Yesterday Pebble announced the new design of their watch, the Pebble Steel. While I do think it looks nicer than the original (which isn’t saying much), I’m still uninterested.

My disinterest with smart watches like the Pebble (or the Gear, or the MetaWatch, or…) is three-fold:

• For one, I don’t feel the need to be more connected to notifications (if anything, it’s the opposite). The things that the Pebble does best — such as notifying me of an incoming text message or phone call, telling me the outside temperature, etc. — don’t appeal to me.

• And then on the flip side, for things like the Pebbles new apps such as Yelp, why not just use the app on your phone? Is it really that much faster and easier and more convenient to use the little buttons on your watch? I could be wrong here, but if the Pebble needs a smartphone to work (the apps can’t get their data without using the connected phone’s network signal) then what is the advantage of navigating a miniature version of the app on your wrist? Perhaps it’s more polite than pulling out your phone?

• And then, not to mention, the watches themselves just don’t look all that cool or attractive to me.

People are saying that the trend today (and the future?) is wearable computing, and that may be true. But in my mind there is still a long road ahead.

Smart watches, smart glasses, smart bracelets, and smart tie stays (or whatever) need to reach a point where they are simultaneously more useful and friction-free than just using the phone that’s already in our pockets as well as being attractive and cool to wear.

The FitBit and FuelBand are good examples of this. They are subtle and do/did something that our iPhones didn’t: track our steps and movement throughout the day. However, our phones are getting more and more capable every year, and so wearable devices such as the FitBit also need to provide an advantage that our phones won’t make obsolete.

This is a guest post, written by my good friend, Josh Farmer.

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I love films. I love having adventures I’ll never have, seeing worlds I’ll never see, and asking questions I may never have asked on my own.

We’ve been told that it’s the little things that count, and one of the neatest things is when a filmmaker finds a way to express our human experience with little details to which we can relate. Think of them as movie Easter eggs. I’ve collected a few of these delightful details below.

Rise of the Guardians is a movie about holiday personalities joining forces against the evils of disbelief and fear. Santa, Jack Frost, and the Easter Bunny lead the odd pack of good guys. A detail that stuck out to me was how a flower pops up through the asphalt after the Easter Bunny creates a rabbit hole to travel through. We’ve all seen those pesky dandelions in the middle of a parking lot. Now we know how they get there.

Marvel’s Avengers teams up the leads from the last few films as they take on the aliens invading New York. Bruce Banner is goaded to smash a few alien ships with the simple, “Now might be a good time to get angry.” Banner, in a line that harkens back to a tense mid-flight argument with the rest of the team, finally lets us in on his big secret: “I’m always angry.” This tells us more about his real struggles with identity and responsibility than it does his anger itself.

Christopher Nolan’s first major film was a noir mystery and thriller called Following. A brilliant debut by a destined director, the protagonist fancies himself a writer and, by following those he is basing his characters upon, is led into two relationships, some burglaries, a murder, a cover-up, revenge, and much more. His B&E mentor invites him to take whatever he wants from a home, but instructs him to create more of a mess than necessary. That way, he says, the owners know that their most intimate possessions were seen, that their soul hidden in keepsake boxes was viewed in its most brute form — as plain, emotionless facts without context or justification. Against this smash-and-grab backdrop, one clue is said about the way we structure our lives. “I know how long to stay in a home I’ve broken into because they always write their return date on the calendar.” Don’t we all.

(On a side note, Nolan’s directing track record is impeccable: Memento, Following, Insomnia, The Prestige, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception. Watch one of his if you want a guaranteed-good film but don’t want something seasonal.)

Ever notice that the monkey in Disney’s Aladdin only went klepto on items that were red? You will now.

In order to turn his head, the robot boy in Steven Spielberg’s AI used a two-step process. First he moved his eyes to where he wanted to turn, then he rotated his head to where he was looking.

