Type Cast

Was the guest of one of our recruitment agencies on Tuesday night at the Design Week Awards. Very nice of them to invite me and all that but one thing hacked me off slightly.

The host, Michael McIntyre, was very funny BTW. Pitched it perfectly to his audience which is more than can be said for the apparent ‘dieing on his arse’ of Jimmy Carr at the Creative Circle, as can be read in some of the comments on this post from Scamp.

What I really want to comment on is the lack of digital awards. I know Design Week need to cover a wide spectrum of work from the creative industries but to have just two awards, ‘Information’ and ‘Commercial’ in this space is selling it really bloody short. Especially, considering that Packaging gets two awards ‘Own Brand’ and ‘Branded’. Environmental gets six! Wayfinding, Retail, Workplace, Exhibition, Hospitality, Museum, Galleries and Visitor Attractions. What about, digital direct marketing, community, editorial, innovation and a whole load of others.

On top of this, Apple won three awards. Now, Apple are doing some amazing things with user interface, interaction design, product design and generally being all-round shit hot. But to put them in the mix alongside agencies which may consist of half a dozen people doing some stunning work with a £50k budget seems a little mis-matched. And wasn’t that work done in Apple’s Cupertino headquarters? But then the entry requirements don’t state that the work has to be done by UK-based agencies. I don’t like ranting about stuff like this because it just sounds like I’m jealous / bitter / feel hard done by* (delete as applicable). Honestly, I’ve never been an awards chaser, I just like them to happen on their own.

OK, rant over. I guess I’ll just have to get the Pantones out, enter next year and maybe go up against the mighty Apple!

I’ve just downloaded and installed the extra applications for the iPod Touch, launched at the Apple Keynote on Tuesday this week.

I know there’s a load of rumblings about having to pay for them. The whole thing does smack a little of Apple biting the hand of their early adopters. You would have thought they’d learnt their lesson after the iPhone price reduction scandal.

Having just experienced the customisable home screen with the jiggling icons and the fact that I now have mail, however, all I can say is that it’s a triumph of elegant, intuitive interaction design and I’m just going to ignore the particular line item on my bank statement. Denial and one click purchasing on the iTunes store is the only way.

Apple should start to learn some lessons and tread a careful path in this area in the future though.

Well, the speculation was true. Apple have today announced the MacBook Air.

I must admit it looks like an exercise in packaging, as with all Apple products. One thing to point out is that the ‘real’ images on the Apple site look loads better than the camera phone shots on the streaming news feeds from the actual Keynote address.

Things I like about it. Well, the size for a start. I use a 15″ MacBook Pro at work and having one at home seems like overkill for my domestic Flickr, iPhoto, iTunes and Safari activities. Especially as pretty much all of my home mac use is literally laptop-based. The ability to connect to another machine’s optical drive will save £65 by not having to purchase the separate drive. Let’s face it, I rarely insert CDs or DVDs into my machine at home, preferring a portable hard drive for storage and for the rare occasions when I install software, doing it wirelessly will be fine. The development of the track pad to include more sophisticated gestures akin to the iPhone and iPod Touch is a nice development.

What I’m not so sure about, however, is the price point. The entry level model seems to sit awkwardly, hovering £100 below the base MacBook Pro which is faster, can drive a bigger external display, has a larger hard drive, upgradeable memory, removable battery etc etc. The 1.8 GHz model is £229 more expensive than a 17″ MacBook Pro! Looking at the options, that solid state memory is over 600 quid! I know producing something on that size is expensive but this might end up being a repeat of the days when users were confused as to whether to get a 14″ G4 iBook or a 12″ G4 PowerBook. Didn’t take long for Apple to kill the 12″ pro-level machine.

I don’t know, what I’m pretty sure of though is that this will suck loads of mac fans in and probably points to the future of their laptop development in the omission of the optical drive and a reliance on faster wireless networks for reading and writing files. Remember what people said with the first iMac omitting the floppy drive? And look where we are now!

Suffice to say, mine’s on pre-order! The base-spec one if you were wondering.