willifred

This might be helpful too, a very good book on the basics:

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Grammar-Design-Briefs-Christian...

I can understand feeling frustrated, but it's a little unfair on yourself. Most designers hone their ability through constant application of their skill, not to mention very often years of expensive schooling. Nobody does it overnight. Although it's certainly possible to do without the expensive formal schooling.

> what are the ingredients

The ingredients (AKA the elements and principles of design): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_elements_and_principles

If you're not going to quit your job to go to SVA or RISD, I'd say the best place to start is to pick up a few books and do exercises. Give yourself time, don't get frustrated, and work at it. There are a lot of good resources in print out there. You could do worse than Alan Pipes's Foundations of Art and Design

http://www.laurenceking.com/product/Foundations+of+Art+---+D...

I'm not aware of anything really fantastic available for free online.

> there's an awkward separation between high culture and popular culture, mostly based on how old something is.

That's an interesting notion that may prove true in the future, but a few exceptions aside, I don't think it accurately describes the history of what you'd call "the western canon." The reality is that in the past, most popular art has been completely forgotten a few generations out. Of course there are exceptions, but the overwhelming number of plays, songs, novels, paintings, etc are dust. Your example of Shakespeare was a bit off the mark, because while he certainly had and has popular appeal, Shakespeare was in no way 'basically popular entertainment'; Lord Chamberlain's Men, The Kings Men—they were not performing for the sole benefit of the groundlings, they were performing primarily for very wealthy patrons.

Also, Shakespeare created perhaps the finest and most elevated art in the English language, and was recognized for it then, even more so today; the plays that were basically popular entertainment in his time are footnotes or worse today.

And as a side note, I'm one of those people who enjoys seeing Shakespeare performed. I think you'd be surprised how much audiences enjoy it, and not just in that insufferable, look-how-cultured-I-am, self-congratulatory way.

> Flash does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from saving copies of images.

This is only true if Flash is loading external jpegs. If they're embedded in a swf, you would have to go through a great deal more trouble to extract image files. But a right-click 'Save image as' is about all the trouble that most people are willing to go through, and as such, I'd guess that Flash is an effective deterrent much of the time.

I know a few photographers and illustrators, and based on what I hear from them, there is a shockingly pervasive attitude that any image on the web can be appropriated for any reason whatsoever. Even corporate types who should know better think nothing of grabbing images from portfolio sites (or flickr) to use in marketing campaigns, etc. I think it's wise for photographers to do what they can to protect their business and their work.

Also, consider the audience. Often portfolio sites exist solely to impress art directors at ad agencies, who (in my experience) aren't as hostile to flash as, say, developers at startups. And clumsy animated or skeuomorphic interfaces are often totally acceptable in that world. Many of them are still building flash 'microsites', after all. Real sales and commerce are taking place elsewhere (corbis, veer, getty images, et al).

I was left wondering why didn't he just export his mailbox. Or add his GMail account to Mail.app and just drag and drop his old inbox into his new Google inbox. There is absolutely no 'lock-in' with Apple's Mail client.

The strangest part was the line about how there were 'many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard.' There was hardly anything different about Snow Leopard from a user's perspective, the things that did change were pretty hard to complain about (smaller application file sizes, Microsoft Exchange support, and um... what else was there?). From a developer's perspective, Snow Leopard was a vast improvement. Just about the only 'bad' thing about it was the end of the line for the PPC.

Emotions about Apple run so high, it's hard not to think of this as trashing one product (OS X) because of negative feelings about mostly unrelated products (iOS, the App Store, the Apple brand in general).

But I'd wager that most Lion users have a pointing device that enables easy scrolling: a trackpad, magic mouse, magic trackpad, or a mouse with a scroll wheel.

Your wish has been granted. There's a full text transcript here: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-20124391/steve-jobs-re...

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I now see that there are a number of parallels—but I still think the contrasts are more striking.

First of all, Eric Schmidt did an excellent job. In 2011, Page inherited a that is hugely profitable, practically owns search, and has successfully expanded into many other markets. While there's no doubt that he'll do many things differently, you can pretty much guarantee it's not going to be anything on the order of the massive purges Apple experienced in the late 90s. Apple in 1997 was mortibund; almost nobody thought Jobs had a serious chance at turning it around.

Schmidt successfully did for Page and Brin what John Sculley was supposed to do for Jobs; provide guidance for an inexperienced founder until they can assume the chief executive role.

And while I agree with much of what you wrote, I take exception to the idea that, outside of search, Google 'doesn't do anything particularly well'. They have a range of excellent and successful products, most of them well integrated into their core business. I refuse to accept the idea that, for example, Maps, Gmail and Android aren't products 'done well'.

