Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

News came across the wire that Apple Inc.’s co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs has passed on after a long battle with cancer.

Exceptional brilliance has left us. No matter what you thought of Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, you have to admit that he was one of the most dynamic, passionate and brilliant people in technology, and dare I say, the world. He’s one of the most successful CEOs in the last century. His vision has changed the way we do a lit of things dealing with technology. True, Apple didn’t invent a lot of the things that makes Apple poplar today, but it was Steve’s vision that made things that were easy to use for “normal” people. He always looked at how to make things work easiest for the largest number of people. The lowest common denominator, if you will. Steve had a way of knowing what would appeal to people.

One of Steve’s best quotes was from his 2005 Stanford commencement address: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The tech world will never be the same. We will likely never see his like again.

Rest in peace, Steve. You’ll be missed.

For the record, I like the instant streaming on Netflix. I had no problem paying for the streaming and the DVD delivery that Netflix was going to force upon subscribers.

Until today.

By now, most people have heard the Netflix-Qwikster news. The second I read the news, I promptly brought up netflix.com and removed the DVD option from my account. I then found the Netflix DVD that I’ve had for like 4 months and sealed up the envelope. (For the curious, it was Disc 1 of the anime series, Gurren Lagann. Which, by the way, I didn’t need anymore cause it’s on the instant streaming list.) It’s on its merry way back to the nearest Netflix facility.

The concept of “Okay, we see that you all are rather pissed off about our price hike so we’ll help that by splitting up the company and still charging you the higher price, but we’ll split the price on you credit card since they companies will be different.” is a really bad position when your a consumer looking at this. Especially if you’re one that has been paying for both streaming and the DVD plan.

Split the company and still charge us the higher price. That makes everything better, right?

If that kind of a response was an apology, Netflix needs to look up the definition of “apology.” That’s a pretty sad conclusion that Netflix came to. The response Netfilx CEO Reed Hastings gave didn’t offer a solution to consumers. It’s just a backtracked, irrational justification for a big mistake that should have been handled better the first time around.

That said, in the end, this is probably going to be a good thing for Netflix. The DVD side of the business is falling. With more and more stuff going to to the streaming service, the DVD side of the Netflix business is going to keep declining.

According to a 2010 post by GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler, Netflix spent $66 million in the second quarter of 2010 to license streaming titles for its Watch Instantly service, compared with $9 million in the prior-year period. In comparison, Netflix spent $24 million on DVDs in Q2 of 2010, compared to $43 million during the second quarter of 2009. The numbers don’t lie. Not that it’s a very hard thing to fathom. The costs of streaming is much less than the DVD shipping.

We now will get to see another round of fallout from the Netflix price hikes. Will the users of both Netflix streaming and Qwikster DVD delivery be satisfied with the new direction? We’ll have to watch and see where this one goes.

The news came out today that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit in the Federal court in Washington, D.C., to attempt to block the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.

“Any way you look at this transaction, it is anticompetitive,” says Sharis Pozen, an acting assistant attorney general. “Our action today seeks to ensure that our nation enjoys the competitive wireless industry it deserves.”

This kind of stuff is always fun. The only problem I see with the Department of Justice trying to block the merger is that if AT&T doesn’t get T-Mobile, one of the other carriers will. As anyone that has been paying attention to this knows, Sprint wants it blocked so they can buy T-Mobile. If Sprint doesn’t get them, someone else will go after them. The argument can be good, but using the preservation of competition as the reason is rather flawed. If they deny AT&T the option to merge with T-Mobile, using their same argument, none of the other big wireless companies, Sprint or Verizon, should be able to merge with them. If they were to allow either of the other two, that, by the DoJ’s own definition, would be anticompetitive.

Of course, Sprint hailed this as the best decision ever. “The DOJ today delivered a decisive victory for consumers, competition and our country,” said Vonya McCann, Sprint’s senior vice president of government affairs. “By filing suit to block AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile, the DOJ has put consumers’ interests first… Contrary to AT&T’s assertions, today’s action will preserve American jobs, strengthen the American economy, and encourage innovation.”

I doubt that Sprint would be praising the DoJ if they said, “Yeah, AT&T merging with T-Mobile is anticompetitive. Oh, and if Sprint or Verizon try to do it, that would be anticompetitive too.” Sprint thinks that if they block AT&T, that they will have smooth sailing to picking up some of that T-Mobile pink. I just don’t see that happening.

