metafold.:.currency

ysoa n gsd n cooper makes three!________22 October, 2011

…but seriously.

websites are like constantinople________30 May, 2011

websites are like istanbul: destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt, name change! (built up, fall down, destroyed.)

please bear with us (me) during technical difficulties.

if adobe creative suite were your high school________18 July, 2010

for you design+grafiks g33ks out there like me.

L-to-R, T-to-B: photoshop, illustrator, indesign, premiere, bridge, aftereffects, flash, dreamweaver, soundbooth

apple: producing beautifully-designed, well-marketed, highly-controlled garbage________2 June, 2010

dear steve jobs:

you make truly beautiful and often innovative objects, but reasonable users have some complaints.

1. don’t release products until they’re ready and then pretend the problems with them don’t exist / aren’t your fault / etc.
   for example: the “you’re holding it wrong” comment in response to the fact that iphone 4 will drop calls when the phone is held in a certain way (or variants thereof such as the “our algorithm for displaying service bars is inaccurate”). also, what about the fact that the update to ios4 has (appropriately enough) quartered the battery life of my ipod touch?  also, every app on the device runs about twice as slowly.  wow.
2. don’t engage in personal vendettas (however well- or ill-founded) against other members of the tech (or literary, or … whatever) community.
   points which spring to mind are your senseless war against flash predicated on some late-coming updates for mac systems back in the 90s.  it’s especially distasteful to me that you defend this one based on the rationale that flash is not an “open standard”.  apple, once the icon of open systems and user customization, has become a giant, greedy, information-aggregating machine that doesn’t allow users (or even coders and app-designers) to perform the most basic acts of personalization.  your clunky OS and buggy mobile devices need help sometimes.  why insist on ridiculing users instead of including them in your efforts to improve on good products?  or,  you know, bad ones.  let’s also not forget the time you banned james joyce from the app store because it was “pornographic” and the embargo against wiley based on your personal pride (see iCon).  or your little spat with michael dell that drove you to release petty little emails to all your employees.
3. don’t make crappy mistakes in your “pretty” OS/hardware that a first grade could tell you to avoid.
   let’s simplify: it should be one keystroke to rename a file or folder–not a maze of menus.  mice should have at least two keys.  holding delete should delete things quickly.  ctrl+left arrow should jump you back a word.  shift should be a drag select and ctrl should be a point select, rather than having just one way to multiple-select that’s (let’s be honest) kinda broken.  when i have a word selected, clicking on it again should put my cursor inside that word (so i can delete a letter from the middle) rather than … doing nothing!  the “delete” key should … uh … delete things.  i should not have to right-click and “move to trash”.  i could go on, but you get the idea.
4. itunes genius is spyware, plain and simple.  while you’re at it, take a look at foobar to see how a media platform can perform better than itunes at about a quarter of the memory usage.  oh, and it’s totally customizable too.

that’s all i can think of off the top of my head.  i feel much better. i don’t think very much of you, mr. jobs / applecorp.