Opinion

Apple with the iTunes, 8.2.1 update blocks non-Apple phones from appearing as an iPod in iTunes. This is a blow most importantly to Palm, because their Palm tre has been advertised to work with iTunes.

Officially Apple did this because they do not test non-Apple products with iTunes, but it's clearly a move to protect the iPhone market. The message is clear. If you want iTunes and iTMS on the go you have to get an Apple device.

I would like to state that Apple does have the legal and most importantly moral right to do this. Just as Microsoft has the right to include IE in Windows. There is nothing wrong with a company protecting and upselling their own products. They can and should do this. There is no obligation from one company to help competing companies. And, on the long term, such protective behavior will benefit everyone.

British foreign Office minister Chris Bryant said that the historic emblem of the red cross risked undermining the work of the humanitarian organization, because of the religious connotations of the cross and crescent symbols currently used by the international body.

It's time for another Graphic Mac Rant. Back in February, I went off on Apple's lack of menu bar customization. Today, just one day after Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), I have a whole new dump truck to unload on you - covering the cry-baby, booger-eating, Apple complainers flooding the interwebs about everything released and announced at WWDC. You can read the rant here.

It seems Apple just can't win with some people!

I think the web will fundamentally change within 2-3 years. The internet came to a point where separation of different tasks will become necessary for organizations to stay competitive.

I think there will be 3 different types of internet companies, which will emerge from existing companies practicing one of these tasks well or from new ones taking advantage of the opportunities created by this new setup.

The first layer of organizations will be content owners, such as news sites, blogs, archives, etc. These are sites that focus on creating and organizing original content. This content will be tagged and put into format that computers can make sense of using technologies of the semantic web concept. They will not be focused on sorting or presenting this data to their viewers. They will be primarily making money on syndicating this original content to the next two layers.

There is much protest going on against Comic Sans, a font created by Microsoft in 1995. Originally it was designed for comic book style talk bubbles containing informational help text. Since that time the typeface has been used in countless contexts from restaurant signage to college exams to medical information.

President Obama unveiled new logos designed by Mode Project. Creative director Steve Juras led designers Aaron Draplin and Chris Glass in the assignment to create two logos, one for projects completed under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and the second for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) team.

I do think Obama's campaign was and still is great. I do appreciate how he puts emphasis on good design. However I'm afraid he's going overboard.

Are we going to have a completely different logo for every government project from now on, each with a completely different look? If it were up to me I would rather create a more formal identity with a family of logos that are different but still belong to the same family and represent the different initiatives of the government. This would help people understand that all of these projects are based on the same ideology and belong under one leadership.

I understand the idea behind the Tiger logo, but I think it fails on two major accounts. First, the orange and black stripes conveys danger, which is not a good association for the subject. Second, it's very informal and lacks authority. You can't take a program with such a logo seriously. It reminds me of the movie Idiocracy where the government becomes part of the commercial enterprise and where brands rule the land.

The ARRA logo is OK, but visually it reminds me of a modern communist era. The crest format with the simple icons (that even the illiterate can understand) of the plant and the cogs, representing the peasants and the industry are just way too soviet. It makes me feel like we're at the beginning of a collectivist dictatorship.

Lord help us! ;)

If you had to decide between 5 new features in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) or let's say a 20% speed increase in all of your application compared to Leopard (OS X 10.5), which one would you choose?

We've been all waiting for Spore, the latest game from the creators of Sims and SimCity for years. When it finally arrived I was glad to see there was a Mac version of it. Being a big fan of simulation games and the theory of evolution in general, I quickly grabbed a copy of it.

The installation was easy, the animations are stunning and the game play is relatively easy to figure out thanks to the in-game hints. The story of the game is really compelling. You need to evolve a microbe to an intelligent species and to develop your character that can conquer the galaxy. The game is divided into 5 distinct stages. Microbial evolution. Conquest of the land. Tribal life. Civilization and finally the space age. You're guiding your same character (or species rather) through all these stages.

There are however fundamental issues with the game if we take a real evolutionary perspective.

I don't hate emoticons in chat, it helps express emotions. Allows for sarcasm and fine tuning of your words. I don't like emoticons in forum topics. I do tend to hate them in email. And they certainly have no place in serious printed documents.

These creepy little icons are like viruses, they infect everything and killing off elaborate written communication. Today even GMail introduced them in their email interface. GMail was the last stronghold against these little parasites of intricate sentences. You don't need to explain yourself in words anymore, just send a series of emoticons and be done.

I can't wait for the day when emoticons will be accepted in contracts and legal documents. One day they will be part of the international alphabet of broken English. One day nothing else will be left, but :)