The thing that makes this worse is that T-Mobile can’t compete if they keep going it alone. They need to be bought by someone, but it just ends up being potentially bad for the world if they do. It’s a sad thing to admit, but the only logical company to buy them is AT&T. Any of the other major players would have to spend a ton of time and funds to integrate GSM into their current technology.

I was with Nextel when Sprint bought them back in 2005. I stayed away from Sprint after my initial flirtation with them because all I ever had was bad billing situations. Great phone service, but horrible billing problems. As a customer, the Sprint-Nextel merger killed Nextel and the functionality that it had with its Push-To-Talk option. Then, forcing the Nextel customers off the iDEN network to Sprint’s CDMA network just created a mess. At least AT&T is on the same network and there would be less pain involved with a merging of technology.

Ultimately, I don’t think that anything here is going to stop the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile. Even if the DoJ is successful in stopping it now, there’s nothing to say that the merger won’t be tweaked until it does go through. Really, all this does is spend more money on something that will end up being a money pit for the taxpayers and won’t create any real action beyond slowing things down.

Is it bad that the best and worst company to buy T-Mobile is AT&T? It’s hard to tell. Is Sprint a better option? Not likely, cause with past experience, we’ve all seen where that will go. All we can do now is see where this all leads. In the end though, I think we’ll be seeing the pink, blue and orange come together. Whether it’s good for us all or not.

As a designer, I have thousands of fonts floating around on my computers. It’s hard to keep track of them, let alone remember how each one looks. There are times when you see something and you KNOW you have the font, but you can’t place the name of the typeface.

I had one of these situations yesterday. A client gave me a text “logo” that we needed for a print piece, but as tends to happen sometimes, the client didn’t have the logo in any format that could be used for a print design. I know I had seen the fonts on the logo, but I didn’t know which ones they were. I looked through my standard set of fonts an couldn’t find them anywhere.

In comes a handy little iPhone app called WhatTheFont, from typeface foundry Bitstream. WhatTheFont is designed so you can see a font on something, in this case, it was from a low resolution JPEG file that was used on the client’s website, and have the app use Bitstream’s extensive font database to identify fonts that are similar to the text you are looking at. After doing a bit of clean-up work in Photoshop, I took a picture of the text I wanted identified with my iPhone’s camera. From there, you draw a box around the text you want the app to identify and the app will upload the image to Bitstream’s site and then spit back a set of possible fonts. It’s a pretty straight forward process. I had two unidentifiable fonts in this logo and WhatTheFont identified them both perfectly. If it’s an obscure font, it can be difficult to identify, but overall, it does a really good job making a match.

Right now, I’ve only been able to find an iPhone app for WhatTheFont. If you don’t have an iPhone, Bitstream does have a web-enabled version of the service on their MyFonts site. Of the two, I love the iPhone app since I find it to be much easier to use and it’s portable. With the ability to just take a photo with your phone’s camera wherever I am and process on the fly, it’s much simpler than having to save an image onto your hard drive of the font you want to identify. The web version does have the ability to identify an image on the Internet as well by just plugging in an image URL into the form and it can match off that as well. Either way, this can be a valuable tool in any designer’s toolbox.

The app is available for free on the iTunes App Store and can be accessed on the web for free as well.

More info about the iPhone app:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8

MyFont’s WhatTheFont for iPhone page:
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/iPhone/

MyFont’s WhatTheFont web page:
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

RELATED IMAGES

442 King St., Charleston, South Carolina. That’s the location of what looks like some exceptionally tasty cuisine. That’s where you will find Fish. From their website: “Fish Restaurant showcases the finest local, sustainable ingredients with an always-changing menu and a French-Asian flair. Executive chef Nico Romo, the youngest chef to ever earn the distinction of Master Chef of France, blends his skills at creating classic French fare with a zesty Asian-inspired artisan touch, resulting in fresh and flavorful dishes that engage and inspire.” Excellent pedigree for a chef and some tasty food. But, this IS about the design of the site, so I digress.

The site is very clean and elegant. At first glance, it looks like the site could be made in Flash, but upon inspection, it’s all just HTML and some nice jQuery calls. The transitions and rollovers are slick and the design of the elements have an airy kind of feeling to them. Light colors, translucent whites, lots of overlayed items. Lots of transparent PNG files. It’s a great combination of jQuery transitions and simple design.