Many Disney-Pixar films have one or more characters from another Disney-Pixar film, usually from the upcoming one rather than the previous.

Epic puts a miniaturized human into a magical woodland. Whenever the fairies’ arrows strike trees, a knot forms in that spot. So next time you see a knot in a piece of wood, tell your kids that magic happened there.

The Matrix was the genre-expanding philosophical sci-fi flick which explained that déjà vu was a software glitch within the world of the Matrix. If you like the possibilities of a Matrix world but have never read the comics or essays that went with the original 1999 release, you should (full list here, via Wayback Machine). This one, called “Goliath”, has great pacing and the feeling of various Matrix glitches occurring within the story.

The Matrix Reloaded continued the storyline with bigger explosions and with more commitment to functioning across the two worlds. It was panned by most critics, as most part-twos are, but it might have been because they missed the point: The monologues and dialogues are where the action’s at. Greek plays function on this same principle. The conversations push you into the next action sequence, but the philosophy of the Matrix world is preeminent. One detail I liked was how vampires and ghosts are just faulty, banished programs going against their orders, trying to stay alive even if that means embarking upon reprobate adventures.

Downton Abbey uses shaky handheld cinematography when the subject is the servants, but steady and composed shots when the wealthy figures take screen time.

Wreck-it Ralph brought early gaming history to the big screen with a great story. They tackled topics such as equality, sexism, racism, bullying, and of course friendship, loyalty, and destiny. The best little detail for me was the spot-on staccato movements of the people in Ralph’s game. Just perfect.

All these are examples of unexpected exceedings — when we are delighted because someone explains our shared human experiences; when we agree that we’ve done or thought something, but assumed we were the only one; when our philosophy is reflected back to us in a way or from a place we didn’t expect; when we came to be entertained but walked away impressed; when the Easter eggs hatched in our hot little hands.

Through delight, these small glimpses connect us emotionally to the art form. As artists, designers, and ones who produce, we serve others well by exploiting (I do mean this in the best way) the ability to delight.

It’s the end of the year and we’re all encountering more lists than we can count. We’re looking back and aggregating then distilling the best ____ of 2013. Videos, articles, apps, magazine covers, you name it. Well, here is my list of the best lists.

• YouTube’s top Trending Videos of 2013: Fact: the fewer of these you recognize, the more productive you were in 2013.

• Pocket’s list of most-shared/saved articles: How many of these saved articles were actually read? (Asking for a friend.)

• Federico Viticci’s Must-Have Apps: 115 apps listed across three articles, with a total cost of $438.38 to outfit your iPad, iPhone, and Mac.

• Kottke’s list of best photo lists: This picture has popped up in more than one of the lists of the year’s best photos.

• Time’s list of 10 best movies: I’ve only seen a few of these, but I concur that Gravity (in IMAX 3D) was the best film of the year. And the BBC answers your nagging question of how long the runway is at the end of Furious 6.

• The Verge’s favorite 50 people of 2013: Their list of who they consider to be this year’s dreamers, informers, noisemakers, entertainers, world changers, old guard, and the next wave.

• Tools and Toys Favorite things: One of the only lists where you’ll find a USB bike lamp, an iPad text editor, and a badger hair shaving brush together.

• The Macworld Eddys: Some great apps here, well-deserving of the Eddy.

• Best movie posters of 2013: A lot of these are great designs, and curiously (or perhaps not so much), almost none of them are for movies of Holywood blockbusters.

• The Sweet Setup’s favorite games: Some of these games aren’t from 2013, but who’s counting?

• My iPad and iPhone app playlists: Somewhere between a comprehensive list of all my “must have” apps, and a concise list of what’s on my Home screens.

• Kottke’s List of the Best book cover lists of 2013: Yes, another Kottke list of lists, but a list of list is decidedly meta, and what’s more meta than listing a list of lists in a list of lists?

• Time’s Year in Pictures: So many magnificent, sober, and fun images from events around the world.