might attach to any of these, the fact is that these are impressions that are carefully managed to get us to keep buying their products. In that very basic sense, it is business as usual.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/apple_and_...

The Complex Battle Against Child Labour

Interesting, but challenging, approach to tackling underage workers in Apple's supplier factories. I'm not sure how you make this work, but it's clear you have to do something. Samsung's nothing to see here attitude seems regressive.

But firing the supplier was clearly not enough, given the questions the company was facing. Its executives decided to adopt a program designed in 2008 by Impactt, a social-responsibility consultancy based in the UK that operates in China, India, and Bangladesh. The plan calls for Apple to make any transgressing supplier pay not only for the education of any child laborers it is found using, but also keep paying them wages until they graduate (thus removing their incentive to stay out of school). Apple follows up with the former workers to ensure they are still in school.

Source: http://qz.com/183563/what-happens-when-app...

We Hate Our Telecoms Providers

From the department of "no news here":

LONDON: Every day in the UK, an estimated 3 million negative opinions are exchanged about the country's leading providers of bundled telecoms, TV and broadband packages, making them even more detested than banks.

"Vital but unloved" was the conclusion of Keller Fay, the market research firm specialising in word of mouth (WOM), as it analysed data from its TalkTrack programme and found that negative WOM for this group was higher than for most other sectors.

Source: http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/EmailN...

Selling To Millennials

This stuff doesn't just apply to people born after 2000. It's true of pretty much any modern savvy consumer.

  1. Convenience is essential. If you waste my time I will never come back to you. I have better things to waste my time doing online, such as watching What Does The Fox Say, again, for the sixth time on YouTube.

  2. Price matters, a lot. I can’t emphasise this enough. Millennials are Google natives. We Google everything, and we compare prices of everything. If I can buy the same product on Amazon for £2 cheaper I will, not only because it’s cheaper, but because Amazon haven’t annoyed me, yet.

Worth reading the whole list of points.

Source: http://tfmainsights.com/im-millennial-buy-...

What Makes Stories Shareable?

Lots of our visual design students investigate why certain campaigns go viral, and others languish. Turns out what works online is what's always worked.

The question predates Berger’s interest in it by centuries. In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle’s insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic—it’s credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they’ll fit into those categories.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elem...

Norman Foster On The New Apple Campus

Very interesting interview, in which Foster deals with issues of scale, and how single large buildings are more efficient and provide better experiences than multiple smaller ones. In the case of Hong Kong airport I can wholeheartedly agree. I'd take that any day, over the sprawling terminals of, say, Dubai.

It's nice too to get an insight into how Steve Jobs' thinking directed the new design. Looks like Steve is, even now, building Apple in his own image.

Meanwhile, the reference point for Steve [Jobs] was always the large space on the Stanford campus—the Main Quad—which Steve knew intimately. Also, he would reminisce about the time when he was young, and California was still the fruit bowl of the United States. It was still orchards.

We did a continuous series of base planning studies. One idea which came out of it is that you can get high density by building around the perimeter of a site, as in the squares of London. And in the case of a London square, you create a mini-park in the center. So a series of organic segments in the early studies started to form enclosures, all of which were in turn related to the scale of the Stanford campus. These studies finally morphed into a circular building that would enclose the private space in the middle—essentially a park that would replicate the original California landscape, and parts of it would also recapture the orchards of the past. The car would visually be banished, and tarmac would be replaced by greenery, and car parks by jogging and bicycle trails.

Source: http://archrecord.construction.com/feature...

Wireless Power Moves Closer To Reality

Artemis' pCell technology is exciting for what it brings to mobile data communications, but they're hinting at something much, much bigger

pCell isn’t just LTE

Concurrently with LTE devices, pCell supports "pCell-native" devices, at far lower cost and power, each with its own pCell in the same spectrum. pCell-native devices can be faster than LTE with fiber-class latency.

For example, an iPod®-class device could be made pCell-native with minimal additional cost at the same size and power, and would provide better than LTE mobile performance in pCell coverage areas.

