As 2007 comes to a close, here is my eclectic, contrarian, and surely incomplete list of favorite things that appeared or I discovered in 2007.

Software

Nisus Writer Pro: My bar-none favorite word processor. The Pro version was introduced this year as a step up from the Express version that’s been around for a few years. It’s deceptively simple looking, yet smoothly incorporates a robust feature set with an elegant interface and beautiful display of type. As a processor of words (as opposed to wannabe page layout app) it is unparalleled. If you are in the wordsmithing business, try this app.

Journler: This app has been out for a while but I just started using it this year. It is one of the few apps other than Camino that I keep open 24/7. See my earlier review (note that Journler is switching from a donation to paid model)

Numbers and Keynote: These two apps are part of iWork 07, Apple’s “productivity” suite that somewhat competes with Microsoft Office. At $79 for three apps it’s a screaming deal. Since I don’t use Pages (see Nisus Pro above…) Numbers and Keynote have been the two standouts for me. At last someone has taken a fresh look at the spreadsheet, and Numbers succeeds brilliantly. Yes it is missing some power functions, but it is aiming at a pro-sumer audience and for that it is perfect. Finally, someone has done cut/paste correctly - Excel’s method of doing this standard operation has always grated on me where the cut doesn’t take effect until the paste has been done.

While not perfect and with some frustrating oddities, the new version of Keynote brings some excellent features like easy to use path-based animation, new evocative canned animations and transitions, and instant alpha masking. But it also has important small features that improve productivity, like per-paragraph formatting (as opposed to Powerpoint’s per-text-block), groupings of slides in the flimstrip, and object-locking. (This version of Kenote addresses some of my complaints about Powerpoint.)

Squarespace 4.0+: This blog runs on the Squarespace platform, and the new versions released this year have brought excellent new capabilities in site search, statistics reporting, as well as overall refinements. I’ve used several other hosted and non-hosted blogging platforms and Squarespace trumps them all in its ease of use, UI elegance, and personal customer service.

Hardware

Pentax K10D: Everybody else will have the iPhone on their lists (and rightly so), so I’m going orthogonally here to recognize a prosumer digital SLR from a second-tier camera maker. The K10D brought high end features like weather sealing, anti-shake in the body, lots of AF points, large viewfinder, built-in DNG support, and a novel approach to ISO adjustment to a new low price level (under $600 now). Plus I think it is the most handsome of today’s 10 megapixel SLRs, and has excellent ergonomics. It’s shown here with one of Pentax’s unique “pancake” lenses that are great for street photography.

Media and Events

The Decemberists, The Crane Wife. Strictly speaking this came out toward the end of 2006, but I didn’t hear it til early 07. It’s been on my “turntable” steadily all year and has remained fresh and interesting.
Children of Men: It’s been a good year for apocalypse movies, kicked off with the stunning Children of Men. Layered with meaning and symbols, and a tension-filled story to propel it along, and great performances all around. Peter Merholz wrote up a good review.
Charlie Wilson’s War: Who would have thought that insider deal making and arms deals could be so uproariously funny? This movie had the audience in stitches, while driving home some hard lessons about not “fucking up the endgame” as Wilson puts it in the closing titles. Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman are at the top of their game.
Made to Stick: At once common sense and profound, this book is a must-read for anyone that has to communicate complex ideas and motivate others to action. Read my earlier review.
Nobel Peace Prize: 2007 was a tipping point in environmental awareness, and the joint awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change was a key contributor. It will be looked back upon as a turning point in mass consciousness.

 

Cars

Fiat Cinquecento: Finally a car to truly challenge the small-car crown of the MINI. To see one is to want one. Will they bring it to the US? Let’s hope so. (Review)
Alfa Romeo Competizione 8c: Just beautiful. How much is it? Who cares? (Official site)
Audi TT: Pictures of this had left me cold, but seeing it in person is another story. Not as iconic as the original, but it evolves the form in a sophisticated way. (Official site)

 

Serious Wheels has some highly stylized images of the new super-high-end Lamborghini Reventon. Only 20 will be made, and will cost some four times as much as Lambo’s previously most expensive model, the Murcielago LP640.

The car’s styling actually disappoints me, though it is unarguably striking, and is explicitly influenced by fighter jets. The press release (cited on Serious Wheels) states:

With the Reventón the [Lamborghini] Centro Stile designers have coherently developed this philosophy, inspired by another sphere where speed and dynamism reign absolute: modern aeronautics, responsible for the fastest and most agile airplanes in the world. This has created an extremely precise, technically striking style with a new vitality: interrupted lines and contorted surfaces create a fascinating play of light, giving the car incredible movement.

Clearly the F117 Nighthawk fighter is the reference point here, as it is really the only fighter that looks this jagged and planar. It was designed in the late 70’s, first appeared in the 1983 Gulf War, and is to be retired next year. Subsequent stealthy jets have been much more rounded, as the computational abilities to create the radar-evading surfaces have improved. And while the press release speaks about dynamics, stealthy aircraft are notorious for the instability, requiring constant computer correction or they would spin out of control.

Frankly it surprises me that it has taken almost 25 years for car design to be heavily influenced by the distinguished aesthetic of the stealth planes. When Harley Earl created the streamlined aesthetic for GM, it was roughly contemporaneous with the jets and rockets that inspired it.

