davee5

This is precisely why it's the right design for an Apple car and probably the wrong design for a Ferrari.

I knew someone who allegedly worked on the Special Project after a successful career at more familiar premium automotive brands. He was expressing exasperation with the process and said "I don't get why they're letting people who don't like cars design one. You wouldn't send your kids to a school full of teachers that hate children!"

My recollection, now quite fuzzy but deeply entrenched, is the key is to never touch the throttle. The LSO would yell at you but I noticed your speed slowly drifts down from drag until it's just inside the acceptable range at touchdown. Managing heading and altitude is not all that hard, so my brother and I had a pretty solid success rate to the amazement of our friends.

I'm quite struck by the title of this announcement. The box being drawn around "your world" shows how narrow the AI builder's window into reality tends to be.

a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude. We're also expanding... with an advanced mode that searches the web.

The notion of software eating the world, and AI accelerating that trend, always seems to forget that The World is a vast thing, a physical thing, a thing that by its very nature can never be fully consumed by the relentless expansion of our digital experiences. Your worldview /= the world.

The cynic would suggest that the teams that build these tools should go touch grass, but I think that misses the mark. The real indictment is of the sort of thinking that improvements to digital tools [intelligences?] in and of themselves can constitute truly substantial and far reaching changes.

The reach of any digital substrate inherently limited, and this post unintentionally lays that bare. And while I hear accelerationists invoking "robots" as the means for digital agents to expand their potent impact deeper into the real world I suggest this is the retort of those who spend all day in apps, tools, and the web. The impacts and potential of AI is indeed enormous, but some perspective remains warranted and occasional injections of humility and context would probably do these teams some good.

Mannkitchen Pepper Cannon. I absolutely adore this device and have bought a few as friends for discerning cooks and mechanical gadget lovers. Build quality is utterly fantastic and the quality of the grind is excellent. Most importantly the ability for it to grind copious amounts of pepper with minimal input is unmatched. I tried just about all the other ones recommended on various forums but none match up, not even close. Yeah it's $200 but oh man is it nice.

This made me laugh unreasonably hard.

Quite welcome! Sadly I don't know of any resources that are really useful when you try to put things into practice. Most of the tutorials / blogs / forum posts I've seen are not really that constructive nor sufficiently detailed to get into the truly useful practicalities. I personally learned the trade by (a) working in an industrial design studio as the token engineer & CAD jockey with "real" industrial designers pushing me to do better, and then (b) building my own kilohours of practice in aesthetically driven CAD modeling. Now as the design lead & manager on most projects it still takes me months of coaching my employees on subtleties to get things right, and even each project still requires an unreasonable amount of time tuning curves and corners. Like all professional practices this rabbit hole goes real deep. Still, you can get pretty far with brute force iteration and careful attention to detail. I think your progress thus far demonstrates that quite well.

Huh, well apologies for the assumption though I merely have the blog images to go off. When I look at the render that shows the top ortho and the one for the bottom cable geometry the highlights end fairly abruptly. The only curve that visually looks C2/G2 to me is the acute angle blend between the tray edge and the back of the phone cradle, that has a nice acceleration of the radius in and out of the transition.

It's possible the Shapr rendering engine is not very subtle, or perhaps the G2 math is accurate in a strict sense but the output is not very differentiated from G1. It's mathematically possible for there to be a continual change in local radius, i.e. be curvature continuous, while still having local changes be sufficiently aggressive that it visually appears discontinuous at a human scale. Each CAD kernel seems to make these things in its own way, hence different industrial design studios will strongly prefer the use of certain 3D CAD programs to make their final master models (e.g. Alias). Personally I drive CREO as for ages most manufacturers overseas used pirated copies of Pro/E or CREO and thus I could send them "native" surfaces. In that program my preferred curvature continuous coefficient range was 0.52-0.57. I don't have Shapr access handy so messing around with the coefficients and finding a result that you like is outside my domain -- and perhaps you already did!

