Christopher Nolan on Heath Ledger

Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the 70’s and 80’s that I have a deep personal affinity with actors and celebs I’ve never met. I’m a Reagan-era kid, after all, the actor-politician cemented for me a sentiment that the most important work of all is that of telling stories, pressing enthusiasm, fueling emotion.

It’s why I get to say things to myself like, “Man, if Will Smith only knew me, we’d be buds. Best friends.” [Read more]

Apollo Group says verdict won’t have affect on business — misses point entirely

Apollo Group leadership thumbs their collective nose at the courts, saying that the $277.7 million verdict against them “will not have a material adverse affect on its business or cash flows.”

While it’s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned very little from the experience. [Read more]

Apple.com: Robert Lang profile “The Art and Science of Paper Folding”

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback. [Read more]

Edward Tufte on iPhone Human Interface Design

Interface Design and the iPhone

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

Via TechCrunch: Pownce Goes Public Tonight

Just caught this on TechCrunch via Daniel Burka on Pownce — not sure how it slipped by me! Pownce, the long-compared-to-Twitter micro-blogging tool, comes out of beta tonight. Great news for Daniel, Leah Culver, and Kevin Rose, who’ve worked hard to build a great tool for social aggregation.

I’ve been using Twitter and Pownce for the last six months, on and off, and I’m torn between the two. Which is a whole lot better off than I was before, when I was torn between just how stupid I thought they both were in the first place.

Twitter, Pownce, and legions of tools that have adopted the “Status” function, all appear to address the question, “what are you doing right now?” With Twitter, I didn’t really care at first. The public posts range from invites to meet-ups to updates on bathroom performance, to shots at sports teams, to cries for help.

Then, I ran into some folks on both services who know how to actually use them. Take Alex France, for example, who goes by the Pownce moniker dignews. Alex posts tech news and links with short headlines, and has become one of my favorites to follow, because he seems to share my interests. Alex is 16-years-old, from Manchester, England.

Or how about Thomas Hawk, president of photo-sharing site Zooomr, who is using Pownce as part of his photographic jihad to share a half a million finish, corrected images with the world. Every day I’m greeted with a handful of gallery-quality photography.

For me, where Pownce takes the hands-down lead is in offering the ability to group my friends into sets. Close friends? Co-workers? Each can have their own group, and you can ensure that messages you send to one group don’t clutter up the inboxes of others, who might find the message inappropriate.

Look at it this way: I set up a new “Clients” group. I can use the tool to send quick status updates to my clients who might need to know timely information about our work together. In a recent software launch, the client group served as a key lynchpin in delivering timely information to the people who needed to know it. And that, after all, is the key to employing a tool that actually fits the job.

This is the biggest hurdle, still, and I hope the Pownce launch drums up enough mainstreamish press to get the message out: these social aggregator/micro-blog services aren’t just for tweeners and programmers — there’s a business use, too. Finding the sweet spot where tool and utility intersect will help us all be more productive, and efficient.

If you use either tool, find me here on Twitter, and here on Pownce. And don’t forget to find me here on Facebook, and here on LinkedIn, too!

Rarity: Apple Employee Talks!

Jens Alfke writes a great insider post on his decision to leave Apple and move into life as an independent developer. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that gets to me is this:

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?