Shawn Blanc

There are far cheaper ways to make crappy coffee while camping.

Nope.

If you’ve got 60 seconds I would very much appreciate it if you filled out this survey and tell me about what application launcher you use (or don’t use).

Sean Sperte’s take on Adobe Muse:

If Adobe really wants to help print designers break into the web, they need to focus their efforts on actually teaching print designers how to design for the web — which requires knowing code.

He calls it a step in the wrong direction.

A free, weekly email newsletter from Tory Briggs that’s aimed at nerds. It’s basically a list of cool stuff that happened during the past week related to design, development, photography, and other nerdery. I’ve been getting it since it debuted about a month ago and find something worthwhile in it every Sunday.

“We welcome Google’s commitment to defending Android and its partners.”

Speaking of misunderstanding yet trying to emulate the success of others, here is Seth Godin on the matter:

It’s not enough to be aware of the domain you’re working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.

Kyle Baxter:

We can’t make superficial analysis of other people’s success and expect to have their success, too. It won’t happen. You’ll fail every time. You have to understand the deeper reasons for it—market trends they’re taking advantage of, changes in society, their deeper strategy. And then you have to go beyond what they’ve accomplished, because there’s no point in merely reaching parity with your competitors. While you’re busy getting to where they are now, they’ll move even farther forward, and you’ll be perpetually chasing their taillights.

Okay, so this is a fantastic visual. I think it explains so well why so many of us love our creative professions. I know for me, regardless of the project (writing, designing, planning) I love taking a big jumbled mess of ideas and problems, sorting through them, making sense of it all and then running with it to produce something fine.

Horace Dediu on Google’s acquisition of Motorola, and the unintended consequences that will come from what is now a classic channel conflict.

In short, when the supplier of a license is also a competitor of others who use that license, then the other competitors get uncomfortable.

HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorlola all license Android for use in their handsets. Now, part of the competition (Motorola) is owned by the company that everyone licenses from (Google).

Fortunately for HTC, Samsung, LG, and Sony, Google promises that “Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open”, and that they “will run Motorola as a separate business.”

For one, I don’t think too many people believe that Google will leave Motorola as a separate business and solely use its patents as a defense against Microsoft and Apple. And secondly, if Google were to leave Motorola as a separate business then it would be a massively missed opportunity for Google.

Smart piece from Ben Brooks on the naive and ironic (or hypocritical) differences between Google’s actions and their words.

Also, in an aside, Ben hits on another byproduct of the acquisition: modems:

Motorola has long made the best modems a consumer can buy for their home DSL/Cable connections — Google now owns that. That prospect scares me as the last thing I want is a party with a vested interest in what, where, and how I browse the Internet to be standing between me and the Internet. Google is now that party — of course they may never leverage it, but do you really believe that?

A generous piece from Andy Ihnatko:

The only way to firmly define Google as a top-tier maker of a mobile OS, as opposed to just another company that cranks out toasters, is to take control over Android and enforce the sort of vision which allows the platform to move forward. Sometimes, you can’t let a market keep building faster and faster horses. You have to start selling cars.