The Duel
I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with lighting and focus in my photography. Here’s one that came out just like I wanted it.
New iPods this Wednesday?
There’s a ton of rumours floating around that a press event Apple is holding Wednesday will see the introduction of a new line of iPods. I say it’s about time. Though I haven’t even had my 30 GB black one for a year now, the design of this one dates back about two years and is starting to look a little stale next to the iPhone. Then there’s the issue of storage; I don’t have a problem with hard drive-based media players from a capacity standpoint (though mine is almost completely full, as shown above), but the performance on the full-sized iPod compared to the Nano (which uses flash storage) is just awful.
The iPod uses some pretty aggressive power saving mechanism that spins down the hard drive fairly often. While this is great for battery life, this also means that when I hit the next button, there’s a delay of sometimes one up to sometimes four seconds before the track changes, and even then, the album artwork takes a couple extra seconds to refresh. This is a lousy user experience. The Nano changes songs without skipping a beat, so I’d like to see them move to flash storage across all platforms.
Pecha-Kucha
Dan Pink in Wired this month has a nice little piece on Pecha-Kucha, a movement that’s half art, half efficiency in which presenters can only use 20 slides at 20 seconds a piece. As Dan appropriately puts it, “Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down”. This is a response to the innumerable amount of dull, drab, and torturous PowerPoint presentations (likely set in the default template) any cubicle-dweller has likely had to endure.
This whole thing is similar to Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule in making a sales pitch — 10 slides, 20 seconds each, with 30-point font. If 30 is too big for your liking, Kawasaki suggests “find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.” Above, Dan put together an example of Pecha-Kucha, where he goes into the emotional intelligence of signs, and how they can connect with people to get their message across effectively.
Words of Clarke
Here’s another quote I’m fond of that I discovered in this month’s dwell magazine, surprisingly enough as part of an ad. The origin of this quote is Arthur C. Clarke, but author Larry Niven later claimed the inverse in reference to sci-fi, “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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