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You have to give mr. Spiekermann credit: he says it like it is.

In the article “Top Designer Says World Cup Design “Just Embarrassing” over at DW-WORLD.DE he rightfully tears down the complete design World Cup 2006 effort. Principal problem is the fact that the logo tries to communicate too many messages.

And you know what? He’s right. It looks nasty.
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Akismet has caught 4,380 spam for you since you installed it.

As the Akismet site beautifully states: “Remember the days before spam?”.

To be honest: I really don’t.

Yesterday I installed the rather fantastic Google Browser Sync. A solution to a problem I had been trying to deal with unsuccessfully for quite some time now: keeping personal bookmarks, passwords and browser sessions and windows synced over a number of computers.

So I’ve been using it for a day now and my conclusion thus far is: it just works. Really.

During a typical working day I have about 10 to 15 browser tabs open on my desktop at any given time. Google Browser Sync allows me to save the state of my browser & all of the tabs remotely, so when I fire up my browser on my laptop, it automatically retrieves the last saved state & can continue to work where I left off.

Brilliant.

The same goes for logins & passwords, and — also important — my browser history.

One drawback of course is the fact that all of this information is stored on a server, encrypted of course, but nevertheless…

On the other hand, I do believe that security at Google is and will be much better than anything I can ever achieve on my personal computers.

Install it & let me know what you think.

Just released today: the Mac Google Video player. As usual Google is a bit skinny on the specs:

• Watch videos downloaded from Google Video
• Browse scenes within a video using thumbnails
• Skip to anywhere in the video, even if that portion hasn’t downloaded yet
• Sit back and watch videos in full screen mode
• Resume video downloads automatically

You can download it here.

If you want people to find a particular bit of information on the Internet - or on your site for that matter - make sure you put that particular bit of information on the Internet.

What’s not on the web, cannot be found on the web.

What’s the deal with this new MacBook? Marketing tactics at Apple always were excellent, but this time they’ve overdone it a bit.

If I compare the prices and the specifications of the top-end white MacBook and the Black MacBook over at the Apple store, the only discernable differences are:

• 20 Gb of diskspace
• black case

and of course a difference in the pricetag of 200 euro for the black MacBook.

Which is, of course, nice for Apple: everybody I talked to lately (well there are a few exceptions of course) wants a black one. The white one doesn’t even seem to be an option. People do look at the specifications, and do seem to notice that the specs are the same, but when asked about the price almost everybody fails to mention the 200 euro difference in price.

After mentioning the extra 200 euro the WhiteBook still isn’t even an option for most people. The BlackBook is coveted above all other models. Think different, indeed. Problem here is that everybody thinks different.
This all rather ties in nicely with a little book I’m re-reading: “Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture” by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. In of the chapters they describe how “the desire to differentiate oneself” is one of the fundamental engines of economy. I think the BlackBook is a perfect exemple of this theory.

And, by the way, who ever said that design doesn’t sell?