If commoditization has brought the price of wireless broadband routers under $50, why is Apple still charging $249 for an Airport base station?
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AT&T Wireless, despite having lost me as a customer last week, sent me my free phone upgrade yesterday.
The city is cold and wet this morning, the snow a stark turnaround from the mild weather of the previous week. But the rhythms of the city are unchanged, the general tenor of the subways no more aggravated than any other Monday.
The newspaper salesman on 15th and Park has retreated from his usual corner to a dry spot by the subway staircase. He takes my $10 bill without complaint. “See you tomorrow,” he says with a genuine smile, recognizing me, expecting my return, even though I only buy from him one or two days per week.
The breakfast cart on 33rd and 9th has a big cooler atop its front wheels, filled with juices and water on ice. I buy a Tropicana and a buttered egg roll; I don’t usually buy juice from a cart, so I have to ask, “How much?” The two people inside grin and say, “First time shopping here?” I say yes, and one says, “Oh! Then take a donut, on us, any one you like. Welcome!” I decline the pastryâ”Get out of here, you’re gonna make me fat”âand the other vendor gives me a free banana instead. “See you soon!” they say as I depart, sheepishly, breakfast and freebie in hand. And indeed they will.
The snow has stopped and the clouds are lightening. At lunch I will try and become a regular at the local deli.
The masses are chattering: both Slashdot and Engadget are discussing the AT&T “upgrade” of the Sony Ericsson T68i.
The Engadget article unearths some useful news, too: the T68i was only using half of AT&T Wireless’s network capacity, which is prompting their switch. Of course, the marketing folks at AT&T Wireless would rather downgrade my phone than admit that yes, the poor reception I’ve experienced is real, not perceptive.
But without this knowledge, I simply came to believe my cell phone service stunk. I switched to Verizon Wireless Tuesday and am thrilled with my reception thus far. So much for my free phone.
A woman in Philadelphia has regained custody of her daughter after a six-year kidnapping. She spied the child at a birthday party and took a hair sample that she sent to a DNA lab, which proved the girl’s identity and led to the kidnapper’s arrest. The mother says she had seen the hair sample work on television.
Via Jason Kottke, an analysis of the evolving design of The Economist (the print version).
It’s worth noting that the physical redesign carried some subtle but not insignificant touches from Economist.com into print. (The Web site relaunched in fall 2000, the color version in spring 2001). Not that it was admitted as such, of course, but for an example, take a look at the blue boxes, which debuted online first.
I do love Ecotype and always wished we could use it online. The Economist.com logo, which was designed before the Ecotype revision, used a bolded version of a display typeface that more closely resembles Ecotype than its predecessor.
The use of Officina as a headline font, on the other hand, is too proletarian for my tastes relative to the rest of The Economist; the font is everywhere these days and makes the headlines feel generic. A more customized version would have been more appropriate. It is better than the old Frutiger typeface, though.
While I worked for Economist.com I went from having a passing interest to being a devout reader, and now that I don’t work there anymore, I never miss an issue. I don’t doubt that the current magazine design has something to do with my continued enjoyment.
Metacritic gives The Passion of the Christ a fairly favorable once-over, starting with Roger Ebert’s insistent (if properly tempered) applause for the film’s accomplishment. I, however, far prefer the pull quotes on Rotten Tomatoes.
â”The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.”
â”It’s as if Gibson is measuring God’s love by the amount of blood he shows on the screen.”
Even Ebert notes that the film deserves an NC-17 for violence and the MPAA wimped out.
Of course, as with any movie, the book is much better.
I received a postcard in the mail Monday telling me that Sony Ericsson and AT&T were sending me a free phone, a brand-new T226. Great news! My T68i is a year and a half old and is starting to fall apart.
Something felt fishy, though. My T68i was a $200 investment, and this new phone isn’t costing me a penny. So I went to the Sony Ericsson T68i Upgrade Web Site to find out more.
Impressively, Sony Ericsson is not shy about the upgrade specs; a big link on the home page goes to a comparison page. Unimpressively, the new phone is a major downgrade.
A list of what my new phone won’t have that my old one does:
– worldwide operability
– a calendar
– 7-field phone book listings (the T226 has 3 fields)
– voice-activated dialing
– Bluetooth and infrared (no more linking to friends)
– a modem (no more Web access)
– shortcuts (no more typing 7-8-4-2 to play solitaire)
These are not minor issues. I used my phone overseas and want to do so again this year. I used four and five fields for my contacts quite often, and I relied on my shortcuts.
And that’s just the features I use. The T226 also has no voice-activated dialing, no PC synchronization, half the memory and less picture and personalization features. It does have polyphonic ringtones and a more colorful display.
The Sony Ericsson T226 is the free-with-contract phone for customers who sign up for new plans. That I am expected to consider it an upgrade from my expensive T68i is wholly unimpressive.
