Archive for the 'Industrial Design' Category

Hershey’s — the chocolate company — appears to be in a world of hurt. Sales are down. And as I learned from Steve Dekorte, Hershey just dumped their board of directors, to be replaced by a new board “focused on restoring sales” (well, duh! what BoD wouldn’t be focused on increasing or, in the case of a beleaguered company, restoring sales?!?!?!).

Possibly, but not probably, coincidental, it seems that Hershey’s is a participant in and major funder of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association.

Now, the CMA lobbied — in conjunction with the Grocery Manufacturers Association — to have the FDA change the definition of “chocolate” from “containing 100% cocoa butter” to allowing the cocoa butter to be substituted with “hydrogenated or chemically-modified vegetable fats”.

Kirk Saville, a Hershey’s spokesman, said:

There are high-quality oils available which are equal to or better than cocoa butter in taste, nutrition, texture and function, and are preferred by consumers.

That reads: “Cocoa Butter Expensive. Corn oil cheap. Cheap is good. Customer won’t notice difference.”

I’m not a huge choco-holic, but even I must call Bullshit on this one. I have had what falls into the marketing category of “chocolate flavored” or “chocolaty” or “artificial chocolate essences added”. yuckYuckYuckYUCK! Lightly flavored sand, in the case of drink mixes and many “chocolate like” bars. Choco-like oily skid marks, in the case of the various “flavorings.

Now, I honestly have no idea if the FDA has changed the definition of “chocolate”. But I am not surprised that a company clearly focused on minimizing manufacturing costs with no regards to quality — even through lobbying to change the very definition of “chocolate” — is spiraling the bowl.

(Thank you to Garret Albright for providing links to the latest info regarding FDA’s potential redefinition of Chocolate.)

Today, Sony announced the HDMS-S1D “Digital Photo Album”. A standalone box that can read from various flash cards, has an internal 80GB drive for buffering photos, a CD/DVD burner and can play “professional quality” slide shows (whatever that means).

A pretend question/answer session:

Q: Can it play audio?

A: Yes — it comes with 30 pre-loaded tracks that can be used as sountracks for slideshows.

Q: No, can it play my music?

A: You can load up 5 songs from your own CDs!

Q: Uh… No. Can it play any of the 16,796 tracks I have ripped from my CDs (which are buried in the garage) or purchased from iTunes or AmazonMP3?

A: No.

Q: OK — spiffy network port. Can it play or stream video?

A: No.

Q: Mmmm-kay. Can I publish my photos to Flickr or, even, some Sony’s own proprietary Sony ImageStation site?

A: No… but you can burn photos to CD, DVD, or write them to Flash media!

…btw: we shut ImageStation months ago and will take it offline by February ‘08…

Q: Let me rephrase– Can I share photos of my son’s birthday / first concert / first lost tooth / first bike ride / big finds in the woods / first day of school with family that is 2,500 miles away in less than 3 days without paying an arm or a leg for shipping?

A: Well… You could buy them a plane ticket and get them into your living room faster.

Q: Right — I’ll count that as “No”. Now, the slide show does look really good. Totally dig the face recognition. Given the rest of the features and assuming I hadn’t already solved this problem, I’d pay $100 for such a device. Sound about right?

A: No. That’ll be $400, pleeze. Kthxbai.

What the hell is Sony smoking?

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So easy, a one year old can use it.

And an iPhone will, in fact, blend. I’m amazed at how long the video kept playing on the device.

Some random thoughts on the state of Wii-ness.

1. Internet support beyond the Wii is kind of hosed. First, the Wii is very flaky at connecting to the shopping channel unless I switch between wireless routers every now and then. Note that the built-in web browser (which took two attempts to download) works fine. Well, it works as well as can be expected for a browser running on a monitor at S-Video resolutions.

As I said to Peter Berger when he made a weblog post from his Wii: That’s pretty cool in a “look, I can use a hammer to drive a screw” kind of way.

Maybe it is useful on a higher resolution display? I’m not sure I care as my MacBook Pro makes a pretty damned nice web browser.

2. Nintendo’s online presence sucks. Huge volume of content, but it is poorly organized and stuff is hard to find. I’m always hunt-and-clicking to find the damned forums or some particular piece of information.

Grrr… no, let me rephrase; Nintendo’s web site is fracking pathetic. Overcomplicated and broken. So, want to register Zelda? Gave me an error that it couldn’t register. 2 paragraphs and three sentences into the otherwise “you screwed up typing crap in” text I find the real reason. My login session has timed out!