This opens the door for low-cost pCell-native smartphones, wearables, UltraHD TVs, laptops, appliances, etc.: a broadband Internet of (inexpensive) Things.

Stay tuned. We’ve only scratched the surface of a new era.

{Hint: pCell technology isn't limited to just communications}

Source: http://www.artemis.com/pcell

Apple Launches In-Car iOS As CarPlay

I'm counting this as one of Apple's new product categories for this year. It's important, and it seems like a broad range of manufacturers are on board.

As was rumored on Friday, Apple is today finally ready to launch a new iPhone integration setup for car infotainment systems. Calling it CarPlay, the Cupertino company claims it's "designed from the ground up to provide drivers with an incredible experience using their iPhone in the car." CarPlay is built primarily around the use of Siri voice commands and prompts, providing an "eyes-free" experience where you can respond to incoming calls, dictate text messages, or access your music library. It's also predictive, claiming to know where you'll most likely want to go based upon addresses found in your email, texts, contacts, and calendars. Apple's Maps are also an integral part of the service, which was previewed back in June of last year.

Interestingly, Apple's CarPlay page (and iOS already knows how to capitalise that trademark btw) makes a big things about Siri, and kind of implies that those third party in-car apps will be rewritten to get voice control too. This implies that they're opening up Siri to select third party developers. Very interesting.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/3/5465064/a...

Electric Cycles Could Transform The City

This makes for fascinating reading, including some revealing calculations on the calorific energy consumption of alternative modes of transport. I've long wished that I lived in a city where electric scooters or cycles made more sense as a primary means of moving around. 

But a strange thing has happened. The obstacles we identified in Delhi seem less daunting today than a year ago. Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse. In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.

I have the strong impression that a cloud of discrete but related developments is converging. In the background, a combination of energy costs and economic insecurity adds urgency to the need for change. At street level, myriad innovations in hardware, systems, and business models are giving us the component parts of the ecosystem we yearned for in Delhi. A profound transformation to the mobility profile of modern cities no longer feels like a dream.

Source: http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/f...

The Voynich Manuscript

The Verge is probably correct to call this 600 year-old manuscript as "the most mysterious book in the world".

There is no default, accepted theory to explain the manuscript's provenance, and any theory that gains traction is usually disproven or disregarded by the huge community of amateur and professional Voynich scholars. Ten years ago news reports appeared suggesting the document was a hoax, written 100 years after its carbon-dated vellum suggests. It might've come from Mexico. Or it could've been a philosophical experiment, or a work of art or, according to theoretical physicist Andreas Schinner, put together by an "an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head." Or aliens wrote it.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/28/5453596/...

The 14 Synthesisers That Shaped Modern Music

Tremendous, well-researched article by John Twells for Fact Magazine. The synthesiser has come a long way since my father first played me Tomita's Snowflakes Are Dancing in the 1970s.

The concept is simple enough – a basic circuit generates a tone, and the tone can then be controlled by some sort of input, human or otherwise. It’s a concept that has provided the backbone for countless instruments over the last 100-or-so years, and like it or not, has informed the direction of modern music both in the mainstream and in the underground.

I've loved records created with pretty much every synth on the list. I spent a lot of time listening to the Korg M1 in particular, thanks to working with Richard Mowatt when he was composing for the band Emission in the 1990s. He could make that affordable workstation do things that made my head spin.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve heard the Korg M1. Its versatility and simplicity meant that it was picked up by musicians and studios large and small, and it didn’t take long for the sounds to start appearing in the charts. Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ popularized the M1’s now-legendary “Piano 8” preset, making it an instant legend in house music circles (along with the similarly ubiquitous “Piano 16”), while “Organ 02” was used liberally in Robin S’s ‘Show Me Love’, a track that’s currently doing the rounds thanks to Kid Ink and Chris Brown’s ratchet rework. The preset sound that everyone can really identify however is “SlapBass”, which producer Jonathan Wolff used to create the Seinfeld theme – thanks for that, man.

