Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 83

Wildcard and WordPress

Today my colleague Max Bulger announced a new Wildcard plugin for WordPress that effectively publishes the content of your WordPress blog into our native iOS app. I previously did this for Subtraction.com using somewhat manual means (and leveraging the fact that I work at Wildcard), but this new plugin makes the process much more straightforward,…

Where Design Annuals Came From

Over at Print, Steven Heller tells the story of how graphic design annuals, those yearly compilations of the best work in various niches of the profession, came to be. He applies his customarily thorough historical knowledge in tracing the form’s evolution, and dates the prestige that annuals bestowed upon featured designers to as far back…

BrydgeAir Keyboard

I’ve bought my fair share of keyboards for mobile computers—I’m old enough to have purchased one for my Palm V back in the day. Each time I buy one I think that they’ll unleash a new era of on-the-go productivity for me, but that never turns out to be the case. Still, I’m tempted by…

Suggestions for Apple’s 2015

The approach of a new year is a time for optimism. For instance, I’m optimistic that Apple will undertake a number of projects in 2015 that I’ve been hoping they would address for a long, long time, but have repeatedly neglected. These are mostly housekeeping, fixer-upper type projects. They’re unlikely to move the needle on…

Holiday Things

Jerry Seinfeld delivered this stand-up routine on Jimmy Fallon’s Today Show earlier in the week. His bit apparently followed a segment in which members of the studio audience all received brand new televisions; Seinfeld uses that bit of corporate largesse as a jumping off point for some hilarious, incisive ruminations on acquiring and owning things.…

Home Automation, So Far

This fall I started making some decisive home automation improvements to our house—I know there are plenty of others who are much further along this particular curve than I am, but I thought I’d share some brief thoughts on what we’ve done so far. Actually this effort really started earlier this year when I installed…

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Elvis Costello on SNL, 1977

Ancient history: thirty-seven years ago yesterday one of the most electrifying live performances on American network television ever was broadcast. Elvis Costello, making a last minute appearance on Saturday Night Live with his band The Attractions, interrupted his own song “Less Than Zero” and broke into a performance of “Radio Radio.” The former is a…

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Get Info Redesigned

This is a really interesting proposed redesign of OS X’s standard Get Info window by interface design studio Ramotion. It applies a fresh, Yosemite-like coat of paint onto a design that has hardly changed in a decade. It reminds me that each time Apple implements a major overhaul of its desktop operating system’s visual furniture,…

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The Art of Making a Book

This lovely short film documents the process of hand-printing and binding a book. There are ancient looking hammers and hot metal tools and wooden printing presses and guys with beards involved. In truth, it’s a lovely tableau and reveals some techniques that I wasn’t aware of, though the precious lighting and delicate piano music involved…

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On the Road, Illustrated

Illustrator Paul Rogers recently completed illustrating Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”—he made one black and white drawing for each of the novel’s 309 pages. The work is fantastic; it’s lively and bold and improvisational and clever, just like the book itself. Rogers posted the drawings in a series of very tall scrolling blog posts, which…

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