Still, all that is on the modeling side, but the best way to actually check the visual smoothness of your corners is to use analysis tools like curvature combs to check how aggressively the model is making transitions. It doesn't fundamentally matter if you use the built-in automatic tools or manually adjust b-splines in your NURBS: the smoother your combs change the smoother your corners will look. [I checked the support page for Shapr to see if it supports curvature comb analysis and saw nothing about it, so you may be out of luck on that front until future updates.] Absent that you have to just spin the model in CAD and see how smoothly the highlights roll around and hope the built-in rendering engine is doing its job well.

One last item of subjective crit in sculpting smooth models: when applying a fillet to an edge that turns a corner, such as your interior pocket, you'll have a less visually cramped and abrupt appearance if you use a fillet chord (edge radius) that's nontrivially smaller than the chord length of the turn it has to make (corner radius). Maximized fillets that come to hard corners and make a full spherical bubble, e.g. your initial models shown in gray, generally look less natural than those that allow the fillet to turn the corner. This lets the highlight work its way around in a racetrack form instead of getting "stuck" in the extremes.

Nice work dude, I wouldn't comment if it didn't seem like you're dedicated to making continual improvement and learning new tricks.

If you're in Shapr3D you should change all your radii and fillets to "G2" in stead of G1.*

Currently all your corners (excepting the ones that use Apple's supplied bezier points) appear to be tangent but not curvature continuous. As someone with the utmost respect for the learning amateur I would like to kindly inform you that having G1 corners from just hitting "fillet" is the #1 way for design cognoscenti to ascertain that a model was built by an engineer. Alternatively you could try to mimic or offset the G2 curves Apple already paid a bazillion dollars to fine tune.**

* this particular industrial designer x mechanical engineer does not use Shapr but I do see G2 / curvature continuous fillet tools exist via their support page.

** this designer also thinks Apple's and Dieter's corners are too squashed square and has been building devices with slightly sharper and more accelerated corner curvature as the world's natural bends are parabolic or catenary. So roll your own and find your aesthetic voice!*

My favorite watch at the moment is a replica Moonswatch on a decent NATO strap. I am always quite tickled that wearing a copy of a copy that gets any street cred / sense of history. Two degrees of separation, two orders of magnitude less money out of pocket.

My replica Moonswatches cost $25US, looks fairly spiffy, hint at space history, are super lightweight, and keep time. I have a handful of nice watches but I have come to appreciate the combo of comfort / cheap / cheeky.

I also bought a fantasy Moonswatch based on a Japanese render artist's interpretation of Omega's "dark side of the moon" watch. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy! (Moonwatch > dark side > swatch > render > rep.) As a designer of hardware products I think it's a super fun piece of commentary on modern branding and manufacturing.

I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.

But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:

1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)

2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)

Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.

I definitely use his blog to be thoughtfully informed when it matters. As a 40ish startup guy myself I take on many roles, including helping set product and technology strategies. But I also need to work in the weeds most of the time and don't often have the opportunity or headspace to just ponder the big picture, so having someone else inject perspective at the right time can be very useful. Thus I tend to read Bens work in huge gulps as a new project kicks off, grabbing as much perspective as possible to feed a new initiative with ideas that have evolved and simmered over time.

Moreover, being able to think at a strategic, systems level about the technology landscape is a trained mindset and it helps to have sources of inspiration accordingly. Reading the work of people who think in ways you also wish to be able to think seems like good training for your mental muscles. Like all commentary and advice you learn to keep what you think is relevant and supplement it with your own information and ideas, but having the framework and the examples can absolutely push your further, faster.

Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all, but the Swedish work is largely quite pretty and readable where the Estonian guidelines are an excellent of what designers do when they can get away with it or the client is too compliant / eager to be different. (source: am designer)

The intro claims the character of the Estonia brand is "nordic, surprising, smart" but the Aino font in particular seems way too focused on being surprising at the expense of legibility, which certainly diminishes expression of the smart element.

Just today I attended a 4th grade parents orientation at a Silicon Valley school where they noted they will be placing new emphasis on handwriting and cursive, specifically in order to build up legibility and hand stamina specifically for extended written exams.

The teachers are anticipating a return to hand written testing at high school and college levels in the AI-assisted present/future, so they are preparing students accordingly. (Then we visited the coding class and STEAM classrooms. It's not a Luddite reaction, more of a practical response to witnessed trends.)

