Gratuitous Decoration in Apple Software

I am into how things look on a computer. It was one of the factors in shifting over to a Mac. The hardware is so elegant. The software is usually fine too. Apple websites are good. But they have gone rilly wird with the Contacts and the Calendar on iPad & now on the Mac. I don’t use either much on the Mac as I have a use Google calendar & contacts on the browser, but the decorations are horrendous to my eye. How can they do this in the midst of such a strong aesthetic. They must have sat around and talked about it, what did they say. Perhaps it was a compromise to get rid of animated ducks or background music, or fur.

Here is someone who agrees.

I say that flat is the new black; that 2D is the new avant-garde; that a surface doesn’t have to be ashamed of being a surface. Technology users of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your bas-relief buttons. Let us march forwards together, spurning chrome, into a cleaner, lighter future.

Thats from:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/against-chrome-a-manifesto.html

Perhaps the most absurd and brainachingly stupid example of needless chrome I am aware of, the most terrifying villain on the loose in this episode of Chromewatch, comes from — oh, hello again, Apple!

Ibooks

This is the iBooks app. Notice how lovingly the designers have made it look like you are in the middle of reading a physical book by drawing a little pseudo-3D evocation, down each vertical side, of the pages you have read and the pages you have still to read. What do you think this looks like when you are on page 2 of a book, or 2 pages from the end? I’ll tell you what it looks like: exactly the same. It still looks like you are right in the middle. That’s correct: because of the sentimental and unnecessary chrome, the app ends up lying to you about where you are in the text you’re reading.

I’m enjoying my Mac

It took a while to get used to the interface after being a widows user.  But its ok now.  I have to Google a lot, just to see how to do things on a Mac.  usually the answer is there, and the actions are simple enough eg like using fn delete to get rid of stuff on the other side of the curser.

 

Underground – NYT review

UNDERGROUND

By Wouter Spiegelmens,

Hardback 325 pp. Doubleday Books, 2011 $32.90

Reviewed by Echo J Daniel

NYT Sunday Book Review.

This novel is creating excitement among a circle of people, mostly therapists and philosophers if the book’s Facebook page is anything to go by. It is readable as a whodunit, thought provoking about the nature of the soul in a Jungian way, funny though not exactly LOL, and controversial about the nature of science and research in the humanities. It was published in January and is set to be a cult classic. A sequel is likely and there are rumors about a movie and a HBO T.V. series.

This is a first novel by a hitherto little known New York psychotherapist Wouter Spiegelmens Ph.D. who draws deeply on the experience in his practice. There is no shortage of descriptions of psychotherapy sessions, the book consists of little else. Oh, except for long introspections by the main character and hero Matthew Prendergast. If you are one of his clients, and wondering if your confidentiality has been breached you may take comfort that the title page clarifies in the usual way that this is not about real people living or dead. You may also note a reference in the novel, ‘You’re so vane if you think this book is about you, about you, you’re so vane.’ The book may well draw on the authors life in other ways, while we know little about Spiegelmens we do know that Prendergast and the author practice in the Greenwich Village, they are both in their early fifties and both have been divorced. We know the authors ex-wife is Martha Heathcote brother of the owner of real-estate firm Heathcote Chester and Gracefield. This would explain Spiegelmens’ intimate knowledge of the NYC real-estate scandals in the late 1990s, a time that is often referenced in the book though it is set well after 9/11, as is evidenced by references to OMG!!! Twitter posts, the ubiquity of iPads and clients talking about being unfriended and fraped (look it up).

Prendergast is neurotic in a Woody Allen kind of way, matching the seemingly endless stream of clients that come to his practice. He doubts his own existence as his clients talk of being invisible. He has sexual fantasies that are bizarre but inform him of his counter-transference, and lead him to make insightful and totally ethical responses to the client. For example he has just mentally undressed and chained a seductive young woman to a bed, and then in real life responds ‘You are terrified by too much freedom, you yearn for some constraint.’ she feels very well understood and nodes profusely, leading to more elaborate fantasies in the mind of the therapist. Yes counter-transference is a word you will be quite comfortable with if you even closely resemble one of the book’s enthusiastic followers.

By means of therapy sessions, clinical supervision sessions, and supervision sessions about supervision sessions we become familiar with a network of people who in their own way shed some light on the death of building contractor entrepreneur. Was he killed or is it suicide? Does the dream by a client of a psychotherapist who Prendergast supervises and the philosophy of John Lock hold a key to the answer to that question? The answer is yes. As a reviewer I’m fearful of loosing my credibility to admit that I found that a credible answer.

I’ve given away too much already. I can say, as it is already on the back cover, that this is a novel where learn how a crime is solved as we join a psychotherapist’s journey into the collective unconscious.

Read this book, I doubt the movie will be as good, unless they employ Spiegelmens to approve the script; he has a quirky insight into the nature of reality and consciousness that should not be lost in translation.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 1, 2011, on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Underground: Fiction reveals truth.

San Francisco

I’m about to leave San Francisco, just another day and then I go. It’s been a family trip not a touristy one but here is a snapshot today as I had my last evening in the city.

San Francisco

Devotion

Eric Maisel is inspiring. No doubt about it he gets me to the next phase. Devotion not discipline, that does it for me. I am devoted to my work, and naming it like that might even get me up an hour earlier!

Word processing on the iPad

I find the actual typing ok, and it can be even better with the bluetooth keyboard. The problems lie elswhere.

Pages

Apple’s word processor

Pro:

It works.
I can use styles that convert to Word.

Cons

No Dropbox or other way to use the file in two places. The ones offered are not ones I want to use, like iWork etc. get terrible reviews. iTunes is clumsy. Maybe it will be the #1 way access the file from any device when iCloud arrives. Just a few hours before we hear!

Documents to Go

Pro

I can see the files I have stored in there on Dropbox. Sharing works well.

Con

Looses style formatting in Word format. Makes it unworkable for the work I do.

Sunday Star Times on Christchurch and OnlineGroups.Net!

Christchurch three months on | Stuff.co.nz:

CATE BRETT mara

Photo: Carys Monteath

Community spirit: Mara Apse organised working bees in her neighbourhood after large cracks opened up in the hill, which they filled with a liquid absorbing clay.

tango

It takes more than two for this tango: After the labouring came the music and dancing.

Related Links

Hard lessons Making do in a shattering year

Cantabrian Cate Brett explains how the internet, buckets of clay and learning to tango are helping her community heal after the February 22 quake.

Continue reading “Sunday Star Times on Christchurch and OnlineGroups.Net!”