How the Newspaper is Changing
Music is Changing
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Simplicity
In a recent NY Times article, Alice Rawsthorn describes her frustration with technology that is innovative, but much too complicated. Design is supposed to make our lives easier, but sometimes complicated technology that is not easily figured out through common sense just make everything more difficult. It reminds me of the Rube Goldberg machines that get the job done but have so many unnecessary steps that it makes everything ridiculous.
It also reminds me of a watch my Dad got that had all these extra bells and whistles. It had several alarms, ability to show time in army time, the date, etc. But somehow by pressing a button he set an alarm on it and couldn't figure out how to turn it off. There was no simple way of figuring out how to change it and he had lost the instruction manual. Eventually he just smashed the watch to get it to stop because it was that annoying. Even though it had more, it was an awful design that made life more difficult instead of easier.
Apple iPad
Yesterday, Steve Jobs and Apple introduced their latest device the iPad. It is a slender tablet computer with touchscreen and capabilities similar to the iPhone. Check out this video that shows a short presentation about the new product.
After the huge amount of built-up anticipation for this product, I can only hope it meets expectations. It will allow users to surf the web and for media and books to be displayed. I still like other content providers such as the Nook or Kindle for books because of their eink-based technology, but this could very well change the publishing industry in the future.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Preliminary Research
Our project for the semester is to create a community through an interactive website. To begin the research stage, we were asked to go to Kurzweil AI and by looking through the posts come up with a theme. I came up with the post about a 10,000-year library. The theme I came up with was "The internet changes the recording of history." It interested me because of the recent recall of Orwell's books through the Amazon Kindle. Big Brother is watching.