David Pogue wrote a post about Worth1000.com’s recent contest that asked contestants to submit fake designs for nonexistent Apple products.

All of these are funny because Apple is so about design. It’s just ripe for parody, in a way that no other company is. (Quick: What would a parody of HP or Gateway designs look like? Ummmm….)

Interesting take. If someone was going to make fun of your company, how would they do it? (And if there’s no answer, is that a sign you’re lacking a defined point of view?)

Logitech Harmony 880 Remote
Cheshire Dave Isaacs writes:

I just got a Logitech Harmony 880 Remote for my birthday last week, and I think it’s the kind of product you’d want to promote on SvN: it’s smart and relatively simple: if you want to watch a dvd, one you press one button and it turns on the tv and sets it to the correct input, turns on the dvd player, and turns on the receiver and sets it to the right mode. And it even has a little menu that asks you if everything turned on ok and actually helps you remedy the problem if something didn’t turn on correctly. Awesome UI, and it’s a pretty little device, too. It took me only about 30 minutes to get it set up with my system, and the whole thing is handled online. It beats the crap out of every other universal remote I’ve had. I’ll never have to photocopy my remote and draw little circles and arrows for houseguests anymore.

Update: Some commenter dissent on this one…”I can handle using it but my wife hates it and threatens to throw it often when it doesn’t work.”

Go Light On My Lips
“Go Light On My Lips is the new generation of Mascara and Lip Gloss. Our unique micro-lighted applicator gives you illumination whenever you need it with up to 10,000 lights and comes with its own mirror built into the cap…giving you the versatility to apply color in any lighting situation.”

Terrariums
A Flickr photoset of Paula Hayes’ Terrariums. [via MM]

Chip and Dan Heath were recently interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. There’s an interesting part where they discuss “the Curse of Knowledge.”

People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.

Later this week we’ll be conducting a Fireside Chat with Seth Godin (blog) and Mark Hurst (blog). Got a question you’d like to see us ask? Post it as a comment here and we’ll consider throwing it in the mix.

Etsy is looking for a Fulltime, permanent (get stock) Computer Engineers in Brooklyn, NY.

Sugar Creative is looking for a Junior to Mid-Level Web Developer in sunny Phoenix, AZ.

HQ Group is looking for a Righteous Rails Web Developer in San Diego or your couch.

Innovative Way is looking for a Web Developer (Multi-platform) in Plano, TX.

Astral Brands is looking for a Rails Programmer in Atlanta, GA.

Closer Look is looking for an Art Director (Interactive) in wonderful Chicago, IL.

PatientsLikeMe is looking for an User Interface Engineer in Cambridge, MA.

Fry, Inc. is looking for a Sr. Information Architect in Westmont, IL.

Ingram’s Magazine is looking for a Creative Web Designer in Kansas City, MO.

Ideapark is looking for an Experience Designer/Information Architect in Minneapolis, MN.

Where you post your job says a lot about your company and the kind of people you want to attract. Our Job Board attracts the best because it’s featured on industry-leading sites such as Signal vs. Noise, A List Apart, Zeldman.com, Kottke.org, and the Ruby on Rails site. The people who build the best of the web read these sites. People who value beautiful design, beautiful code, high standards, and doing great work. These are the people you’ll reach on the Job Board.

“The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” –Mark Rothko

At a bookstore the other day, I picked up a book on painter Mark Rothko. It featured dozens of his paintings presented in chronological order, one per page. Flipping through the pages turned into an experience similar to viewing a flipbook movie. The movie was the story of his art over his life.

And you could see a definite progression. His art kept getting simpler and simpler. There was an evolution. He was building up to nothing. The longer he painted, the more he reduced his work to the bare essentials.

Mark Rothko’s artwork
Here’s a look at some of Rothko’s paintings from 1936-1945:

In his later work, from 1947-1969, “obstacles” are eliminated:

Images from the National Gallery of Art site’s section on Rothko.

