The original inkpot Pages icon was beautiful, it looked great when steve jobs had it large on screen at macworld 2005 stating that Pages was "Word processing with an incredible sense of style". At the time this made sense for the Pages icon.
However there are 3 things I notice about this discussion:
1. Gorgeous detailed renderings aren't symbols, nor are they necessarily good icons. Symbols are mentally quicker to understand, and that makes them ideal as the foundation of an icon, where their purpose is to communicate, not just be pretty. The new icons do this better than the older icons. Secondly the detailed illustrations aren't effective at small sizes, to use the ink pot example: the pen is lost in the detail of the ink pot, at typical viewing size it's a visually noisy design. I recall a criticism at the time being that people didn't know what they were looking at.
2. People such as John Gruber who referenced this post don't have the self-awareness to recognise that they are neither an expert on the topic nor the target demographic. Watching Gruber riot about unimportant minutae over the last few months has been an interesting case study. At no point does he show a modicum of charity whereby he tries to understand why the changes were made, instead his response can be summarised as a whiney/bratty version of "it's the children who are wrong".
3. There is an amusing and unpredictable cross over between people who think the ink pot is peak icon design, but have argued in the past that the much more recent floppy disk is too old to be used as a save icon.
There may be an arrogance that we're not vulnerable to these tactics because the topics of conversation are science and tech focused, rather than celebrity culture.
However this post and the comments really debunk that - here we have a clear example of the author turning these people into characters, archetypes of reality tv, and inviting the reader to have an emotional response to what is potentially interesting, but actually just the mundane business matter of dealing with demand spikes.
A normal conversation might take a step back, above the emotional baiting, and instead lament on how TSMC weren't able to develop sufficient supply capacity in time to maximise yield across not just these clients, but many others whom are looking to get involved in the AI hype train. Instead we're seeing something quite different, and quite uninformed. It's reading like a gossip post from an instagram thread.
I notice that HN is actually more vulnerable to these types of conversations. Maybe it's because HN likely weights towards an ASD audience, which has less experience in handling socially driven narratives. I do definitely see here more of the "one-sided" conversation that is typical of ASD.
Neither American nor from the UK, but I knew what this was about because it's possible to go online and seek out information. Neat.
What I didn't do was become some entitled see you next tuesday and complain that a .com should be reserved for the american audience and the site should use a .co.uk – As if american businesses don't utilise foreign TLDs to create cutesy URLs. Maybe now is a good time to note that the fashionable .AI TLD belongs to Anguilla, a British territory.
While SparkFun may feel entitled to air their grievances as an "Official response", these types of public statements aren't productive for business nor useful/respectful to consumers.
Public notices for the consumer should serve the consumer. I.e. they should only relate to matters that directly concern them, such as notice of availability, warranty, support or the fulfilment of other consumers' rights. Those statements should be unambiguous and not allude to blame or personal tiffs.
While Sparkfun's statement touches on availability it merely does so as a vehicle for grandstanding and retaliation through gossip and drama. The fact that SparkFun notes it's a "private matter" yet chose to involve the public also makes SparkFun look unprofessional, even if they are 0% at fault for the circumstances.
Consumers put their trust in a company, it is disrespectful of that trust when trying to embroil them in personal affairs, they never agreed to that.
Keynote is completely underrated, likely because people assume it's just a Powerpoint clone, but it's more like a highly templated motion graphics app with a UI that steers people into using it as Powerpoint replacement.
So not only is it a far quicker way to make a PPT than using Powerpoint. I also see it used for making presentation videos, interactive PDFs and even animated GIFs/HTML5 animations.
The number of motion graphics marketing videos I see which are actually just Keynote files exported to video is impressive.
That’s kind of funny you mention “quicker way to make a PPT.” Everyone at my company had been asking me how I make my presentations look so good. I’m no designer; I’m a lowly engineer. But I do them in Keynote and export them to PowerPoint, which is half the battle!
(Sadly, my work laptop is Windows. So I create them on my personal laptop then migrate to PPT and do my best to fix up the fonts on Windows.)