The grade school pendulum has already started to swing from Chromebooks back to bluebooks.

Thanks for the kind words! I love the "helped" preface because it's exactly right, design is a team sport and I strongly believe in giving credit where due. Ben Chen (https://www.benchendesign.com/) was the creative lead on EVO 3D. I lead the technical side of the design for that one but he set the vision and the aesthetic. Great dude to work with too.

Yes, it is absolutely in a feedback loop. It's kind of bizarre to see up close.

The consumer hardware duopoly of Apple and Samsung are the only ones who seem to actually drive manufacturing trends. There are also tons of devices being made for the Chinese market, but you can't buy those because they're usually locked up in supplier agreements and honestly they don't meet "flagship" specs for display quality.

Component suppliers, true we-make-parts manufacturers, are not really trying to influence the big picture so much as make sure they are running their manufacturing lines at capacity. And if they are building panels on spec for open market sales, they are going to build >6" displays because it's a higher probability they'll actually sell at volume.

Hi Eric, I'm a hardware startup guy myself (our paths have crossed) with the distinction that my own "very specific set of skills" has been honed at smartphone megacompanies and smartphone startups. OSOM, Essential, HTC, Samsung, Apple. I've designed and built a lot of phones. I'm building one now. I think this is a noble effort, I personally prefer pocketable phones too, but I think there are nigh-insurmountable hurdles in your paths forward.

- 1. Supply chain / component R&D -

You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch. If you end up doing this as your own startup then you're going to start by trying to buy off the shelf parts to keep costs down. But that display you want is simply not on any of the development roadmaps for the major component manufacturers. The industry has its own momentum, and the component suppliers have also been looking at the trendlines so they are building bigger and bigger.

If you can't find the screen you want in a catalogue then you have to pay someone to build it. Convincing BOE et. al that your phone will sell enough to pay off R&D costs is unlikely, so be prepared to pay several million bucks in NRE to make it worth their time (it might still not be) and the wait a year for them to spin up the fabs. So ~$5M and 9-18 months later you have a display.

- 2. Big players are uninterested, not uninformed -

Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring, and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly. I've been in the meetings, small phone advocacy goes nowhere.

Also I'm a little surprised you're hoping an online petition will work after your prior experience trying to influence your acquirers. I presume you saw the inside of Fitbit / Google and how decisions are made...

Snarky answer says "why would you learn to improvise from a textbook?"

Actual answer is: because after 10 years of having a mediocre classical piano teacher beat the love out of my must-syncopate-Beethoven-fingers I decided to learn guitar on my own terms.

I spent hours a day in my room with music I wanted to sing, screwing around with tabs and chord charts and fingering charts. Later when I took a jazz theory course (at a university no less!) I was handed staff music with all these weird scales: mixolydian, dorian, phrygian -- I had no idea this stuff existed. Since I never learned to read staff music on guitar, but I know it on keys, I had to translate by ear. Since I was learning improvisation I wanted a map of the "acceptable" notes that I could mess around on my just hitting them at random. (In a way this is like a hack's Wayne Krantz improv exercise.)

Every autodidact builds their own ruts and then when it's time to learn new tricks they have a choice: build on the rather particular foundations already laid and see if some interesting and useful architecture can be laid on top, or tear it down and do it the "normal" way. I chose expedience and uninterrupted passion, but had to hack my way into it. And I still love the instrument, and I still play in those mental visuals scribbled onto yellow legal paper.

There are myriad ways to approach the guitar, and it seems I found mine. When I check out something like the Pat Martino video course[1] I find it completely baffling, if not profoundly impressive. In my read people think guitar is easier than it is because the 4-chords pop chart is not hard to achieve, but if you want to exceed that the learning curve shifts quickly. I think Chris McQueen of Forq / Snarky Puppy / etc explains this all rather well. [2]

[1] Pat Martino sees different things than I do on the fretboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc7Qvp8Zs6U&list=PL2TrPkuyjM...

[2] Chris McQueen knows he makes it look easier than it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCLv-tiQBuk

I love this.

