Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 161

"Vintage" Movie Titles for Video Games

Graphic designer Bao Nguyen designed these gorgeous imaginary movie titles for famous video game franchises, in the style of old movies.

Sadly, he's only created three of them so far, but it might be possible to urge him to make more. See the titles in greater detail on Flickr.

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Me On the Road

You've read my blog, now see the road show. In the coming days and weeks, I'll be making a number of appearances, not just in New York, but all across the country: Austin, Minneapolis and San Francisco, too. Here's a roundup of what's happening.

SXSW 2012, Austin TX

First up, of course, is SXSW, starting this weekend. On Saturday night, Mixel will be co-hosting a big bash with our friends at the hotly-tipped startup Cameo and several other mobile companies. In addition to drinks and music, we'll be projecting hundreds of user-made mixels big and bold at the venue, and the whole Mixel staff will be there. Sadly the early response was so tremendous that the party is oversubscribed already, but stay tuned here and on my Twitter feed as we may open it up further that evening.

The next day, Sunday, I'll be giving a solo talk all about Mixel at 12:30 over at the Hyatt Regency campus of the festival. (A free shuttle gets you there.) This is my first big lecture about some of the big ideas that went into Mixel: how we're tackling the challenge of lowering creative inhibition for people from all walks of life, some thoughts on tablets in general, plus a sneak peek at some of what we're planning in the near future. You can get all the details about the talk at the Mixel blog.

Right after that talk, we'll be gathering up all the Mixel users at SXSW and walking a short distance over to Dominican Joe's for the first ever Austin Mixel Meetup. Everyone is free to join us; it's an informal hangout where you can meet members of the team and plenty of other users whom you might know only through the app. Bring your iPad!

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

I'll be in Austin until early Tuesday morning, when I head to Minneapolis for an appearance at the Walker Art Center, one of the country's most prestigious contemporary art and design museums. The folks there were kind enough to invite me to give a lecture on Tuesday evening, a very humbling honor. If you're in the area please pick up a ticket and come on by.

Pratt University, New York, NY

At the end of the month, I'll be appearing closer to home at Pratt Institute, where I'll be giving a talk the evening 27 Mar as part of their Spring 2012 lecture series. I'm very much looking forward to that, as I'll be appearing on stage with Ali Madad of SCTY. (However, I'm a little sad that it will take place on Pratt's Manhattan campus; it's conveniently located on 14th St, but I live very close to the school's Brooklyn campus and really liked the idea of just walking home after the talk. Oh well.)

TYPO 2012, San Francisco, CA

That's pretty much it for March, but in early April I'll be in San Francisco to appear at the first ever Typo International Design Talks conference held in that city. The list of speakers is pretty fantastic, filled both with friends and folks I've been wanting to meet for a long time, so I can't wait. Tickets are still available, so grab one before they sell out.

More to Come

If you can't make it to any of these events, not to worry, I'll be doing several more as the year progresses. We spent most of last year building the foundation for Mixel, and we're busy iterating on the product this year, but part of my job in 2012 is to get in front of as many people as I can to tell them about all the amazing things that the app makes possible. Sooner or later, I'll probably make it to somewhere near you.

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Bound for Anything

Little by little, we're getting to the point where most consumer goods will be customizable. We have a long way to go, but the site Bound for Anything gets us a step closer: they let you customize your own journals and notebooks, meaning you can specify whether the pages are pre-printed with lines, grids, calendars, even storyboard boxes and simple games. Not only that, but you're not limited to one type; the service lets mix and match as many sections as you like, so you can create a notebook that meets your specific criteria. My friend Jared, who first brought Bound for Anything to my attention, ordered one of these and said it was shipped to him in about a week. Find out more here.

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The New New iPad

I didn't talk about hardware at all in my iPad wish list from earlier in the week because none of my complaints about the iPad 2's form factor seemed as pressing as the changes I'd like to see in the software. Now that the third iteration of the device is here (announced just today), with a high definition Retina Display, a much improved camera, and 4G LTE connectivity.

That's all fine and good, and to be sure I will buy one if only out of professional duty. But there's one major hardware change that I now realize that I do really long for: a reduced bezel.

Across all its models, the iPad bezel has had to strike a tricky balance between providing a grabbable area for the user's hands, housing the innards of the device, and aesthetically framing the screen. The original iPad's bezel was thick but excusable, as that version was something entirely new. Its successor was essentially unchanged, but Apple did a beautiful job reducing the depth of the device itself in that model.

