It’s an important discussion.

S

Still, the headline used by Wired.com was clearly incorrect; Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. I’ll note that I like Wired magazine quite a bit, and what we have here is most likely just an overzealous editor. But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

Phil Plait is no stranger to this topic, “having spend a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble.”

Hindsight being what it is, perhaps Apple could have phrases like “for many,” and “for some,” but I think John Gruber, who has held the new phone and seen the Retina Display in action, have the way of it in his response to Samsung’s criticism

They can say this now, but they won’t be able to say such things and be taken seriously after the iPhone 4 is released and people have seen it in person. Until they figure out a way to make AMOLED visible in daylight, they’re not even in the game.

If Jobs is wrong, or worse, lying, then one has to ask if scientific exactitude is required for every everything we say. If that’s the new canon, there are a lot of liars out there.

S

A type family originally developed for New York’s Whitney Museum, Whitney contends with two different sets of demands: those of editorial typography, and those of public signage.

Typefaces for catalogs and brochures need to be narrow enough to work in crowded environments, yet energetic enough to encourage extended reading. But typefaces designed for wayfinding programs need to be open enough to be legible at a distance, and sturdy enough to withstand a variety of fabrication techniques: fonts destined for signage need to anticipate being cast in bronze, etched in glass, cut in vinyl, and rendered in pixels.

While American “gothics” such as News Gothic (1908) have long been a mainstay of editorial settings, and European “humanists” such as Frutiger (1975) have excelled in signage applications, Whitney bridges this divide in a single design. Its compact forms and broad x-height use space efficiently, and its ample counters and open shapes make it clear under any circumstances.

S

Our rational brains can access the equivalent of about 2 feet of information around us.  Our subconscious brains can access the equivalent of 11 acres of information around us. Every experience, every lesson, every mistake, every success is all stored away and your brain has the capacity to access that information, even though you’re not conscious of it.

It’s this access to additional data that explains our “gut” feelings, intuitions, hunches, or, as he says, that something just feels right.

Now to find a way to capture that insight in the shower when you have it so you don’t have to keep repeating it to yourself until you’re dry and can find a pen or keyboard!

S

If you’re thinking about developing for the iPhone or iPad, take a look.

I can’t close without mentioning that the icon (and demo vid—warning: uses the F-bomb) are hilarious and worth a look on their own merits.

S

If you’re not familiar, the Mac’s Services menu is something it inherited from NeXTSTEP, and it’s not unlike the Unix command line’s pipe. A Service takes the current selection and sends it to another application to be worked on, which may or may not pass the result back to the original caller. Services are under-utilized on the Mac because we’re so accustomed to copy and paste, drag and drop, and the routine of saving a file to the desktop with one application so you can open it with another. But iPhone OS, lacking two out of three of these options, could foster a Services explosion.

Of note in the post is the use of the excellent iPhone prototyping tool, Briefs.

S

“Fa love Apple!”

This can only be a sign of things to come both for technology and medicine.

S

My intent as I build the site is to have the home page be something like a newspaper. As I find something of a general nature that interests me, I’ll post it here. Feel free to add to the post with your own comments.

In addition to the front page, I’ll have a Blog where I’ll post things that are personally interesting, or of a more editorial nature where I have an opinion about a given topic. Again, please feel free to enhance my post with your own comments.

If it looks like a discussion is starting to build on the main site or blog, I’ll create an entry in the Forum, which I also intend to use for other, longer posts and discussions.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let me know. To help avoid spam, I set posts to be approved, but I don’t intend to edit or reject them beyond that. Of course, this may change, but none will be more surprised than I.

Sylvaticus