When I first started taking guitar seriously, after years of kid piano lessons, I really struggled to "find" notes. I mostly play both by ear and by visual shape, not by intervals or reading staves. So while taking jazz music theory courses I eventually sat down at a piano with a guitar in my lap, played the note on the keys to find the note on the fretboard, and then carefully drew out a scale map exactly like the one you have here for every mode I wanted to learn. Knowing what "shape" a scale had from the root has been enormously useful while improvising at my (still) intermediate level. I have kept that piece of notebook paper I wrote out for over 20 years now. This is a much finer implementation!

My only initial feedback is to put some of the logarithmic visual compression between frets into the visuals. This is a visual learning tool and visually the fretboard is not evenly spaced. Also, maybe dot markers?

Instagram has slowly been deprioritizing content creation and promoting content consumption. This was clearest to me when they recently moved the Post button up to the top, out of the way, to make room for more consumption buttons within thumb reach.

For a good long time IG was the only place I could reliably see actual user-generated content. Moreover it was actual friend-generated content, and mostly they posted their actual (best, happy) lives.

With culling of the slideshow preachers, the media re-grammers, and the vacuous influencers, an honest social media experience can still be enjoyed-ish. But ads and re-designs will continue to chip away at the creative sharing and interactions that used to be the core UX until it's fully unusable for its original purpose.

Instagram now wants you to watch and scroll, not capture and share. Soon I'll need to take my creative sharing elsewhere, but where?

This is why at Apple the division making MacBooks is called "portables" and not "laptops." They're officially not supposed to go on your lap.

Also the thermal limits of the human dermis are pretty well studied and documented. The vast majority of CE products are designed not to exceed 50°C, which is when the thin skinned (children and elderly) start to get second degree burns pretty fast. 60°C is where you burn almost immediately.

Interestingly 45°C is "threshold of pain" for most folks, but few companies set that as the target limit. Since thermal dissipation is a ∆T game that last 5 degrees matters a LOT for wattage out (on a hot day outside 30-35°C is a good surface temp estimate, so that last five degrees is the difference between 10 or 15 degrees out, a non trivial delta.)

Was it actually? Because I'm hard up for a good Silk Road read.

I slogged through Raoul McLaughlin's "The Roman Empire & the Silk Routes" because it's online reviews were glowing for silk road history told with decent story telling. I still found it startlingly dry, it felt like a demonstration of how much research he did rather than a real narrative arc.

Tangentially I read half of it aloud to my little kids for bedtime, they loved the crazy names of faraway fantastical sounding places - it's about all that really redeemed it experientially. YMMV, apparently.

"Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" is her signature book and for many (myself included) a spiritual experience to read.

"The Writing Life" is the best book about the process of creating that I have ever read, and I often suggest it to my design teams. (Designers like to read books about design, but you don't hire designers because they're good at words. You want to read about creating? Read books by writers.)

One of my favorite excerpts from The Writing Life:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well," the writer said, “I don’t know... Do you like sentences?" The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint."

Apple has been working on glasses at least since 2006 and perhaps earlier, far longer than this article indicates. Perhaps there's not continuity in these projects, but I suspect an R&D team or two has been working on this for over a decade. Whether or not you still believe it, Apple generally releases new new products when they're ready.

"Apple started working on an augmented reality headset at least as early as 2006, but put the idea on ice because it seemed a mere curiosity compared to the iPhone. The possibility of some sort of iGlass device was confirmed by Tony Fadell, the former iPod division head who is now the CEO of Nest Labs, during an interview for the oral history."

https://www.fastcompany.com/3018060/apples-iglasses-are-real...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474968/innovation--ap...

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not-that-secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up.

I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're doing absolutely nothing all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career).

I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.

More to the point, I believe the ability to foster connections between a wide variety of topics & ways of knowing will open many doors. Singular focus is not the unique path to success, aggregating knowledge and wielding it coherently (even if tenuously) is also quite potent.

Consider every stereotypical intellectual TED talk you've seen, chances are it either goes deep on one idea or develops its uniqueness by combining ideas that create a new adjacency.

Granted the "jack of all trades, master of none" phenomenon is real but it's still predicated on mastery of singular topics being the target. Breadth combined with sufficient depth to be dangerous, as well as the ability to communicate clearly, enables people to organize and align disparate ideas that people can rally behind. Every skilled product manager, marketer, and executive needs to be able to cross over from their core expertise, and general curiosity and the ability to dive into many things at once is fundamental to those sorts of successes.

