Ged Carroll

Category: design | 設計 | 예술과 디자인 | デザイン

Design was something that was important to me from the start of this blog, over different incarnations of the blog, I featured interesting design related news. Design is defined as a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, interfaces or other object before it is made.

But none of the definition really talks about what design really is in the way that Dieter Rams principles of good design do. His principles are:

  1. It is innovative
  2. It makes a product useful
  3. It is aesthetic
  4. It makes a product understandable
  5. It is unobtrusive
  6. It is honest
  7. It is long-lasting
  8. It is thorough down to the last detail
  9. It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
  10. It is as little design as possible

Bitcoin isn’t long lasting as a network, which is why people found the need to fork the blockchain and build other cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin uses 91 terawatts of energy annually or about the entire energy consumption of Finland.

The Bitcoin network relies on thousands of miners running energy intensive machines 24/7 to verify and add transactions to the blockchain. This system is known as “proof-of-work.” Bitcoin’s energy usage depends on how many miners are operating on its network at any given time. – So Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly by design.

On the other hand, Apple products, which are often claimed to be also influenced by Dieter Rams also fail his principles. They aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly as some like AirPods are impossible to repair or recycle.

  • Mac software recommendations

    Why a list of Mac software recommendations and why me? I have been using Macs since my early cough, cough – ok let’s just say a long time. I bought my first Macs secondhand. The first one was a sit-up-and beg style Macintosh SE. This is in what nerds now call the Mac Classic style machine. This allowed me to proof club flyers on a computer rather than getting bromides made. The machine paid for itself in less than five months.

    Classic Mac Flickrdither

    I moved on to a PowerBook 165 running ClarisWorks and early Internet software.

    I managed to connect it to the net through my university and surf in 16 shades of grey. Some of the software I recommend has been maintained almost as long as I have been a Mac user which says something about the power of developer’s core ideas.

    At the time there wasn’t the Mac user community that there is now. But what users there were made up for their lack of numbers with fierce passion.

    When you bought a Mac you could tap into a real world community. My University user group met once a month and swapped software and tips.

    It was this rather than the iMac which made sure Apple had a user base by the time Steve Jobs returned. Mac related magazines filled in the knowledge gap and carefully curated demo software. It was through this experience that I learned about some of the apps here. I have stayed loyal to them over the decades and upgraded them as required.

    Nowadays there is a larger, but less passionate community. We tend to share web services rather than apps. We also tend to gather around the biggest rather than the best. I am a great believer in supporting independent development where the applications work better for me. This the lens that I view software through in making the recommendations below. Some of the recommendations come from people I trust like Mat Morrison. Where I have shared a piece of software I don’t use I’ve made this clear below.

    Despite the disappointing* product designs of the last two MacBook Pro revisions, I’ve been surprised as a few more friends move to the platform. They’ve sought advice myself and other friends. So I thought I’d consolidate the knowledge and put it out there.

    The process caused me to reflect on the software that I use and value. I like:

    • Products that work both online and offline, so Hemingway’s native app made it in rather than the Grammarly Chrome plug-in. Internet isn’t as ubiquitous as one would have you believe, God knows I love technology, but I am not blind to its faulty implementation
    • Products that seem to be mature and have gone through a couple of development cycles
    • Software has to fit me, rather than the other way around. I’ve built up behaviours over my time using computers and networks that seem to work for me. But we have different learning styles and habits, which was part of the reason why I’ve suggested choices that I don’t use but others like. Chances are one of them will work for you, but not all of them will
    • I prefer not to depend on web giants like Google, Facebook et al when it comes to software. Their ‘always in beta’ philosophy can make for inconsistent product experiences – look at how the Skype consumer platform UI and functionality has changed for the worse over time. ‘Always-in-beta’ also results in abrupt ‘sunsets’ – that’s tech speak for killed off. This happens for a few reasons. The bigger they get, the bigger a service has to be in order for it to be worthwhile supporting. Their product strategy is about you as a product rather than you as a user. This is true if its an application or an API. Their entry into a market can see them decimating small competition; once that has been completed if there isn’t megabucks they’ll leave just as fast. The RSS news service Google Reader is an exemplar for this process. I love new shiny things as much as the next nerd, but I also don’t want to invest too much into them if they can disappear just as quick

    Communications

    Communications used to be a simple process for me, as I used to run Adium.