To check out the site (or learn how to find the restaurant if you’re in Charleston), head over to http://www.fishrestaurantcharleston.com/.

There are a few things that I really love in this world. Music is one of them. And so as I was roaming the halls of the Internet this week, I came across this week’s site, Atlantic Records.

To be honest, I haven’t thought about record companies really since I lived in southern California, so when I came across Atlantic’s site, it was interesting to see some things that I had forgotten. (Like the fact that Phil Collins is with Atlantic. Big Phil fan in the 80s and 90s. Just had forgotten which label he was on.) The site is set up like a magazine, with little snippets of things, lots of white space, and nice sized images that give it a simple, classy feeling. Kind of a throwback to the earlier days of Atlantic. There are the usual things that you’d expect on a record label’s site, artist information, tour dates, lots of photos. Then there are some of the retro things like a historical look back at the earlier days of Atlantic. Old school ads. Vintage photos. Quotes from some the music’s greats. There’s a treasure trove of information about some the best musical artists in history and it’s all over the site, tucked into nice little nooks all over the place.

The “footer” is nice too. It’s on most every page and gives you a way to get to the Atlantic Merchandising page and then will do some location grabbing and give you shows by Atlantic artists that will be coming to your area soon. Great stuff.

For those who like music or just want to see some good, clean design, take a trip over to the Atlantic Records and enjoy!

I like to take photos. I dare say that most people do. While very few of us count ourselves in the “Professional Photographer” camp, there’s something about being able to freeze a moment in time. And it’s something that has become significantly easier with the advent of the cell phone camera.

Being the iPhone 4 user that I am, there are a lot of great iPhone and iPod touch photo apps out there. Today, we’ll take a look at one of the hot ones at the moment, Instagram.

The idea for Instagram came from the mashing of the love for “instant” photography and the concept of telegrams being sent “over the wire” (or Internet as the case may be). What you get is a stream of photos that come from all over. They can be from your friends, your co-workers, or even perfect strangers. Once you download the app (which is free, by the way), you’re well on your way. How this all works is you can either take a photo with the Instagram app or select an image from your Photo Library and then, inside the app, you can add one of the filters to your photo or leave it untouched. There are a nice set of filters that are included with the app to help transform what could be a generically okay photo and help it look a bit more professionally processed. Once you filter (or not), then you add some info about the photo, some tags like on Twitter, and you’re done. Right now, when you post a photo, you can share individual photos on Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. If you specify a location with your photo, you can tell the app to check you in on Foursquare.

Overall, the app is very simple and easy to use. The interface is very minimalistic and clean. The only place in the app that seems a bit off compared to the rest of the interface is the camera screen. It seems to almost be something that was an afterthought when the interface was designed. It’s simple and usable, but design-wise, it looks like a disconnect from the rest of the app. Some of the text links and buttons are a bit on the small side, but are still usable. You may have to try to tap some things a couple of times, but it’s not anything that should cause you to stop using the app. It’s just too much fun to see all the other photos that people post and all the other ways that you can post and filter your photos.

The app is free and available from the iTunes App Store.

You can catch my Instagram stream with my username, @tekitsune.

RELATED IMAGES

INSTAGRAM FILTERS

It’s been quite a while, so I figured that a good way to get back into posting things is to find a great Site of the Week. In our first time out for our return to posting is an agency in Toronto called Grip Limited.

Interesting navigation. Overall, the site can seem a bit cluttered based on the concept of the design, but because of the complex nature of the site, it becomes more of an adventure for the viewer. There is a TON of information. (Like the line “Sill, it’s got to be reassuring to know that as part of the interview process we now ask candidates if they’ve ever raised champion livestock.” Poor livestock.) The design of the site is set up in columns, with the text in a carnival poster style using modern typefaces. Bold use black and orange is used throughout the site. While the site seems to go on forever (and is you move to the right, it DOES seem to go on FOREVER!), it’s fun to see what could be hanging off the edge of the page, including the columns and columns of their portfolio work.

The only drawback that I can see with the site is that it was produced in Flash. With all the potential with HTML5 today, there’s little need with how this was designed to be using Flash. But, that small thing aside, it’s a fun site that you can lose yourself in hours of searching, reading and playing.

To see all the insanity, point your browser to www.griplimited.com.

I guess it was bound to happen.