I thought the new phone might keep me on AT&T Wireless for a few more months before I ported myself to Verizon and away from AT&T Wireless’s poor suburban GSM reception. But I doubt it.
The fuss about George Bush attemping to ban gay marriage with a Constitutional amendment saddens and disgusts me on multiple levels.
Bush is only making noise about it to deflect discussion of more pressing, damaging issues that could undermine his re-election campaign (note the timing of his amendment announcement on the same day as the grilling of the director of the CIA on Iraqi intelligence). Even worse, he is turning a personal issue into a political one. Notice how Dick Cheney doesn’t say a word about gay marriage since his family’s opinion would undermine the election campaign. I suspect that deep down Cheney thinks the issue is none of his boss’s business.
Worst of all, though, is how Bush wishes to insert a restrictive clause into a set of Constitutional amendments that for the past two centuries has increased personal freedoms, not diminished them. He aims to place marriage in a straitjacket alongside a long list of proud American freedoms. (This Metafilter post nicely frames the amendments: “20 out of 27 deal directly with giving people more rights and only one [prohibition, later repealed] took away rights. If passed, 28 would be the only standing amendment to limit rights of citizens.”)
What happened in San Francisco last week, with thousands of gay and lesbian couples lining up for legal marriages, will someday be hailed as a watershed moment in American liberties, much like Susan B. Anthony’s work and Rosa Parks’s stand before them. Women and minorities had to fight for decades against persecution, prejudice and political rhetoric before making their way into a (mostly) equal and accepting society. Homosexuality, sadly, is going to have the same fight.
Thirty years from now we will look back at this era and wonder how so much of the country was so stubborn and wrong. In the meantime, one can only shake one’s head and hope wiser judgment prevails against fear and intimidation.
One of the hardest things to do during Web site creation is to finalize a vision for the home page. So much to do, and so little real estate! How will users find anything? Where will it all fit?
Yet the same questions that stymie home-page development often magically disappear inside the site, where suddenly, logic and order rule. Major items go in top- or left-hand navigation schemes. Subcategory navigation squeezes under the main lists, either through clever spatial allotments or more-clever DHTML and Javascript tricks. Promotional items cascade down the right-hand side or across the page above and below major content.
Why is this so? Several reasons:
– Stakeholders around an organization all feel they need, and deserve, home-page placement and promotion for their interests.
– The home page tries to be all things to all people. Heaven forbid a user land on a site’s home and not see every crucial function the site provides.
The good news is that Google’s continued dominance has brought the trend in home pages toward lighter, cleaner designs. Urging their continued dominance is not a new argument, but it bears repeating, as too many sites still do not practice this policy well.
The solution to this is to stop trying so hard with the home page and start thinking about how the rest of the site works. Functionality and placement become more obvious inside the site. Why not carry those same principles backward, onto the home page?
A prime factor in lightening the home page burden is that home pages aren’t the all-encompassing portals they once were. Search engines still lead users deep into sites, and initial exposure is often not the home page but an internal content area that showcases an entirely different set of priorities. Only as a second or third click do users find the home page–which they expect to deliver better functionality or explanation, not necessarily the kitchen sink.
Therefore, if the home page is not necessarily the starting point, it doesn’t have to be the catch-all presentation device like, say, a magazine’s cover. It has to continue the brand definition and extend functionality, whether that is more simply executed or more accurately explained.
Users are increasingly goal-oriented online; they arrive with a purpose, and they want to achieve their goals as smoothly and easily as possible. Some recent arguments even contend that users don’t care what page they’re on, relative to a Web site’s hierarchy, so long as they’re making progress toward their goals. That may not be an all-encompassing argument, but the underlying tenet rings true: one only needs to identify position in a site structure only if one is confused or lost.
Bearing that in mind, a well-designed Web site will have simple, useful navigation and a moderate (or less) amount of clutter on internal pages. Ground is ceded to the presentation of content, and utility finds logical placement, sometimes by default. This should be the standard site-wide.
That brings us back to the home page, which may be the first or the fourth page a user visits during a session. It should maintain a similar navigational structure to internal pages. This is not because it’s a good introduction, but because it may be part of the continuing progress of the user. A visitor could quite conceivably go from an article to a section index to the home page, inside-out; if that is the case, how disconcerting might it be when the home page looks and works differently than the inside? (Even ultra-simple Google maintains the same top-of-page links on its home page as it does on its results pages.)
The same rules apply to the myriad interests angling for home-page positioning. Many sites have one or more links or promotions that go to specialty or off-site pages; these are miniature advertisements that don’t appear elsewhere on the site. Rather than cluttering the home page with one-off opportunities, find ways to integrate these links with the rest of the site, in places that make sense and promote consistency. If said placements overlap on the home page, so much the better.
The idea is not to revolutionize home-page design but to ensure that it embraces the activity within. Let the home be integrated rather than stand-alone. Your users will appreciate it.