    At one time Adium supported ICQ, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. Adium still exists but many of the main instant messenger platforms don’t. These days things are a little more complicated for me.

    I run Apple’s Messages.app which allows me to use my iPhone’s SMS service and contact other Apple product users. It’s encrypted which is nice. It’s so simple, even my parents have managed to master it.

    I use Slack to keep in touch with a number of professional groups.
    My friends in China and Hong Kong use a mix of WhatsApp desktop app and WeChat’s desktop app.

    I don’t use it so much any more but LINE and Kakao Talk make a couple of good desktop apps too. The Economist and Wall Street Journal do good content on their LINE channels. Bloomberg and the UK agency Battenhall publish some good content on WhatsApp that are worth subscribing to.

    I use the consumer version of Skype to dial into conference call bridge numbers. I have used Skype for Business whist working at Unilever and Publicis – it wasn’t a positive experience.

    I know some friends that find Franz handy, it seems to support an eclectic collection of services; but not all the ones I need covered.

    Evernote alternatives

    Evernote wasn’t the innovator that many people think it is. DevonThink and Yojimbo have been longer in usage amongst a small but dedicated Mac user base.

    DevonThink – positions itself as document management. It also syncs across devices. It is an expansive and thorough piece of software, I’ve tried it. It’s great, but just wasn’t for me. Devon Technologies also have some interesting products that do web and system search. They have been handy for friends in recruitment headhunting research.

    Yojimbo – In my personal experience I found Yojimbo easier to use than DevonThink. Both are great tools, but its a question of what makes the most sense for you. I think you should try both and see which one works best for you.

    Graphics

    OmniGraffle – great for diagrams and flow charts. OMNI are long time Mac developers and always seem to get the most out of the machine.

    News

    I have been vocal in my love of Newsblur RSS reader on other occasions, so won’t go into how fantastic it is here. I use a native Mac app called ReadKit to interface with Newsblur, Pinboard and Buffer on my Mac. This was really handy when I was in China, as the internet operates differently there.

    ReadKit also has good integration with Buffer and Pinboard.in; services I use for social posting and bookmarking respectively. ReadKit isn’t perfect; in particular its persistent windows for posting to Buffer and Pinboard.in can annoy; but it works for me.

    Office software

    I use the default macOS applications Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts. app. They work flawlessly with iCloud to sync across iPhone, iPad and Macs. I have Google hosted, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP based accounts running on Mail.app side by side with no problems (so far).

    I use the home edition of Microsoft Office (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Going for the home edition is a fixed cost rather than an Office 365 subscription. I use Hemingway to handle the creative process of writing and provide some editorial input. If I am writing a presentation for myself then I will use Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

    I use OmniPlan as an equivalent to Microsoft Project.

    Music

    I still listen to ripped music on iTunes. Streaming services like Spotify often have a limited library of back catalogue music. Carefully curated playlists can see tracks disappear in an arbitrary manner when rights owners pull them from the streaming service. I listen to old DJ mixes, digitally bought music from BeatPort, iTunes and Bleep. I also rip CDs as often these are cheaper than their MP3 counterparts or haven’t made it into online music stores. iTunes also handles my podcasts and audio books. I have an iPod Classic that’s tricked-out with a 256GB SSD. I don’t run my phone’s battery down listening to music. I have been keeping track of my listening using last.fm’s app.

    Productivity

    BBEdit is a 25-year old piece of software for the Mac. It is a text editor but always comes in more handy than that descriptor implies. It’s one of them applications that I discovered on a Mac Format or MacWorld demo disk and then kept on using.

    I haven’t used it, but Duet looks like a handy way of bringing a secondary screen around with you, if you are working out of client offices.

    OmniFocus – list writing made better, but also handy for getting thoughts down on a presentation etc

    Parcel – comes in handy for keeping an eye on your package deliveries.

    PopChar X – I have been using PopChar since I was in college. I got it on a demo disc from MacFormat and immediately saw its benefit. Twenty years later I am still using the application.

    Screen grabs

    Papparazi is my go to screen grab tool, Skitch comes highly recommended from people I trust.

    Utilities

    Apple has got an annoying habit of taking ideas from great utilities and including them in future versions of macOS. This is great for users, but bad for Apple’s long-suffering developer community. It was independent developers who kept the faith during the dark times of the mid-1990s.

    coconutBattery – recommended by a friend who uses it for ensuring that apps aren’t drawing excessive power when you’re on a battery. Here’s looking at you Google Chrome!

    GraphicConvertor – yet another app that is over 20 years old and still supported. It manages to handle the most arcane graphics formats and allows you editing functions.

    Fetch and CyberDuck – Fetch and Transmit have been the go to Mac apps for FTP clients for a long time. Familiarity for me means that Fetch edges out Transmit. Both are great pieces of software that I am happy to recommend. It is also worthwhile considering CyberDuck which is open source. CyberDuck has also done work on supporting Amazon and Google storage which some of my friends find invaluable.

    Little Snitch – in the world of Mac users Little Snitch used to be famous for stopping Adobe software from phoning home. This was back before Creative Cloud when buying software was a major investment for agencies. So there was an interest in cracked user codes and careful monitoring of your network connection. Little Snitch is very useful these days as a really good firewall application.

    Stuffit Deluxe – yes you can do a lot in terminal but you’d be hard pushed to find a compression app that handles as many formats as Stuffit. I even opened up some 20 year old .sea archives from my time in college.

    TechTool – machine health monitoring that has been around since the dark days of the Mac. A great application to keep your Mac running the way you want it to.

    Terminal.app (default app) – macOS is built on a proper operating system NetBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. Terminal allows you to access the power of the operating system. But with great power comes great responsibility, I strongly recommend some additions for your bookshelf. O’Reilly Publishing has some great books that provide advice on how to use the terminal notably Learning Unix for OSX. David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for macOS are worthwhile as references as well.

  • Designing the Internet

    David D Clark was involved in the designing the internet as it moved into the commercial sphere. He rose to prominence in the 1980s through to the mid-1990s. In the talk at Google’s Mountain View campus he goes over much of the process. The things he says about network economics and security is particularly interesting.

    Outtakes

    In the 1970s it was about getting the protocols right, they needed to debug both the code and the specification that went alongside.

    1980s made hierarchies to make things scale as everything got bigger.

    1990s brought in the commercial internet, the specific goal of specifications was to shape industry structure. Protocol boundaries define industry structures.

    Quality of service development was compromised because it didn’t work economically for network providers. Specifically by concern about internet telephony. Standards adaptation was affected the internet service providers efforts to get value out of applications that run over the top (like Google).

    His discussions on designing the internet with politicians are particularly intriguing. There are still unanswered questions about societal and political accountability. There is a space for anonymous actions and an accountable internet would fall back to sovereign states including authoritarian regimes.

    Availability as well as integrity and cryptography (disclosure control) are important for security. The internet is insecure by design. Conscious decisions were taken to put risky actions into the internet. This gave us Flash, Acrobat and the Chrome browser.

    Embedding risky actions to provide attractive features for users, versus ensuring that these are only between people who you know. Trustworthiness is key.

    Protocol features affect industry power, adding more features may give power to the wrong people. The prime example of this is the work that the Chinese government have been doing with Huawei to try and define real ID, censorship and cyber sovereignty into next generation standards. More related content here.

  • Dekotora & things that made last week

    Apple’s team in Japan hit it out of the park with this iPhone XS ad that tells the story of a dekotora lorry christened Lady Misaki. Dekotora is a culture of truck modification, turning the humble Hino or Mitsubishi cab into a LED and burnished stainless steel sculpture. Dekotora is a loan word from the English ‘decorated truck’. It came out of a Japanese TV series shown in the 1970s called Truck Rascals that was based on Smokey & The Bandit. Drivers thought that they might appear in future productions, it then became a way of life. More on Japanese life here.

    https://youtu.be/AvTd2FnF2sc

    Sky and Cassetteboy put their opinion over on whether Die Hard is a Christmas film or not… Bruce Willis doesn’t think that its a Christmas movie, but is instead a movie that happens to occur in the run up to the Christmas holidays

    Nvidia shows off a ‘style based generator architecture for generative adversarial networks’ or star power in Hollywood could be disrupted pretty soon….

