Compelling idea for moving files from Mac to iPhone | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “There’s iCloud, Dropbox and a host of other services to help us tranfer these files, but there are no solutions as elegant as the concept devised by interaction designer Ishac Bertran.”

(Via. TUAW)

Elegant? I’d say this is anything but elegant. For starters, how is manually holding a phone in one hand while pinching and dragging with the other on a vertical screen more elegant than iCloud automatically syncing the files with no user interaction whatsoever?

Even Palm solved this problem already much more elegantly with the “bump” feature on the WebOS tablet a few years ago. You see a file on the tablet you want on your phone, or vice versa? Just bump the devices together on the side of the screen, and the file transfers.

But again, even that isn’t as simple as putting your files in iCloud, where they will simply be available on all devices at all times. Make an update on your phone, your laptop will have it in a few seconds. Make a change on your laptop, and the phone will have it in a few seconds.

I realize that Apple is just getting started with iCloud, and that they haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but they’ve clearly demonstrated that this is the plan for the future. There will be no need for the user to ever “sync” anything, because synchronization will be constant and automatic.

Why you’d try and solve this problem when it’s already been solved is beyond me.

Familiar is not a design:

Quasar was not designed, but rather only implemented. It’s the classic outcome of closed, engineer-based thinking.

(Via Matt Legend Gemmell)

Matt Gemmell sums up my thoughts on Quasar perfectly. The iPad doesn’t present multiple apps on screen at once for a reason, and that reason isn’t because of some hardware limitation, or because Apple wanted to “dumb it down” for users. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision. Apple designed the iPad that way, and I believe it’s a better device for it. You can argue that other systems like Windows Metro or Palm’s Web OS handle this sort of thing better, but you can’t just haphazardly let people fall back into their worst desktop habits and call it an improvement.

10 Years of Touts:

A collection of little rotating “tout” graphics we had at the top of the old site.

The oldest modification date? 2002 — 10 years ago.

Through these touts, you can basically see everything we’ve done over the last 10 years. The passage of time generally freaks me out, so it’s a little overwhelming for me to see these all in one place, but it’s also kind of nice and comforting to see that, man, we’ve done a lot of stuff.

(Via Panic Blog)

Not a bad-looking graphic in the whole bunch. It says a lot when you can go 10 years and nothing you do looks dated.

CNET: Why has Forrester’s CEO become an Apple doomsayer?:

With so much of the management and design team being people who were there under Jobs, they retain a lot of the good aspects of that era—and while Jobs was undoubtedly a huge direct influence as a tastemaker, there’s a case to be made that having a CEO who employees arenot terrified of being trapped in an elevator with is, in the long run, a good thing.

(Via Coyote Tracks)

This is a brave assertion, but I have to agree. The only thing about Tim Cook that will need to play out over time is his sense of vision. Will he see the next big thing when the time comes? So far, we have no evidence that he’ll be able to match Jobs’ sense of that. But we have no evidence that he won’t be able to, either.

As far as running the company goes, he’s going to be just fine. And no one else would do it better.

The biggest thing Apple has to watch out for now is its own sense of complacency. Once you’re the top dog, and Apple is certainly going to be top dog for at least the next half decade, you become your own worst enemy. I think Tim Cook knows this well. Forget the competition, focus on what makes you great, and resist the urge to own every market, even when those markets make no sense.

Adam Lisagor’s AeroPress Tribute:

This is a short tribute to my Aeropress. Two years ago, one was given to me, and it changed everything.

For a little more than $20, this marvel of science will produce arguably the best cup of coffee you’ve ever made in your home. It makes no sense.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

The only part of this I can’t approve is the use of a metal kettle. Don’t ever let your hot water touch metal, man. Glass is the only way to go.