Following that trend, I fully expected that in its third revision Apple's designers would turn their attention to the bezel, minimizing it or at least reducing its width by twenty percent or so. Obviously that didn't happen, probably due to the demands of the Retina Display and battery.

The reason I'm focused on this is that, to be frank, I find the iPad to be harder to hold than it should be. The screen size itself is great, but the added girth of the bezel always seems superfluous and even cumbersome when using the device on a crowded subway. I don't want a smaller screen though; If I could keep the existing screen size but just pull in the overall width and height of the device by a few centimeters, it would be a meaningful improvement. Next model, I guess.

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iOS Wish List

By most accounts, it's almost a sure bet that Apple is set to debut the third iteration of the iPad tomorrow. Presumably, there's a new version of iOS in the works too, though if the past is any guide such a thing would probably not be announced at the same time. Still, software features are what I'm really interested in; a Retina display would be a nice addition on the hardware side, but most of the improvements I'd like to see in the iPad would be software-based — and I'm not talking about Siri. Here's a wish list of what I'd like to see.

Family Computer

By now even its skeptics admit that the iPad is something very different from 'just a big iPhone.' To me, that difference is most evident in how the iPad has become the new family computer. I wrote about this previously, referring to to a mode of usage that I call post-personal computing: by and large, people leave these tablets at home, and they tend to share them within their households to an extent that they didn't with laptops or desktops.

If there has ever been a hardware device that could benefit from allowing multiple accounts to access it, this is it. Having made the transition away from tethered synching, it seems logical to me that Apple's next major challenge would be to fully embrace the multi-user paradigm.

This wouldn't be easy, of course, because it would almost certainly demand a rethinking of the multiple account paradigm. Just serving up a different home screen to a different user, the way Mac OS X currently serves up different desktops, would probably be insufficient. iPads are shared spontaneously and in mid-session, so signing in and out of user accounts would be more of an impediment than a help.

Apple could start with a parallel approach to personal data, like contacts, calendars and emails, letting users access what's relevant to them via their own password from within any other user's session. What would be even better would be a way to create a family address book and calendar, something like the one moms have kept in kitchen drawers and on refrigerator doors forever. There's no technological equivalent to that yet, and there really should be.

Going further, such an infrastructure should make it easy to lock certain content within certain apps. Right now, a shared iPad is almost literally an open book to anyone it's shared with. In a family context, this might not seem like such a big security risk, but even trivial secrets — like a list of gift ideas — are worth keeping.

Better Management of Multiple Apple IDs

Actually, where Apple really needs to start is with its clunky Apple ID system, which doesn't yet allow you to merge two accounts that you own, much less two accounts within a family. I've written about this before too, and it continues to be a hindrance that Apple's accounts seem to be permanently isloated from one another. Changing that situation will go a long way towards defusing the complexity of purchases and personal information that plagues so many novice users who have inadvertently created multiple accounts. I've seen that situation so many times, when a user can't recall which account she's bought an app with or signed into a service with, that it seems like one of the most egregious user experience shortcomings in technology today.

In fact, iOS in general desperately needs a comprehensive password management service embedded into the operating system. For my money, they should just acquire the superb and indispensable 1Password and be done with it; there's nothing better on the market.

And while we're talking about acquiring third-party utilities, Apple should also take a look at Smile Software's excellent Text Expander, which turns user-configured abbreviations into full words or even blocks of text. On a device where typing is often uncomfortable at best, having a solution like Text Expander built into the operating system — as a service available to all apps — would be a huge usability improvement.

Those are my big wish list items, but here are a few that are more prosaic.

Screen Dimming

I occassionally suffer from insomnia, and my iPad is a handy way to while away the early morning hours. It's so much more friendly than bringing a laptop to bed, which is what I used to do. But with my partner sleeping next to me, even the device's dimmest screen setting is too bright for the room. A truly bedroom-friendly setting — maybe even half the brightness of the current lowest brightness setting — would be very welcome.

Avatar Management

As we put more and more of our identities online, our visual representations become more and more critical, especially as we present different aspects of our identity to different services and to different sets of users. Apple should make this easier by building into iOS — or iCloud — a Gravatar-like service that lets us swap our preferred pictures in and out at will, and make them available across all our devices.