    Ad for Shopee featuring K-pop band Blackpink pulled off air in Indonesia – Mumbrella Asia – hallyu or Korean culture started to do really well in the Middle East and Indonesia over a decade ago as their dramas lacked the kind of sexual scenes that you saw in Hollywood productions. However as K-pop has stylised itself around modern R&B it has become progressively more sexualised and both Indonesian and Malaysian Islam has started to look more like the Arab interpretation of the religion rather than the historical live-and-let-live attitude. So it was inevitable that something like this was bound to happen.

    Publicis Groupe’s annual holiday message has made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the unpopularity of its artificial intelligence-powered platform Marcel. The claim about it’s timesheet capabilities is interesting. I do wonder if the adoption figures aren’t great, this ad could backfire.

  • On the sofa: The Man from Mo’Wax

    The documentary The Man from Mo’Wax was something that I’d been looking forward to watching for a while. James Lavelle made his name as the guy at Honest Johns who was the go to guy for Major Force Records releases. Major Force was a Japanese hip hop label that featured the likes of

    • Hiroshi Fujiwara
    • Takagi Kan
    • Masayuki Kudo
    • Milo Johnson (who was part of the pre-Massive Attack group The Wild Bunch)
    • “Tycoon” Toshio Nakanishi
    • Scha Dara Parr
    • Ishida Yoshinori

    These were the people who influenced 

    • Bomb The Bass’s first album Into The Dragon
    • The subsequent trip hop movement
    • Japan’s streetwear scene (Goodenough, Fragment) which has a continuing impact on the global streetwear scene

    Lavelle’s impact before Mo’Wax was huge. His column that had the Mo’Wax name and identity was huge. Mo’Wax the record label in its tunes and championing the designs of Swifty and Futura’s art have been hugely influential. Lavelle was the tastemaker that drove BAPE before the Americans like Pharrell Williams got hold of it. He did things in collectable figures and fashion that other labels still haven’t done. Surrender was a great streetwear label. The first UNKLE album was brilliant. 

    But he lost it; drugs and self indulgent projects that burned money and credibility. He was sufficiently narcissistic to document his life two decades before social media, which is the reason why you have a lot of warts and all material that has elements of Spinal Tap. Lavelle lacked the introspection and self examination in the documentary to make a real turn around. It ends up coming across as a two-hour pitch video for James to take part in a pop star re-invention on VH-1 a la Remaking Taylor Dane. The Guardian’s review summed up Lavelle and The Man From Mo’Wax really well. 

    …from superstar DJ to rock bore

    Cath Clarke, The Guardian (August 30, 2018)

  • Smooth jazz & things that made last week

    I tried to keep the crazy in the week under control listening to smooth jazz. However the week has been just as insane as last week. Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou is out on bail, but Donald Trump cast a shadow on the whole process by a saying that he was quite prepared to use her freedom as a pawn in his trade dispute with China. Telling China that the rule of law is malleable isn’t a good move from a strategic point-of-view. Suddenly everything is negotiable, which incentivises bad actor behaviour. 

    As for Brexit, the words of Danny Dyer still ring true:

    Who knows about Brexit? No one has got a fucking clue what Brexit is… You watch Question Time, it’s comedy. No one knows what it is. It’s like this mad riddle…

    Danny Dyer, Good Morning Britain – ITV (June 28, 2018)

    How smooth jazz originated and took off

    How habit-forming products are made by Nir Eyal. This is all pretty dark and illustrates how modern apps are and web services are made habit forming.

    There are a series of Christmas themed adverts at the moment that riff on Christmas animation The Snowman by Barbour and Irn Bru’s original and belated sequel ad.

    Uber has got into the Christmas spirit by putting a limited amount of toy themed cars out on to the streets of Paris.

    Matt Farah’s Watch and Listen podcasts is one of the better YouTube channels out there. Their interview with Jean-Marc Pontrué, the CEO of Panerai is a level of insight that you wouldn’t normally have. One key observation is that Richemont has turned SIHH into a fan event for their brands as other houses have withdrawn. It is part of a wider more engaged attitude that Panerai takes with its fans compared to the likes of Rolex. I think that its a smart move as luxury is still about experiences.