Quotes « Vincent Gable’s Blog

October 9, 2008

Function Over Brand

Filed under: Design,Quotes | Apple, Business, iPhone
― Vincent Gable on October 9, 2008

There is something to be said for the fact that the phone with the strongest brand in the world has no visible branding whatsoever on its front face.

—John Gruber on the iPhone. But you knew what phone he was talking about.

I’ve always been deeply opposed to any branding strategy that values a brand over a product. Adding branding to something’s “face” makes it harder to use, because it adds visual noise to the very part of the thing you have to interact with (and figure out how to use). For example, an “Intel Inside” sticker next to a keyboard is one more square-thing you have to rule out when looking for the right button to press.

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October 7, 2008

Photoshop Upgrade Refusenik

Filed under: Design,Quotes | Adobe, Graphic Design, Photoshop
― Vincent Gable on October 7, 2008

I hadn’t heard of Bob Staake before but, according to Wikipedia, he’s kind of a big deal:

Illustrations by Staake appear in The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and others. Illustrations by Staake are used in advertising by such companies as McDonald’s, American Express, Sony, United Airlines, Nickelodeon, Sports Illustrated For Kids, Ralston Purina, Hallmark Cards, Kenner Toys, and others.

Starting in 1993, Staake illustrated and contributed concepts to The Style Invitational, which is a humor contest at The Washington Post.

In 1995, Staake became a regular contributor to Mad Magazine.

In the September 4, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, Staake created the first of many cover illustrations to follow for that magazine.

Interestingly, he still uses Photoshop 3, first released over 12 years ago,

Let me clear up today’s rumor: I do NOT work in OS 7. I use OSX and run classic (9.0) in the background. Photoshop 3.0? Yes, STILL use that.

Responding to some brouhaha over his tools, he made it clear that it’s by choice,

I love how every tech geek out there goes POSTAL over the idea of an artist using software that they’re comfortable with – even if it’s old.

Reminds me of people who still think Microsoft Word 5.1 was the best version ever. Personally, I don’t think they are off by much, although given my spelling, a word processor without spellcheck-as-you-type just won’t cut it.

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A Dishonest Move I Wish They Would Make

Filed under: Quotes,Security | Telemarketing
― Vincent Gable on October 7, 2008

Bruce Schneier has a great scheme I wish every dishonest company would follow,

Turns out you can add anyone’s number — or remove anyone’s number — to/from the Canadian do-not-call list. You can also add (but not remove) numbers to the U.S. do-not-call list, though only up to three at a time, and you have to provide a valid e-mail address to confirm the addition.

Here’s my idea. If you’re a company, add every one of your customers to the list. That way, none of your competitors will be able to cold call them.

Underhanded corporate shenanigans ending cold-calls once and for all would really make my day.

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October 6, 2008

Returning Linux

Filed under: Quotes,Usability | Epic Fail, Freetards
― Vincent Gable on October 6, 2008

Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.

— MSI’s Director of U.S. Sales Andy Tung

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October 4, 2008

The Decadent Future

Filed under: Quotes | Decadent Luxury, Energy, Futurism
― Vincent Gable on October 4, 2008

…the average American consumes so much energy every day, it would take 200 slaves to reproduce his lifestye. Modern industry makes such luxury possible.

At least according to my television. It’s nice to live in the future.

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September 30, 2008

September 27, 2008

Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Usability | Apple, Learning, Psychology
― Vincent Gable on September 27, 2008

…joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective.

…

I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys

–Hank Williams

The short article is worth reading.

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September 26, 2008

Simple English

Filed under: Quotes,Usability | English, i18n, Internationalization, Linguistics, Simplicity
― Vincent Gable on September 26, 2008

There are 400 million native English speakers, but over a billion people who speak English as a second language. … At any given instant on this planet, most people who are speaking English are not native speakers.

…

Perhaps we should take a good look at common forms of incorrect grammar and see if they actually make our language easier to learn. Maybe we should give a loose leash to those who are trying to make English more accessible.

I am going to try to use simple language and limited slang in my writing. When one considers the population of the world, it seems rather rude to address only the native English speakers.

—Aaron Hillegass

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September 25, 2008

Simple Truths About Cross-Platform Apps

Filed under: Design,MacOSX,Programming,Quotes | Apple, Crapware, Windows
― Vincent Gable on September 25, 2008

Scott Stevenson tells it like it is,

Even if Apple recommended cross-platform toolkits for Mac development, the basic premise of Mac software market would not change. Mac users bought the computer they did because they found the experience more appealing. Bringing an application across from Windows with minor tweaks simply won’t resonate with this sort of user.

And gives free advice,

Maybe the most important thing you will ever need to know about Mac development is this:

Mac users will generally favor an app with a better experience over the one with more features.

The full article.

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September 24, 2008

XML Parsing: You’re Doing it Wrong

Filed under: Cocoa,MacOSX,Objective-C,Programming,Quotes,Sample Code,Tips | XML, XPath
― Vincent Gable on September 24, 2008

There are lots of examples of people using text searching and regular expressions to find data in webpages. These examples are doing it wrong.

NSXMLDocument and an XPath query are your friends. They really make finding elements within a webpage, RSS feed or XML documents very easy.

— Matt Gallagher

I haven’t used XPath before, but after seeing Matt’s example code, I am convinced he’s right, because I’ve seen the other side of things. (I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret — right now the worst bit of the code-base I’m working on parses XML.)

NSError *error; NSXMLDocument *document = [[NSXMLDocument alloc] initWithData:responseData options:NSXMLDocumentTidyHTML error:&error]; [document autorelease]; // Deliberately ignore the error: with most HTML it will be filled with // numerous "tidy" warnings. NSXMLElement *rootNode = [document rootElement]; NSString *xpathQueryString = @"//div[@id='newtothestore']/div[@class='modulecontent']/div[@class='list_content']/ul/li/a"; NSArray *newItemsNodes = [rootNode nodesForXPath:xpathQueryString error:&error]; if (error) { [[NSAlert alertWithError:error] runModal]; return; }
(I added [document autorelease]; to the above code, because you should always immediately balance an alloc/init with autorelease, outside of your own init methods.)

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