iOS 7’s Icons Suck because Jony Ive is Used to Hardware & Factories
Neven Mrgan on the new icons in iOS, and the grid system that led to them:
Jony Ive’s new “icon grid” is a guide meant to ensure that different apps’ icons look harmonious on the home screen. That’s a lofty goal. The issue of whether a grid can really accomplish that is complex; most designers think that non-block-based designs (so, not paragraphs of text, not photos, not headings) require a lot of “optical adjustment”. This is fancy talk for “tweak it so it looks right.”
To me this illustrates Ive’s history with hardware design: meticulous designs down to fractions of centimeters, built for rigid standards so machines and processes can eventually be reused across entire product lines.
In software, such exactness isn’t necessary and is perhaps, well, wrong.
Adjusting an icon design to the eye, not to meet a standard, costs you nothing to implement. Stray pixels don’t require new factory machines, new lines, or new processes.
But the hardware world, the world that must keep in mind factories and efficiency, is the world Ive is used to.
That said: this is a first iteration and Ive’s first major crack at software design. Soon he will realize standards can be flexed within the virtual, and icons will defined to fit the standards of the eye, not the standards of the factory line.
“”The device would work not by splitting atoms—the method the atomic bomb had relied upon—but by fusing them. Estimates projected a blast so great that no one could tell Truman what its uses in fighting a war might be…
The problem now was not so much how to defeat an adversary as how to convince him not to go to war in the first place. Paradoxically, that seemed to require the development of weapons so powerful that no one on the American side knew what their military uses might be, while simultaneously persuading everyone on the Soviet side that if the war did come those weapons would without doubt be employed.
The Mac Pro has an internal power supply, not an external power brick. Only Apple would design a computer packed this tightly, with such high emphasis on removing heat, and choose to integrate the power supply. (Via Mashable)
“ I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”
Vanity Fair on the New Cyver War
Essential reading. Will have unexpected effects:
The U.S. banking leadership is said to be extremely unhappy at being stuck with the cost of remediation—which in the case of one specific bank amounts to well over $10 million. The banks view such costs as, effectively, an unlegislated tax in support of U.S. covert activities against Iran. The banks “want help turning [the DDoS] off, and the U.S. government is really struggling with how to do that. It’s all brand-new ground,” says a former national-security official. And banks are not the only organizations that are paying the price. As its waves of attacks continue, Qassam has targeted more banks (not only in the U.S., but also in Europe and Asia) as well as brokerages, credit-card companies, and D.N.S. servers that are part of the Internet’s physical backbone.
(Via Vanity Fair)
“ There are 1 billion mobile phone units coming out of Shenzhen and its immediate surroundings every year. That is out of the estimated 1.7 billion to 1.8 billion units worldwide annually.”
“ The point is we’re using algos to analyze the world, but it goes beyond that: we’ve weaponized some of them, so they’re not just thinking, they’re acting. For me, it’s not about the finance piece. That’s just the visible apex of the thinking and practice. I really do believe that as surely as we had a flash crash on Wall St, we can have them in culture if we’re not careful. And the first way to be careful is simply to understand that there’s something to be careful about.”
