"There are objects that are timeless in design. You can’t improve much upon simple tools like a spoon or a compass. Brands can do this too—Dieter Rams designs for Braun fit in almost any decade and it is hard to imagine much by Muji looking dated. But a digital device is not an alarm clock or a shelving unit. It will grow obsolete very quickly. Which makes the atemporal look of electronics by Apple more uncanny, more rarefied. The personal computer as Holly Golightly's little black dress... The iPhone in particular seems born out of years of science fiction fantasies of handheld gadgets with boundless capabilities. It appears to have arrived not from China, but from just a few years ahead of time. A little piece of the future we were lucky enough to receive early... There are two prevailing science fictional design aesthetics. One is a worn, rusty, lived-in-looking future. It is the junkyards in Philip K Dick novels and the dust collecting on Star Wars flight control interfaces. Then, there’s the world of tomorrow imagined as a sterile place of white and translucent surfaces... A willingness to try Apple products at all suggests appreciation for, if not commitment to its value of simplicity over ornamentation. Design asceticism was a way of life for the company’s founder... To return the favor, some Apple consumers practice a kind of Western interpretation of Shintoism, valuing and caring for the products as if they were living creatures. They respect the objects — their painstaking craftsmanship, and the promise of a better, less dirty, less vapid world —by keeping them in just-unboxed condition."

"In considering the contemporary design world, I identified three categories of popular practice that seem largely uncriticized (...)

The first is living legends: the power of excellence. If you do beautiful work for more than 20 years, indeed, why should anyone take notice of a few lesser projects? In this category I would put Vignelli himself, along with Chermayeff & Geismar, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and organizations like the Museum of Modern Art and Oxo. They are our collective influence, which makes it difficult to stand apart from them and critique. Their best work is already in the books, so their worst work is immediately dropped from the historic record, or assimilated into the narrative as a stepping-stone on the way to more success. (...)

A second category is those too good to be criticized: the power of intentions. When the work in question is meant to improve lives, save the environment, or even just educate, who are we as critics sitting in our comfy ergonomic desk chairs to criticize? (...)

The last category of the uncriticized is perhaps the newest: the power of happy. I speak mostly of the bloggers, those too helpful, too tasteful, and too relentlessly positive to be critiqued. There are two versions of this: the ostensibly neutral online magazine, like Dezeen and Fast Company’s Co. Design blog, and the more personal design blog."

"They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’, but in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
"They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them."
"Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?"

How to use the iWebKit free framework to create web applications that behave like iOS native applications.

Good overview of the steps your web application needs to perform in order to behave like a native iOS application:
* strip away the browser chrome (the url bar and button bar);
* prevent viewport scrolling and scaling;
* respond to multi-touch and gesture events;
* use webkit CSS to get the iPhone OS look and feel;
* cache the app so it runs without internet access;
* get a custom icon on the home screen; and
* have a splash screen load at the start.

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”

"Looked at from this angle, the iPad isn't so much new technology as it is a shiny, pretty doorway to a mall where you can buy everything from books to movies. The iPad hasn't brought us forward into the future. It's taken us backward to a world of strip malls and televisions."

"A wise man once said 'We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.' With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around. Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate."