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Overheard this Evening

Everyone has menus, all over the world, so why is menupages exclusive to New York?

Great question, anonymous reader. There's no good answer.

Lips

TMN: I love images like “Glazed” because I get the feeling that, if you had photographed an eye like this from farther away in a different light or with a different treatment, it would be indistinguishable from a photograph in a magazine or advertisement. Why have you magnified this eye?

MM: [The painting] shows glamour gone awry. But it’s also representing a real thing. It [depicts] the instant in a magazine that gives us so much pleasure. We know we’re never gonna look like that and the models aren’t even gonna look like that. I haven’t invented any of the tropes in my images. They’re all already there and I have my own interpretation.

Over at The Morning News, Nicole Pasulka interviews Marilyn Minter. It's well worth your time this evening!

You might have seen Marilyn's work in the Whitney's 2006 biennial or on Creative Time's billboards around the city. I had heard of her work but I didn't see it up close until the biennial last year, and it was by far the most memorable element of the show.

It's hard for me to put my finger on what's so appealing about Minter's work. Up close or far away you can't be quite sure if her work is made up of paint, enamel, photography or photoshop (she deals in all of these mediums), and her subject matter swings wildly between the refined and grotesque. And within these images there's an intellectual affirmation for my own obsession with gossip, celebrity and pop culture (hello, goldenfiddle).

Ruminations on the iPhone

Like many warm-blooded geeks, I've been thinking about the iPhone for the past week since Apple announced it. I'm kind of cool on it (more on the that later) but I'm happy people are thinking and talking about mobile, since I am obsessed with the mobile application space and I'm always happy to sit in the corner add my kibitz to the chatter.

Right now phone apps are written in Java and C libraries which differ on nearly every single make and model of phone shipped today, this makes development testing and deployment a nightmare. This why phones today do not offer a good user experience, and this is also why enterprising curious souls are attracted to the web before they are attracted to phones. I'm extremely skeptical that the iPhone runs any kind of Objective C, even Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection, as has been speculated. The overhead involved in this development makes phones feel sluggish, and it would be way too hard to support and debug over the family of processors that will run not just the iPhone family, but also the new iPods and long-rumored tablet Mac (maclet?). Javascript, CSS and XHTML all run the same on webkit, and porting webkit is easier than porting Objective-C.

There is a lot of negative buzz surrounding developers not being allowed to install applications on the iPhone, which I believe is a red herring. Developers won't be allowed to install applications, but they will be allowed to install widgets, which is just as good. Hit F12 - that's what your iPhone "dock" will look like. I've got stocks, a nice Flickr slideshow, a Vox widget, Magnolia bookmarks, package and flight tracking, and much more. It's far more useful (and beautiful) than the applications shipped with any phone today. Webkit runs greeat right now on my Nokia N73¹, and since it's the same webkit², I'm sure it will run great on the iPhone.

I'll probably hold off on the iPhone for a while, since unlike Matt Haughey, I love my phone. Actually I should say "phones," since I have two: a "home" mobile (the aforementioned N73) and a "work" mobile, a Treo 700p. I love them both. The Nokia N73 has a 3+ megapixel camera, and I basically use it as a Vox appliance. Since the Vox mobile application sits at such a low level on the phone, it certainly won't work on the iPhone, which will certainly feature similarly deep iLife and .Mac integration (as it should). The Treo is basically a voice, email and calendaring appliance, and it's nearly perfect for that. Plus, it runs on Sprint's 3G network, which is lightning fast in the city.

Having said that, syncing is still the great unsolved problem for phones. It's very telling that Apple is using iTunes to sync instead of iSync, and what that basically says to me is that iSync is actually never going to get better. The Missing Sync is actually really good at syncing photos (pictures go right from the treo to iPhoto). For PC users, Lifeblog is very good at syncing pictures and text messages into a nice timeline, but it doesn't work under OS X. If Apple really, really nails this, and unifies the address book, voicemail, text messaging, picture messaging and email into a single stream that is nicely indexable and sortable, that will be a product worth looking at. But I doubt Apple will get this right, because iSync is still terrible.

¹ Disclaimer: I have done some work for Nokia in the past, specifically on the Lifeblog project, and I had a wee bit of input on the way this stuff works. If not real input, at least an influence of an occasional thought by people who have real input.

² Why is that relevant, you ask? It's the same browser, see Infoworld, Engadget, and Surfin' Safari. (Who says Apple doesn't blog?)

Taipei 2050: Our Hero is On the Way

So, I'm playing around with "motionbox," and through the front page of the site I find the film "Taipei 2050."

It appears to be a machinima of a movie trailer (for a fake movie, of course) which is subtitled and partially shot from the perspective of a camera phone, complete with battery level display. It's the sort of thing that is commonplace now, but was unimaginable four years ago.

One minor nit: We're obviously not going to be using battery-powered cell phones in 2050. Not sure how that slipped by the producer.