Work & Life - Some Web site founders have been surprised that their products are better suited to cellphones.
Work & Life - Google unveiled a marketplace of business software to help to spur the adoption of its own suite of productivity applications.
Work & Life - Slate editor Julia Turner explains why American exit signs need to be shown the door. Over at Slate, in her epic six-part series on wayfinding, deputy editor Julia Turner explains the exit sign: designed to stand out, but ignored by designers--at least in the U.S.--for 75 years. In America, we have the commanding, red EXIT, standardized in the '30s and '40s. But most everywhere else, it's the ISO standard: a green man bounding out the door, developed in the late '70s by the Japanese designer Yukio Ota. It's called, unsurprisingly, the running man, and its advocates say it's more legible (wordless and green, not red, which means "stop" not "run away"). But still we stick with the red letters. Why? Well, mainly because we couldn't think of anything better, Turner says. The only alternative she cites was developed for the AIGA's symbol set for DOT (right) but it never caught on, for obvious reasons. Still, there might be hope. In his new pictograph system for MTA, being ted at the Jamaica station, Mies Hora is splitting the difference, using a green-lettered EXIT and the running man. Maybe it'll wean us off the red menace altogether. (By the way, hear Turner talk about the graphic design horror that is Penn Station on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show. It's not the
Work & Life - Our daily roundup of Web gems includes a deeper look at Barbie the engineer, Carly Fiorina's tenure at Hewlett-Packard, Jonathan Schwartz's battles with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a pricing glitch at Amazon.com.
Work & Life - Two of the world's computing powerhouses have started a war of words around their forthcoming tablet computers.
Work & Life - Charles Thacker, the lead designer on the Alto, the Xerox PARC prototype of the modern personal computer, won the Turing Award.
Work & Life - Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, has stepped up to defend Google (in a roundabout way, via HTC) from the patent attacks recently levelled by Apple. If you want to be truly disturbed at how virulent the patent litigation scene is in the tech world, read on.Sun, which is perhaps b known for its creation of Java, OpenOffice, and its development of the UNIX core, apparently suffered a threat of patent litigation directly from Steve Jobs back in 2003. Schwartz explains that in the tech world, patents are used not just as defenses against intellectual property theft, but as offensive weapons that can eliminate competition if levelled correctly. In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass, Steve [Jobs] called my office to let me know the graphical effects were "stepping all over Apple’s IP." (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it,"I’ll just sue you."Schwartz managed to convince Jobs not to bother suing, as Sun held patents on several aspects of UNIX, on which Mac OS is built, that could be used to great effect in a countersuit. "Steve was silent," Schwartz writes.He even describes a similar instance to the altercation with Steve Jobs, in
Work & Life - The social networking site plans to roll out features next month that will give its 400 million users the option of sharing their location with friends as part of their news feeds.
Work & Life - Cisco has unveiled its biggest routing system to date, one that the company says is capable of linking everyone in China on a video call.
Work & Life - Foursquare, a location-based social network, is rolling out new tools that will give businesses more information about their customers and allow them to target special offers.
Work & Life - With its Translator Toolkit, Google hopes to teach its translation system to understand minority languages, like Maori.