Source: http://www.factmag.com/2014/02/28/the-14-s...

iOS Security & TouchID In Detail

Nicely coinciding with Apple's iOS and OS X security fixes–if you haven't downloaded them yet stop reading and go do it right away–and with Samsung's own questionable implementation of fingerprint scanning, Apple's released a pretty detailed PDF outlining iOS security. It's fairly readable–you could skip the more technical sections and still get a good idea of what's going on–and it provides more information than we've had before on how Touch ID and the A7's Secure Enclave works. Pretty nice.

Source: http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/do...

Amazon Doesn't Need A Device To Make A Dent In TV

Wired makes the case that Amazon wants its own device to take Instant Video to a broader market, and to get around Apple's cut without the kludgy workarounds it's had to use so far. 

You might not even need cable. As a cord-cutter, I’m using Instant Video to watch the latest season of Justified on my iPad. They’re available hours after they air on traditional TV. Amazon’s understandable refusal to let Apple take a cut of its content business means I must pay for episodes in the browser before watching them on the iPad’s Instant Video app. But I still think the overall experience is better than iTunes. Streaming is so much faster than downloading and doesn’t take up any space on my device. I’ve watched Breaking Bad, The Americans, and the awesome Luther the same way, and I’ve never felt like I’m missing out on some mythical TV experience. Yes, I’m not tweeting along to the show in “real time.” But that’s way less important to me than paying for only what I want and nothing I don’t.

I'm not so sure having a device (which Amazon's bound to sell at a loss) is any threat to other platforms like Apple TV. They want their content on as many devices as possible, and if Netflix is able to make subscriptions to streaming video work on the Apple TV then Amazon certainly could. Paying 30% to Apple for individual shows might be painful (perhaps less so for recurring subscriptions initiated through an iTunes account), but I'm sure that Netflix has a different arrangement for getting its channel right up there on the Apple TV.

Source: http://www.wired.com/business/2014/02/forg...

Samsung S5 Fingerprint Sensor

Maybe they should have copied Apple's design.

Less successful is Samsung’s take on the fingerprint-unlock system made popular by Apple with the iPhone 5S. Like the 5S, the S5’s home key features an integrated fingerprint scanner, which can be used to unlock the phone or authenticate purchases online (Samsung is partnering with PayPal to enable this feature, though it doesn’t validate purchases from the Google Play Store). Samsung’s version requires a vertical swipe over the home button to activate the scanner, and we found it to be quite unreliable and virtually impossible to activate when holding the phone in one hand. It can store up to three different digits, but it was very particular about the speed and orientation of the swiping motion used — if we weren’t doing a perfectly straight swipe down, it would refuse to unlock the phone.

Speaking of Apple's iPhone 5S, that Touch ID home button is holding up pretty well for me. I get the occasional rejection, but nothing that detracts from the convenience of not having to type my (long and pretty secure) passcode. I like the idea of integrating with PayPal, though I'm guessing Apple has its own idea about how it'd like to do payments.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5441668/...

Powering The Earth For The Next Thirty Million Years

The ITER project is astonishing in the scale of its ambition: A hundred-feet-tall machine weighing twenty-three thousand tons and generating ten times as much heat as the Sun's core. 

No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of iter’s vacuum interior.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03...

The Car Is The Next UI Battleground

Matthaeus Krenn's slick UI concepts for an in-car touch dashboard are getting some attention. Touch-screen facsimiles of existing physical buttons certainly aren't a good fit, but I wonder if there's an approach that requires less relearning for drivers. Voice control perhaps?

Several automotive companies have begun replacing traditional controls in their cars with touch screens. Unfortunately, their eagerness to set new trends in hardware, is not matched by their ambition to create innovative software experiences for these new input mechanisms. Instead of embracing new constraints and opportunities, they merely replicate old button layouts and shapes on these new, flat, glowing surfaces.

So even controls for air condition and infotainment - which are commonly used while driving - now lack any tactile feedback and require the driver’s dexterity and attention when operated. Considering that distracted driving is the number one cause for car accidents, this is not a step in the right direction.

Source: http://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui/?utm_...