Message Archival

A nontrivial portion of my life, from texts with friends to photos and video exchanged with my partner, are communicated through SMS and now iMessage. But every once in a while I lose a chunk of that message history for some reason or another. This doesn't seem like it should have to be the case; these messages, whether SMS, MMS or iMessage, should be stored in the cloud so that the full history of my exchanges with anyone are available to me from any device, old or new.

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Shift

A brand new typeface from Jeremy Mickel of MCKL foundry. Pretty gorgeous in all its weights, but I really like the bold and black versions.

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Now available from Village Type.

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The Case of the iPad Cases

With the next major revision to the iPad rumored to be announced as soon as next week, I figure I'd better get any iPad 2-specific posts I've had in the hopper posted quickly. In particular, I've been wanting to write about cases for a while, mostly because it took me nine or ten months to find a case combination that really works for me.

For a long time, I was very disappointed with the Apple Smart Cover, which to me is an example of a fantastic design on paper that in real life fell short of expectations. I always found it fell off its magnetic hinge too easily, and after toting my iPad to and from work for only a few months, its edges quickly became frayed.

But then I came across the iPad 2 Smart Feather from Incipio, a lightweight hardshell case that hugs the back of the iPad. A lot of cases do this, but this was the first I came across that also clasps around the Smart Cover's hinge, securing it tightly.

Neither does it add much in the way of bulk to the device. So little, in fact, that when I recently bought a Logitech Zagg keyboard case, I was happy to discover that the Smart Feather fits comfortably in the Zagg's slot. The Zagg is also designed to let you collapse the iPad on top of the keyboard for carrying them together, a configuration that still mostly works when you have the Smart Feather on the device. It's not a perfect fit, but it does the job.

I've been using all three accessories — Smart Cover, Smart Feather case and Logitech Zagg keyboard — as I've been doing more and more of my 'real work' tasks on the iPad. Having a real keyboard is a huge help, and being able to carry the iPad anywhere without having to handle it too delicately has been a boon too. It all seems to be coming together… just in time for me to buy a new model.

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Integrity and "The Artist"

Shockingly, last night at the Oscars, Hollywood decided to award the Best Picture prize to a film that celebrates Hollywood. Michel Hazanavicius's "The Artist," a heartfelt ode to the silent film-era, is an undeniably charming picture even if it seems unable to resist nudging the audience to constantly wink along with its own cleverness. However, I can't help but point out that as little more than a casual fan of silent movies, "The Artist" still seems like a pale imitation of the original. It is a tribute to silents in the same way that, say, "Happy Days" was a tribute to the 1950s.

Over at The New Yorker, film critic makes a great argument as to why the year's "Best Picture" misses the mark for what it honors. Denby's principal complaint is that the acting in "The Artist" captures very little of the quality of acting that the original silent movie stars employed to make those films come alive in the absence of sound. He writes, "Silent film is another country. They speak another language there — a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty."

Denby believes these characteristics escape the two leads of Hazanavicius' film: "both characters, and both actors, move in a straight line in each scene; they stay within a single mood. The great silent actors did so much more." He elaborates: "In the silents, you have to do something; you can't just be. Silent-film acting drew on the heroic and melodramatic traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theatre… it drew as well on mime, magic shows, and vaudeville… Subtlety was not a high priority in those arts." It was frequently not great acting, but it was always expressive.

I agree with this assessment, though in making his case Denby underrates my biggest complaint about the film: it just didn't look like a true silent movie. Hazanavicius' camera is surprisingly fluid in "The Artist." It jumps back and forth, climbs high and dips low, draws in for surprisingly detailed closeups and pulls out with great agility for wide shots. To me, silents generally felt flatter, and not in a bad way. They made the most of the inflexibility of early camera equipment, using shots that seem static relative to today's unimpeded camera technology, but they were very effectively contrasted with their stars' outsized facial gestures, propeller-like limbs and ability to cut dynamic swaths across the screen. The camera could not be expressive, so the actors were. "The Artist" feels a lot more like a movie that might have come a few decades later, when camera equipment got lighter and more nimble; a movie from the 1940s or 1950s perhaps, except with the sound removed. This, for me, was its worst mistake: in a movie about movies, it could not convince me to suspend my disbelief.

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