And if you click “register” on the Wii page after filling in the form, it bounces you over to the other multi-field form where you could enter a bunch of different registration codes. But, it doesn’t give any indication that your input has been preserved. You have to scroll down to discover that.

Stupid stupid stupid.

No amount of ‘re-logging-in’ fixes the problem. Finally, I had to completely dump my cache and reset cookies to work through the issue.

3. Nintendo’s internal information management systems are broken. I just received an email offering three free issues of Nintendo Power magazine because I had registered three nintendo products. I haven’t; I have only registered the Wii.

Clicking through and logging in to the site reveals that I’m not eligible because I haven’t registered enough products. Funny, the site claims I have registered two products while at the same time displaying only one product registered in the Registered Items section of the same page. Nice!

Aha! It is counting the Wii, Bomberman, and the trial browser as registered in one area of the site, counting the Wii and Bomberman towards the subscription in another area, and then only showing the Wii as the one registered product in a third area.

Nice! That is just so terribly helpful!

4. Wii Sports kicks butt. Major fun. Even in a non-party context, I’m digging Golf and Bowling. The training mode is a blast, too, and has definitely improved my controller-fu.

And, yes, I figured out how to control the ball in bowling. The key is to let go of the B button at the bottom of the arc your arm makes, but follow through! Once you get that down and timed correctly with the on-screen animation, the ball release on screen will be smooth. No more air balls. With that in place, twisting the controller on its long axis clockwise as you swing and release will cause the ball to curve to the right quite nicely.

Likely mirror the above for lefties?

Yeah, anyway, I thought I figured it out. Then I wrote about it. Now I can’t do anything but curve left for the life of me. Sigh.

And, like real sports, I’m sadly sore after playing the game! Just my arm, though, and not my whole body.

5. Zelda. Wow. Cool cool stuff. I love that the musical themes from previous games remain present. The graphics are quite beautiful and the integration with the controller is great. Another game that will surely benefit from something better than a 27″ S-Video TV.

Unfortunately, the hawk does not seem to want to attack the kitty. Fortunately, you can pelt chickens with the slingshot. Oddly, the slingshot will kill monsters that are far larger and meaner than chickens, but only scares chickens. Must be the feathers.

6. The whole Mii thing. Don’t get it yet beyond seeing the characters show up in the games and build up experience over time. So far, my Mii’s haven’t wandered anywhere that I know of, nor have anyone else’s Mii’s come knocking. I have entered everyone’s code and I see that some are even enabled (indicating, I think, that my Wii code — 7426 6949 2411 1493 — has been entered on their end).

7. Bought Bomberman ‘93 off of the Wii Shopping Channel (I fully expect some salestard to tell me how “the Wii’s superior 129 bits blows the doors off 128 bit systems!!!! BUY NOW!!!”) to see how that experience works out. Other than the connection woes, it works well enough. And that is a great game — it is going to be a blast in a party setting!

Though, I have to say, the download progress indicator is cute, but weak. A little mario running across the screen collecting coins whose frequency of appearance indicate data rates while hitting 1 of 3 bricks to indicate 1/3rd, 2/3rd or finished is just not quite the granularity of data I’m looking for. Sadly, it would be trivial to make it a bit more useful just by adding more bricks — a whole row of ‘em kind of like, I don’t know, a status bar — and providing, maybe, a score or something to indicate # of bytes traversed with, possibly, a high score indicating the total # of bytes that must be transferred?

8. MAME. Please? MAME! It would be fun to hack together my own controller, too.

Ahh, well, whatever. I’ll leave it on again and see what happens overnight.

I caught the Festivus episode of Seinfeld this evening. Damned hilarious episode.

In any given Seinfeld episode that has some random invented subject or product, there is always a random set of products launched around that. Festivus is no different.

The lamp caught my eye. Both because it is a fairly neat Lamp design in that it apparently bolts to both the ceiling and floor, thus providing a bit of stability well beyond a regular lamp.

At the same time, it is just so totally not a Festivus pole with all those lights and stuff. Blasphemy, I say! Such a pole should be a plain aluminum pole because of its very high strength-to-weight ratio.

Coincidentally, Festivus is celebrated on the same day as my anniversary; December 23rd.

Update: Dell site design folk are actively reading the comments on the original post to evaluate how to better improve the user experience. Neat.

