Before you Build, Buy or Rent —the most important issues governing your residence are Water, energy and communications along with location [ more specifically where the building touches the earth and it's orientation to the sun ]. These are things we all take for granted but if you carefully think about each one they have profound implications. Take away any one of these and you can imagine the impact. The other component for sustaining life is food. While this may seem overly simplistic the strain placed on our natural resources causes us to take a closer look at those things necessary for life. Consider the quality of each item and where it comes from.

Design is not chopped liver.

Design is a process that leads to a conclusion. It has a beginning a middle and an end. Chopped liver is always served as a side dish. Design cannot be a side dish. Design is not decoration; it may be decorative or plain but that is not the purpose of design. Design is the development of an idea to some purposeful conclusion.

Sorry for the delay; it’s a bit dusty in here but hopefully we can get it cleaned up before your allergies kick in. [ read as very dry humor ]

There are two components to design or we should say creativity. The first component is to actually create something; draw, paint, dance, sing and so on and the other component is to evaluate the thing created to determine if it passes for something we wish to display to others. Both things require skill and both are subjective. Here’s what I have observed about both laymen and designers; they have trouble being really honest about their work. In terms of graphic arts some will opt for “good enough” rather than measure up to the level of professionalism exhibited in many publications and on consumer goods we purchase.

A singer must realize whether they can actually sing a listenable version of a song as opposed to just liking to sing. I like to put it this way: “appreciating talent in someone else is not the same as having it yourself.”

The key to doing great work is to be brutally honest about what you did and with courage doing whatever is necessary to fix it. Even if that means you have to leave it to more skillful hands.

According to Appleinsider there is suspicion that the real reason for the delay of Leopard 10.5 is related to the secret features more so than the iPhone.

“American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu told clients on Friday. “We believe the extra time Apple is allocating is for developers to test secret features that will likely be revealed at its WWDC 2007 conference starting on June 11, 2007.” [from Appleinsider]

Another possible consideration is that this would give Apple an opportunity to announce the features at WWDC and then give the developers a chance to react to the new features between June and October.

This piece also appears on Some Mac Blog.

If you blog for very long, one thing you will hear from the pundits is, “content is king”. That is, you must have something that people want to hear, see, read or link to. The way that this becomes painfully obvious is how quickly your latest post can enjoy great success and then suddenly it’s gone. What happened? With fifty million blogs and counting you must be compelling to stay on the radar.

Really it comes down to how things are picked up in other forms of media. Viewer popularity and brand recognition! The more things change the more they stay the same.

There’s another page on this blog called the Blogger Chronicles which sporadically covers the business of swerving in and out of the internet/blogosphere. Check it out!

I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at what we already know about Leopard as we await the final version. Technology in any form comes at us way too fast and I find that really using it comes through the process of re-discovery. Let’s take a look…

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It’s been a fairly amazing road map for Apple in recent years with the switch to Unix, Intel was a huge jump, new hardware and creating ground breaking software all at the same time.

In 2006 Steve Jobs gave us the “sneak peak” of Mac OSX Leopard at the annual World Wide Developers Conference and in that keynote he mentioned that there were some “secret features” that would be announced later. Hmmm… much speculation has been tossed around about what those features are but who knows really.

What we do know is this feature list; [features in detail apple.com]

* Time Machine
* Mail
* iChat
* Spaces
* Dashboard
* Spotlight
* iCal
* Accessibility
* 64-bit
* Core Animation

Each of these components has been updated and while each one has that special Apple coolness factor there is only one that is what you could call “New”. That would Core Animation. We’ve seen core audio and video but this rounds out the suite of visual tools for action based content. We know that core animation is behind the cover flow trick in iTunes and we saw what some have said was core animation being used in Steve’s “Keynote” presentation. While transitions and flying images are fun it remains to be seen what kind of user interface enhancements will come out of this. I can imagine a few and if those enhancements can be leveraged into a more streamlined workflow then Core Animation will be much more than a pretty face.

The other feature that I think is worth some additional notice is Spaces. This sort of thing has been implemented before by third party developers but perhaps were overlooked by the Mac community since the reviews were mixed regarding their effectiveness. Apple’s integration of this feature into the OS is going to make a lot more sense as our computing lives become more complex. Although the software has become more powerful and easier to use; then number of tasks we are trying to perform is always inching upward. As I type this I have seven applications running in my dock, if you see what I mean. Spaces could simplify my life but more importantly it could save me time.

Yesterday I was working with a different kind of project that required lots of documents, pdfs etc and it was frustrating trying to keep track of everything and where it went. Spaces would help in isolating just the kinds of things I want to focus on for a given task. Hence, two thumbs up for Spaces.

Last and certainly not least is Time Machine. This will be good for all of us since most of us don’t have a very good backup strategy and some don’t have one at all. It will also be good for hard drive companies since we have to have someplace to back that data up to. Let the speculations continue….

So much sofware, so little time or so the saying goes. Due to the “live” nature of what I do there are always new ideas concepts and developments that influence what I am sharing.

There is a point at which the demands of a particular shot and features of a camera converge as we move forward with creating images we will look at where this happens. Look for future thoughts on “what camera” as concepts develop.

It is our goal to provide some overiding concepts that will help you cut through the information fog to recognize and capture the images you want.

Till then… keep a camera handy.

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