Ruby on Rails has gone one dot two with a slew of pleasure-inducing features. There’s a new love affair with HTTP and its RESTful style of architecture. And patching up of things with UTF-8. Including a promise not to break it’s multibyte characters again.

On top of those headliners, there’s some eight months worth of polish, glitter, and glitz. Making this one shiny release. If you’re into doing Rails, you should most definitely check this one out.

Oh, and while you’re at it, go have a look at the new Prototype site. It premiered along Prototype 1.5, which is included in Rails 1.2.

Greg Borenstein writes in about the Quicksilver Radial Menu:

Seeing your screen capture from the Quicksilver preference pane recently reminded me of one of my all-time favorite outside-the-box interface elements: the Quicksilver Radial Menu. I can never quite decide if it’s ingenious or just utterly daft, but it’s a whole alternate interface style available for Quicksilver that opens up a transparent circle around the current item you have selected.

If you invoke it on a folder, for example, the radial menu shows you the contents of the folder arrayed in a circle around that folder’s icon [see below].

Then, if you hold the mouse down on any of the spokes, it shows you the actions available for that item [below].

Also, you can hit the arrow below the central icon at any point to flip the whole works over for more options (for example, to toggle between action and navigation modes). Like everything in Quicksilver, these options are all ingeniously and infuriatingly context-aware, constantly changing based on what kind of item you’ve got and what actions are available.

The whole experience is a little bit like someone smashed open the contents of your hard drive and the capabilities of all of your apps and just laid them open for you on a flat surface.

Here’s a look at how four great writers describe an amazing athlete. Note how all three spotlight a single play to explain a larger idea. By zeroing in on a specific moment, they are able to explain to readers what general, big picture platitudes can’t.

Bill Simmons on Allen Iverson
Don’t Question The Answer by EPSN’s Bill Simmons describes a quintessential Allen Iverson encounter.

Once I was sitting midcourt at the Fleet Center when Iverson was whistled for a technical, yelped in disbelief, then followed the referee toward the scorer’s table and screamed, “[Bleep] you!” at the top of his lungs. The official whirled around and pulled his whistle toward his mouth for a second technical.

And I swear on my daughter’s life, the following moment happened: As the official started to blow the whistle, Iverson’s eyes widened and he moved angrily toward the official, almost like someone getting written up for a parking ticket who decides it would just be easier to punch out the meter maid. For a split-second, there was real violence in the air. Of course, the rattled official lowered his whistle and never called the second T. By sheer force of personality, Iverson kept himself in the game.

Look, I’m not condoning what happened. It was a frightening moment. At the same time, I haven’t seen a player bully a referee like that before or since. And that goes back to the “seeing him in person” thing. Iverson plays with a compelling, hostile, bloodthirsty energy that the other players just don’t have. He’s relentless in every sense of the word. He’s a warrior. He’s an alpha dog. He’s a tornado. He’s so fast and coordinated that it genuinely defies description. He’s just crazy enough that officials actually cower in his presence. And none of this makes total sense unless you’ve seen him.

David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer
Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, author and tennis player, describes a Roger Federer moment.

I’ll be talking about web apps at Future of Web Design in London this April. The site just launched and it looks like a great day of insight and inspiration.

What: FOWD London
When: April 18th 2007
Where: Kensington Conference Centre, London
Price: £59 limited early bird offer! £85 full price

Speakers:
Ryan Singer (37signals)
Josh Davis (JoshuaDavis.com)
Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship)
George Oates (Flickr)
Andy Clarke (Stuff and Nonsense)
Rei Inamoto (AKQA)
Florian Schmitt (Hi-ReS)
Denise Wilton (Moo)
Jason Arber (Pixelsurgeon)
Dan Saffer (Adaptive Path)
Jeff Croft (WorldOnline)
Mark Tutssel (Leo Burnett)
Simon Collison (CollyLogic)

Register at:
http://www.futureofwebdesign.com