What are the similarities in position between Jobs/Apple in 1997 and Page/Google now?

While you make a valid point, I also think the parent post might have been also making a different one. It's not so much whether these markets existed prior, but that Google is entering these markets with vastly more resources and (often) with an intent to commoditize the market by giving the product away or undercutting everyone else by a significant margin, so that they can grow their own data-driven advertising business--effectively turning each market they enter into just another 'moat' around their core product.

While I wouldn't deny their right to do so, I also wouldn't deny that it often casts them as a bully.

Gmail has started suggesting friends to 'consider including' on emails. Personally, this has resulted in both me and my ex getting some very uncomfortable suggestions recently for whom to consider including in correspondence. It hasn't suggested we email each other, which would be forgivable, but a third party whom I had never directly emailed. And it highlighted for me what I consider to be a major problem with Google's social initiatives, which is that they've collected and employed this 'social' data in a completely antisocial way--behind your back, when you're using unrelated services. And it might be clever, but it can get very creepy.

I can't resist plugging audiotool: http://www.audiotool.com/ It's flash, but it's mind blowingly amazing.

From the Lifehacker review:

> It's also worth noting that they're looking to crack down on piracy, so depending on how well it works and how much of your music is illegal, that could be a deal killer for some.

This would be a deal killer for me and nearly everyone I know.

This and the picture of a laptop in a slide during the Ice Cream announcement made me wonder if this means Android is coming to the laptop form factor, and/or other 'PC' form factors. Certainly would be interesting.

Ease of deployment might be why this very blog post is published on Wordpress.

Jason Fried has a great piece on this idea: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/575-but-theres-only-so-many-w...

To me it makes perfect sense. For many people, web browsers have very little to differentiate them. Chrome's single major differentiator is that it's fast. If you asked the average person what's different about Chrome— they probably wouldn't care so much about the robustness of the html5 or css3 support— they'd say that it's fast.

Microsoft can attack on that front very aggressively. So they're taking the one thing that most people know is different or special about Chrome, and saying, 'IE is faster. Faster canvas, faster svg.' Seems like a great strategy to me.

While the article raises some valid points, I question the use of compete.com figures to make any claims about foursquare's declining traffic.

This is an older but relevant post from a former Google designer: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

More anecdotally, I find that the best design and illustration I've seen from Google is usually on a very small thing: Google doodles, the CR-48 pilot program videos and illustrations, the Google TV quick tour. Some amazing work has gone into Chrome marketing.

But it's almost never on a product. Their products often feel like the design was managed by committees of engineers. That's not to knock any of Google's product designers, but it often feels like they're not allowed to make decisions on anything that really matters.

I love the line, 'you can't commoditize good design.' I just want to read it over and over.

Design has been so further commoditized in recent years, it's a wonderful reminder that design is much more than application of style.

I agree that the author's points are purely speculative, but the situation kind of demands speculation, since the official answer was very unsatisfying.

The tablet market somehow seems more competitive than mobile is currently, and third parties like Amazon could rebrand/white label Honeycomb for complete rival tablet platforms, forgoing the 'with Google' label, services, ad platform, etc. Tablets are general computing platforms and not locked down like the carrier dominated mobile market; Google would have a tougher time controlling this kind of thing than they do with mobile phones.

>200 engineers and 50 in 'overhead' (designers, marketing etc.)

Is this a deliberate attempt to troll or are designers nothing but overhead? Poor design, particularly poor interface design, is considered a major factor in many of Google's product failures (Wave, Google TV, Buzz, et al). User interface design and consistency are frequently cited as the largest remaining gap between the Android and iOS experiences.

The Apple board reduced Steve Jobs's role at Apple to ceremonial/figurehead. Steve Jobs actually resigned from Apple.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

I started using SRWare Iron, which is like a more tinfoil version of Chromium, for this reason.

Because it's a usurpation of my role as the administrator of my system. Because it necessitates a level of comfort with a company—whose business model is based on collecting and selling user data—rooting my system, and trusting that they're not going to abuse that privilege, or forget my best interest when acting in their own best interest. I think that's a good enough reason.

Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy.

I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to have to go into the future kicking and screaming.

I love Chrome, but I hate silent updates.

The majority of Chrome users have no idea that their browser is silently updating itself without their knowledge or consent, and if they did, they wouldn't have any idea how to shut it off.

I can think of plenty of cases where most users would want to turn it off—tethered to a slow data network, throttled bandwidth, etc—but the precedent it sets bothers me more than any hypothetical inconvenience. It's like I'm suddenly, unknowingly leasing a little space on my machine to Google, and I'm not always sure what they're installing.

Mac Pros used to (maybe still do) come with a fully registered group licensed version, along with Art Director's Toolkit, which is an absolutely awesome tool.