Apple released a statement today saying that there are some changes coming to the Developer Agreement for iOS Developers. Back in April, Apple had changed the agreement to only allow certain kinds of programming languages to be used for the creation of apps using the official Apple iOS APIs. Apple removed the extra words it had added to section 3.3.1 of the license that had blocked the Flash-derived apps. The verbage from the April change was as follows: “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs [application programming interfaces] through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).” That urked a bunch of developers, but really tweaked Adobe. That turned into the squabble that we all saw over the last few month. WIth the announcement today, it seems that most (if not all) of that is now over. Now we’ll see if Adobe’s AIR® Packager for iPhone project gets resurrected.

As someone that’s looking to go into iOS app development at some point in the (hopefully) near future, this is mostly a good thing. Now, I firmly believe that Flash is not something that should be used for things like websites and video. If you haven’t read Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” piece, it’s a good read. Steve makes some good, exceptionally valid points in there. Flash hasn’t proved to be a viable solution in the mobile space. If Adobe were to fix the problems with Flash, it would be a different story, but we’re still waiting there. There are much better ways to do things like web navigation and video on the Internet. Sure, Flash is an easy solutions for things like that, but just because it’s easy doesn’t make it right. Now, apps and multimedia stuff though? Yeah, Flash is a good thing there. The only downfall I can see there is that the user experience on the various iDevices can be lost with poorly planned Flash apps. Apple takes great pride in the fact that they user experience is very important. Apple’s customers expect certain things and a great user experience is one of them. I hope that people that will use Flash to develop iOS apps will take the time to do them right.

Now if you can just get clients and customers to believe that Flash development isn’t just “click, click, done!” Ah, the pain goes ever on.

In semi-related news, Apple also announced that it was going to publish the criteria that it uses for approving apps for the App Store. When that gets online, that should be an interesting read. For more info on all this, take a look at the press release from Apple.

There’s been a lot of talk about a new social media app for the iPad over the last few weeks. It’s great little app called Flipboard. The aim of the app is to take feeds from various news-related sites and your personal Twitter and Facebook feeds to create a print magazine-like presentation for the topics that you care most about. Since Flipboard made it’s public debut on July 21, it’s been exceptionally swamped by iPad users that want to get a glimpse of the slick presentation that Flipboard gives you. I admit, I’ve been waiting for my email address to be given the green light to add my Facebook and Twitter feeds to the setup before I wrote up a review. I got my notification today, so I’ve been doing some poking around to see how things work.

I have to say that the app is really beautifully designed. The app launches with a nice pictorial view of a variety of possible “stories” from people that are in your feeds and from places that are pre-populated by Flipboard. Once on the Contents page, you can customize your screen to follow a variety of different topics and writers from pre-populated sources or you can search Twitter or Facebook for your favorite people.

It allows you to create a personal social magazine. You can flip through a magazine-style presentation of the things that your friends are posting to Facebook and Twitter, or you can add your favorite Twitter users and lists. You’re able to leave comments and share anything you read in the app. When your click on an article in the page view, you get a box with that specific article. On the article screen, you can also see any tweets that link to the article or post. If you just want to move on to the next article, you can just keep swiping and the next item will come up. Want to go back to your page view, just click on the little “x” in the top corner.

The only nitpick I have so far is that there are some connection problems occasionally with the Twitter and Facebook feeds. You’ll launch the app and you’ll get a “No Content” error on one or both of the boxes there. A lot of times that will go away if you close the app and relaunch, but it’s just a minor frustration. I suspect that it’s just a small connection problem with all the people out there trying to get this working.

The only other thing that I can see that could be a potential problem for Flipboard is the question of “Is Flipboard legal?” There have been a few place around the web that have tackled the topic, like Gizmodo and Wired, and I can understand both sides of the argument. Flipboard is using technology like the Reader function in Apple’s Safari browser to cache the content to Flipboard’s servers. Based on comments from Flipboard’s Co-founder Evan Doll, they are trying to be careful to not pull whole articles into Flipboard. Stories that come into the viewer are just little snippets of things and you can click on the “Read on Web” and get the full article. Tech pundits are wondering if the “content scraping” of non-affiliated sites is going to lead Flipboard to a copyright issue. How that will play out, we’ll have to just watch and see how that ends.

All that aside, Flipboard is a very slick app. It’s nice to see some out-of-the-box thinking with an app. If you have an iPad and your in to social media, Flipboard is a great app to have. The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on the iPad. Check it out!

RELATED IMAGES