In 1909, Henry Ford said buyers could have any color Model T they wanted, "as long as it's black." One hundred and one years later, Apple, too, seems unable to produce an iPhone 4 in any color but black. Here's why: [This video uses Flash, so Apple iWhatever users click here.] Source: JLE...

01 November, 2010

President Barack Obama has appointed visual data guru Edward Tufte (previously mentioned: here) to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte will advise on such things as the Recovery.gov website, where citizens can punch their zip code into a track-the-money map and see all the recovery projects in their area. Bob Garfield of New York public radio's On The Media interviewed Tufte about the appointment this week (audio embedded below; transcript here). GARFIELD: Tufte has inspired a generation of innovators with his ideas for the efficient, clean and rich presentation of information. He’s a fan of The New York Times website,...

04 April, 2010

[caption id="attachment_2855" align="alignleft" width="320" caption="Kempt Head, Nova Scotia"][/caption]...

30 October, 2009

The CBC Radio iPhone app has finally been updated, and now includes live streams from Halifax (and Fredericton and Saint John, but not Sydney or Charlottetown), and from at least one location in every Canadian time zone. The app allows on-demand access to many good CBC Radio shows, but alas, only to "highlights" of Ideas, whose producers have for some reason been glacially slow to grasp the importance of the Internet's time-shifting potential for this program. Hat tip: Scott Gillard....

09 October, 2009

CBC is awaiting approval from Apple for an update to the terrific CBC Radio iPhone app. The updated version, which should appear on  iTunes soon, will include live streams of CBC stations Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Fredericton, Grand Falls, Moncton, Ottawa, Regina, Saint John, St John's, Thunder Bay, Windsor, and Winnipeg. (Can Sydney be far behind?) The original app (free download here) did not include any streams from the Mountain, Central, or Newfoundland time zones, and only Goose Bay in the Atlantic zone. Stations in the missing locations streamed in Windows Media format, which the app could not handle. As stations switch...

29 September, 2009

This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day. The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp's net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up. Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use...

20 August, 2009

Edward Tufte, the Yale University statistician known to Business Week as "the the Galileo of graphics," and to the New York Times as, "tbe da Vinci of data," explains why the iPhone works so well. The secret lies in the "magnificent and intense" resolution of its screen, and its "brilliant suppression" of content-stealing "computer administrative debris." Moneyquote: Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And, clutter and overload are not an attribute of information; they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design. And...

29 June, 2009