Starck is saying that design is dead.
I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact.Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.”
Whatever. Typical narcissistic boomer sentiment. "I'm getting old and want to retire, so after I'm gone, design is over." I think Starck's view that design equals materiality is the problem with a lot of his design. You can design things so that they don't have to be Earth killers.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Philippe Starck says design is dead
Sunday, March 30, 2008
I'm Pissed at Directv
Know its been a while since I posted last. I've been very, very busy and just haven't had the energy to blog...until now.
Yesterday, I was forced by Directv to take their new DVR as they are cutting off MPEG-2 HD service so my Tivo HD box would no longer work. Readers of this blog know that I did not want to do this and was pissed that they were harassing me to switch. I put it off until the last possible second. But with the cutoff date on Monday, I had to do it this weekend.
I tried to be open minded, but this box is just a piece of shit. Its is much harder to use and I cannot figure out how to do simple things like watch live TV. But the biggest issue I have is season passes. On Tivo, I had 125. That may sound like a lot, but you have different programs in the summer than the winter and then I have 3 kids each with their favorite shows. And there's shows I like and my wife likes. So you can rack up the season passes much faster than you might think. On the Directv box, you are only allowed 50 shows. That's it.
So these idiots forced me to take this box I didn't want and get rid of Tivo which I was happy with all the with promise that I could get more channels with this new box, only to find out that I can't record them. WTF?
I feel like I have been raped. Like there is the house guest in my living room that I don't want who just won't go home. I don't know how long I can put up with this. I may have to switch to cable where at least the FCC has protected my right to have a Tivo.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The true meaning of the SDK
Apple released its SDK for iPhone and iPod Touch on Thursday and it is a pretty big deal. When you look at what the Cocoa Touch platform is capable of, its pretty impressive. Developers will be able to write some pretty impressive apps with all the advanced web, imagining, location, and other APIs available.
Apple has gone about as far as it can with audio and video on the iPod. Now its time to turn it into something else. Their strategy is to attack the 1B unit mobile phone market and become the must have portable device of the next decade. I think it will work. None of their competitors in the mobile phone space have this level of software expertise. They will all tell you that they have their own SDKs and have had for a long time. That's correct, but where are the killer apps? Apple is going to have thousands of sexy, easy to use, extremely powerful network aware applications. As John Doerr said, this is bigger than the PC.
What I am really excited about is games. The most compelling demo was Sega's Super Monkey Ball using the 3-axis accelerometer although the touchscreen demo of the space fighter game was cool too. The iPhone is now a gaming platform on par in terms of capabilities with the DS and even better in several ways. You could really see Apple start to put a hurt on the console guys if they finally get their shit together and do a good job of courting the game developer community.
Apple has a target of 10M iPhones by the end of this year. I think they will hit that. But there are 60M DSes out there. Apple is going to seriously need to get the numbers up to become as economical a platform as Nintendo.
This is very exciting stuff. They iPhone has nowhere to go but up.