The whole “What the Dell?” design rant received quite a bit more attention than I expected (thanks to an initial link from Daring Fireball and snowballing from there).

Quite a few comments, too. Including comments from Dell employees that spawned a bunch of email communication with them. I have a new found respect for the company.

Aside: Yes, to be perfectly clear, I am an Apple employee. This weblog, however, is completely disconnected from my day job other than that many of my hobbies and my profession overlap. I am speaking entirely for myself here.

Initially, many of the respondents pretty much agreed with my opinion of Dell’s site design. Go read the original post if you want more context.

About 20 comments in, a comment from RichardAtDell shows up:

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Has anyone checked to see if a cardboard box manufacturing magnate is on the Amazon board of directors? That is the only way I can explain their packaging policy.

Boing Boing posted a story of ridiculous packaging from Amazon; 9 towel sets in 18 boxes.

I recently ordered a magnetic knife holder from Amazon. It kicks butt.

But the packaging, pictured at left, was just plain silly! The knife holder is basically a big chunk of stainless steel in a box. Yet, Amazon sent it in a box with about 20 of those little air cushions.

To package all this air, the box was easily 10x taller and 10x wider than the actual magnetic knife holders packaging! And the knife holder box wasn’t wrapped at all. It was simply floating free in the box.

What a total waste of cardboard (and little plastic balloons)!

In the last year, I received some excellent cooking knives as a gift. Ones that will hold an edge if properly stored.

Now, proper storage does not mean in a drawer with a bunch of other knives. All that knocking about quickly destroys the edge.

Nor does “proper storage” mean in a wood block with slots. It collects moisture and food bits in the dark crevices, creating an ideal breeding ground for all kinds of nasties.

Knives should be stored such that their blades never knock about while also being completely visible.

A magnetic knife holder will serve the purpose quite nicely. Poking about Amazon, I found the MIU France Stainless Steel Magnetic Knife Holder. Beyond the striking design, it is quite well made with a rounded lip around the edge that the knives rest against, thus reducing the potential for trapping liquids between magnet and blade.

One last tip: Never put good knives in the dishwasher as it will rapidly degrade the blades. I have knives (that I don’t care about — but will start doing so now that I can store them properly along with my good knives) that have been in/out of the dishwasher for more than 5 years. Might as well try cutting with a random piece of sheet metal.

And it is one hell of a lot better / safer than balancing the damned knives on top of a cockeyed spice rack (now gone) as I had been doing for the past few months.

I spent part of today mowing paths through the fields and woods surrounding my parent’s house. I’m using a John Deere 750 tractor with a Bush Hog mounted on the back. This thing can rip through small trees and is excellent for mowing paths.

I started by mowing the fields and, at the end of it, my ears were ringing. Stupid me.

When mowing around the pond and into the woods, I put on my iPod with a set of the Apple iPod In-Ear Headphones and it worked brilliantly. It completely deadened the tractor sound while allowing me to listen to decent tunes at a reasonable volume.

I have never been able to wear an in-the-ear headphone before these. These are the first headphones of these types that have not immediately made my ears swell and turn red/itchy.

The trick is to set the volume limiter to a reasonable level in a quiet room and then not worry about blowing out your ears when in noisy environment like on a tractor or in an airplane.

We also spent some time tooling around the pond in a little boat, hunting bugs, snakes, frogs and anything else that moves.

Tomorrow, I hope to get some picks of vultures as they pick a dead possum clean on top of the dam. That and grab a few captures of the wildflowers that are now accessible off the freshly mown paths.

I dropped by a couple of local businesses and ended up with a bag full of used disposable cameras. The cameras are truly disposable; generally tossed or sent back to a company for some amount of recycling. The cameras are chock full of flashy goodness that can be used in quite a number of projects, including high speed photography, of course.

It seems that the disposable camera market is dominated by two manufacturers, Kodak (on left) and Fujifilm (on right). The Quaketronics kit includes a Kodak disposable and, upon disassembly of both, it is abundantly clear why (though apparently coincidental).

Even before cracking the case, there are signs that these are two different beasts. The Fujifilm has a flash switch while the Kodak has a momentary button for charging the flash, thus implying significant differences in the electronics. While opening, the difference in industrial design is immediately obvious. The Kodak’s back is easily popped off by releasing tabs on all four sides. On the other hand, the Fujifilm camera has five or six tiny tabs with an almost-removable-but-not-quite piece over the battery.

Significantly more, including a nice “don’t touch this with your finger” demonstration upon click through…
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