Apple. A classic is updated

Whenever you go to a meeting with agency types, at some point somebody breaks out a MacBook Pro.

Today Apple refreshed a range of their products and this much-loved workhorse, which started life as the Titanium Powerbook, gets another massive overhaul.

A laser cut “unibody” (made from a single piece of aluminium), LED-backlit display, and clickable “multi-touch” trackpad are topped off with new materials and a fresh design.

Mmmmmmm…..

How do Apple make such great things? An insight into Apples design process.

Process is something that we talk a lot about at glue. People have wildly varying views about what’s right and what’s not. How to draw the line between the end result and the amount of ££ you spend getting there often depends which department you work in.

Apple are famous for their great hardware and software design, and in a presentation at SXSW from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, revealed a few details about their take on the idea.

Pixel Perfect Mockups

This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

Paired Design Meetings

This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Pony Meeting

This refers to a story Lopp told earlier in the session, in which he described the process of a senior manager outlining what they wanted from any new application: “I want WYSIWYG… I want it to support major browsers… I want it to reflect the spirit of the company.” Or, as Lopp put it: “I want a pony!” He added: “Who doesn’t? A pony is gorgeous!” The problem, he said, is that these people are describing what they think they want. And even if they’re misguided, they, as the ones signing the checks, really cannot be ignored.

The solution, he described, is to take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what’s going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line.

via Businessweek

iStick – a fusion of iPhone and iPod shuffle

What do you get when you cross an iPhone with an iPod shuffle? Designer Alexei Mikhailov has dreamed up this gadget to show what he thinks that hybrid should look like.

The iStick is modeled after a tube of lipstick. However, all four sides have a touchscreen providing for a slick interface.

Read more:
http://sparkingtech.com/gadgets/istick-a-fusion-of-iphone-and-ipod-shuffle/

Keep your Mac up to date with Appfresh and osx.iusethis.com

AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.

Appfresh isn’t in Beta yet so there are some glitches, and be careful about downloading Leopard only apps if you’re on Tiger, but it’s shaping up to be a really great bit of kit. If you’re a bit of a software nerd you can also show off your apps via Facebook.

Take a look:
http://metaquark.de/appfresh/
http://osx.iusethis.com/

Apple TV versus Blu-Ray, DVD & HD Cable

Apple has just released an update to their Apple TV. Now you can download movies for rental, so iLounge took a sussed out the quality difference between Blu-Ray / Apple TV / HD Cable / DVD.

via http://ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apple-tv-20-vs-blu-ray-dvd-hd-cable-the-comparison

BBC iPlayer to hit Macs in 2008

The BBC will launch a download version of its iPlayer online video service for Apple Mac users by the end of 2008. Currently Mac users can only use the streaming web-based iPlayer.

Read more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7233252.stm

Google Mac Developer Playground – Google Code

It’s great to see Google developing some great apps for the Mac. In an effort to show that its employees’ “20 percent time” is benefiting Mac users, Google unveiled its officially unofficial sandbox for Mac developers today.

Take a look here:
http://code.google.com/mac/

Apple announces the release date for their new OS, Leopard, will be 26th October 2007

Apple has announced that Leopard will be available on the 26th October 2007. Leopard sports over 300+ new features.

Take a look for yourself here:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That Sony Bravia Bunnies ad and the Apple iMac.

There’s been a lot of fuss kicked up recently about the new Bunnies ad from Fallon for Sony Bravia. The general gist is that an independent illustration agency submitted ideas to Passion Pictures; the animation house behind the bunnies; in 2002. There were a lot of similarities.

You can read more about it here, and here’s the ad in question.

Turns out it’s not just the visuals that are in question. Turns out the music has already been used in another seminal ‘Colors’ commercial.

I love the iMac ad. It’s classic Apple. No specifications, just a beautifully shot selection of the new machines spinning around each other. Mind you, does that look familiar?

Remember kids: Recycle… The possibilities are endless!

Music:
The Rolling Stones – Rainbow [iMac Colors / Sony Bravia Bunnies]
Honeycut – Exodus Honey [iMac 2007]

More info:
Honeycut on Myspace

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BBC online services will be free via The Cloud Wi-Fi network

The BBC are to offer their online service for free through The Cloud Wi-Fi network. This follows an annoucement that from O2 that the iPhone will be given free usage of the same hotspots, although the highly unclear “fair usage” policy applies to the iPhone.

The BBC also confirmed that Mac users will be able to use its iPlayer TV catch-up service from the end of the year. Interestingly though, the official annoucement added that “The broadcaster has signed a deal with Adobe to provide Flash video for the whole of the BBC’s video services, including a streaming version of its iPlayer.”

So hopefully that’s a final goodbye to Microsoft DRM and the wobbly RealPlayer technology. As Flash Player adds new codecs and keeps improving quality surely a cross-platform solution was the only way to go.

Read more:
http://www.thecloud.net/page/3835
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7045123.stm