Prototyping Animated Apps In Your Browser

I've not come across Framer before, but I got my head around it in about 10 minutes. There's an easy route to leverage Photoshop mockups, but you can do it from scratch without too much trouble (and there's a plug-in for Sketch if you–like me–avoid Photoshop).

Many people already prototype in the browser. It's simple and quick. But while html/js/css/jquery gets a lot done it has some downsides:

• It can get pretty complicated mixing all the different technologies
• It can be hard to get the pixel perfect control you want
• It's not always performant, especially on mobile
• It's pretty far from how it will be actually implemented if you prototype for native

Framer tries to solve some of these problems by providing a very lightweight framework modeled after larger application frameworks. The basic idea is that you only need a few simple building blocks like images, animation and events to build and test complex interactions.

Some useful additional background also in this case study of building Potluck.

One Laptop Per Child Is Over

I have to admit, I'd completely forgotten about this once high-profile initiative.

With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project.

Google Glass's 45-Minute Window For Snooping

I've heard of bugs being spun as features before, but this takes the biscuit.

Although Glass might look like the ultimate X-ray specs for spying, Starner argues that Google has intentionally designed it to prevent snooping by limiting its battery life. Whereas your phone can surreptitiously record audio and video for extended periods of time, Glass will conk out after about 45 minutes (and get hot in the process). Starner insisted to conference-goers that this was a design feature meant to protect privacy, not a flaw.

The Genius Of ReCAPTCHA

Mind utterly blown. Incredible.

Von Ahn watched the work on CAPTCHA and decided it had potential beyond distinguishing humans from robots — the extra 10 seconds people were taking to access their email and other accounts could be put to use. In 2006, von Ahn launched reCAPTCHA. Unlike its predecessor, reCAPTCHA challenged users with two distorted words to decode, and looks something like this:

The brilliant twist is that this test isn't just verifying your humanity; it's also putting you to work on decoding a word that a computer can't. The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well.

Thanks to The Loop for the link.

Who Are The UK's Best Designers?

Some great choices here, including Apple's Jonathan Ive, Bowie's designer-of-late Jonathan Barnbrook, and Wayne Hemingway. I've had the pleasure of meeting Barnbrook and Hemingway, and consider them fitting company for Jony Ive, each distinguished by their principled and passionate approaches within their different fields. Voting is open until Friday 14th.

Of the Designerati choices, The Drum editor, Gordon Young, said: "We've been keeping a close eye on the design industry and we're bowled over by the amount of talent in all of the various fields. Design touches everything nowadays so our list includes everyone from illustrators, creative and art directors, fashion designers, product designers, champions of the design industry and academics.

Encryption Isn't Perfect, But It Works

Edward Snowden's message to SXSW is that end-to-end encryption is–along with public oversight–a crucial part of ensuring our future privacy.

Many people believe that the N.S.A., if it decides to do so, can crack any encryption method. Soghoian, an expert in online security, said that this was generally true, but he nonetheless agreed with Snowden that the widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption would be a good thing. Breaking encrypted messages takes a lot of time and effort, he explained. If all online messages were encrypted properly, the N.S.A. would find it difficult to monitor large numbers of people. “Encryption makes bulk surveillance too expensive,” Soghoian said. Snowden, for his part, was even more optimistic about the promise of encryption. “The bottom line is that encryption does work,” he said. In support of this argument, he pointed to his own use of secure communications. Since he revealed to the world the inner workings of the N.S.A., the U.S. government has had a huge team trying to track him and his work, he said, but as far as he knew they hadn’t succeeded.

Also relevant to this: How Apple secures your iCloud keychain even from itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Realistic Alternative To Barbie

Bravo. Nicely done too.

Many people have criticized Barbie dolls for their unrealistic proportions, claiming that they give young girls a warped idea of what beauty should be. To tackle this problem, Nikolay Lamm created digital visualizations of a regular-sized “Barbie” doll, hoping to promote realistic beauty standards.

Already funded, but you can add to the total here.

A Post-Scotland Union Flag Could Look Like This

I rather like it.

But perhaps the boldest design of all is John Yates's "United Britain," a unique take on the Union Jack's cross-based design that Ashburner calls "unlike any other flag currently in existence."

I'll say.

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.

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.

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}

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.

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.

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.

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.