Yes. The commodification of professional work is worth pointing out. I'm surprised by the percentage of people in this thread who think the SW industry is exceptional. It tells me a lot about the fictions people want to tell themselves in an industry that is still relatively novel.

By contrast I'm a HW builder (mechanical engineer / industrial designer / design manager). I make good comp but maybe 70% of what my similarly leveled colleagues in SW do. The vast majority of the arguments in here still apply to my work, with a little less focus on maintenance. And yet my job role's comp is in a slow decline. Why? Because it's fully commoditized.

Anecdote: I used to work for a HW focused VC leading their internal incubator/consultancy's physical design team. One of our ML focused investments got acquired for a ton of money and every other startup in the building wanted to know how well compensated the team was going to be. It's odd to see some people at the water cooler suddenly be worth millions when your startup is still grinding, it makes for stark contrast and a very real "what if" to the onlookers. One of the Sr MEs at a struggling startup was clearly jealous and lamented to me, "man, screw machine learning, how come nobody is paying me a million bucks for my work?" To which I said "let me ask you something, when you were studying mech-e in school, did you ever use steam tables?" yeah. "Did you learn about the Carnot cycle?" yeah. "Have you considered the fact that our industry is 200 years old? It stands to reason that our jobs are not hot shit anymore. Be glad you like your work and are still paid well; ignore the new kids if you can."

Irving Finkel's lectures are marvelous. Watching his lecture on the decipherment of cuneiform is a delight, both in subject matter and in the delivery of a well worn and thoroughly polished presentation. (If only all professors were so articulate and passionate.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBA

Once you are making your pancakes in a full mold, with no pan to speak of, you should revise your nomenclature: you are now making cake. (Deliciously light steamed eggy cake, sure, but not a pancake.)

I've made similar souffle / jiggly "pancakes" using ring molds on a lidded pan. This replicates the technique that was popularized in Japan. Of the recipes I've tried, this one is the simplest and had the results closest to what I saw and ate on my travels - https://kirbiecravings.com/japanese-souffle-pancakes/

I started to compile a list of Human <> Digital I/O a while ago. This wasn't written up as a real article, more for my own notes, but I wanted to publish it for (a) sharing and (b) to be in the public domain so none of my employers can call dibs on my high-level thinking & resources.

link - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oBe27BKbpvts7UNANxv9...

I design consumer electronics, mostly focused on early stages including concept / design / enclosure / HW component & feature architecture. My job is to build digital stuff that is intuitive, useful, and buildable.

I figured that it would be a useful exercise to survey a relatively complete a landscape of "I/O" available for both humans and digital technology.

If we start with the (imperfect) premise that humans are machines, then we can look at all the sensory apparatus we have to determine what access we have to the doors of perception. What are the different types of the nervous system's inputs? Repeat the exercise for electronic machines, to see what tools we have that can interact with body and material. What are the different types of tech's inputs and outputs? Human I/O and Digital I/O.

The overlap of those two sets maps the possible ways human physiology might interact with digital technology. To be clear this only covers the most physical & materialist levels, but it's a start and a useful tool for me.

I have a separate list of actual companies and products that have shipped consumer-facing biosensor tech, but I haven't added it to this doc yet. One more thing on the to-do list...

Oh no, this is dead serious. Even 2 minutes of listening to the recording makes that clear.

Consider that an enormous and often unheralded component of successful design [thinking] projects is cultural: are you working around people who share your process and ideation style? Is your team able to co-navigate an abductive process because there is a shared process, language, and disposition?

Also consider most designers are hired to be (a) intuitive and (b) visual. The practical implications being they are usually not (A) explicit or analytical thinker nor (B) articulate.

So what you have here is someone who is not especially skilled with words earnestly repeating the core dogmas of his industry, but only able to offer a mediocre "translation" of core working assumptions, process, and lingo to outsiders.

In many ways this podcast/article is exceedingly standard fare, you just may not have been exposed to much of the design sphere's publication. There are a handful of thoughtfully articulate, erudite designers out there, but they are the exceptions and not the rule.