What bugs me about the Reventon is that Lamborghini has essentially outsourced its design aesthetic. Instead of continuing their tradition of radical design that looks unlike anything else on the road at the time (e.g., the Miura, the Countach), they have borrowed the aesthetics for this limited-run special almost whole cloth from somewhere else. Even the cockpit has over-the-top references to aircraft instrumentation, with the speedometer and tach looking like a view of runway lights seen from approach. (Otherwise the cockpit is pretty run-of-the-mill.) It is disappointing that they did not take this opportunity to once again progress the state of the art in car styling. Instead the Reventon seems more like a look back.

Related posts:

Innovation Comes from Unexpected Places (or Neglected Ones)

SC Johnson has been heavily advertising their Glade Plug-Ins products recently and it got me to thinking, “How much electricity do all those Plug-Ins use?”. The answer: a surprisingly large amount - hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil worth, in fact.

To try and estimate the number of Glade Plug-Ins I used two numbers (since the company doesn’t provide exact sales figures). On the SC Johnson website they state that hundreds of millions have been sold over the course of more than 15 years, which if we take a fairly minimal case of 300 million over 15 years that gives us a number of 20 million per year. (This assumes they sell the same number today as they did when first introduced, which is obviously not true, so in fact the current sales rate is going to be considerably higher. But we’ll take the average for now.)

A second number comes from a recall notice in which 2.5 million of one particular model manufactured in a 4 month period in 2002 were recalled. This gives a total of 7.5 million per year, for that one model. Assuming a modest growth of 5% year over year (and my guess is the category has been growing considerably faster), that gives 9.5 million units in 2007. Since this was the least expensive of three Plug-Ins models, let’s say it comprises about half their total sales. This also gives us a 20 million per year number.

That’s a nice round number to work with, and probably on the conservative side, but my interest here is more in doing a thought experiment about how small individual actions add up to larger consequences, rather than getting a precise number on the amount of electricity. So 20 million is a good place to start. (It also doesn’t include similar products from other companies.)

The basic Glade Plug-in uses 2.1 watts of energy. The fancier ones with nightlights and light shows use over 3.5w. Let’s use 2.5 watts as our average across all the units sold, not knowing exactly how the model breakdown occurs so we’re again assuming that the lower-wattage/less expensive units make up 50% or so of sales. And the units may not draw their full power all the time (e.g. the nightlight is not on all the time).

Total electricity consumption then is:

• 20 million units x 2.5w x 24 hours x 365 days / 1000 = 438,000,000 kWh (kilowatt hours, the standard measurement in the US for power consumption over time)
• To power a year’s worth of Glade Plug-Ins therefore requires almost 26 million gallons of oil, or 613,000 barrels (one gallon of oil produces 17kWh of electricity, there are 42 US gallons in a barrel, so 714kWh per barrel)
• It also equates to 1/8 the output of a typical 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant. In the course of producing this much energy, the power plant will also create 1250 tons of sulfer dioxide (causes acid rain) and almost half a million tons of carbon dioxide (causes global warming).

(I’m not counting the amount of energy and resources required to produce the Plug-Ins in the first place, which is almost certainly more than what they consume.)

Not to mention that Glade Plug-ins were recently found by the National Resources Defense Council to contain “moderate” amounts of Phthalates, and one specifically in air fresheners which interferes with hormone production in humans and is listed by the State of California as causing birth defects or reproductive harm.

So that seems like quite a lot of resources to burn for something as relatively frivolous as giving your house a strong smell of Apple Cinnamon or Suddenly Spring. A better solution might be something like these Aroma Sticks from Method which require no electricity and are not fabricated using plastics and are also phthalate and butane free.

PS, If someone from SC Johnson or elsewhere is able to provide more precise sales and energy usage numbers, I’ll be happy to update. 

I just saw the newest release of the classic noir sci-fi film Blade Runner, subtitled “The Final Cut”. Undoubtedly it is the best version so far, surpassing the various other cuts that have come out over the 25 years since it was first released. I found that it raised new questions about identity in this MySpace world.

Like every designer nerd, I’ve seen Blade Runner at least a dozen times, a couple of times on the big screen. This Final Cut has been digitally retouched from a 70mm print and both the visuals and sound are stunning. The richness of every frame is breathtaking - everywhere you look at every moment there is something intriguing to see. It is a universe created whole and seamlessly in a way that very few other films have accomplished. I was fortunate to see it on a very large screen at the famed Grand Lake theater in Oakland, CA (complete with opening Wurlitzer).

Vangelis’ score thunders away (at times a bit too obtrusively), and the opening crashes are startling. The special effects give away almost nothing to CG effects today, in fact I would put the cityscapes of Blade Runner, made with miniatures, up against the last three Star Wars movies any day.

When the movie first appeared it was widely seen as a philosophical questioning on what it means to be human, combined with angst about the growing power of computers and concerns that they would eventually surpass humans in intelligence with apocalyptic consequences.

Today those concerns have to a large extent abated, and instead Blade Runner now resonates with themes of construction of identity and how much of our own identity we own. In the movie, the robot Replicants have memories implanted to make them more mentally stable, but they all share the same memories. The memories exist in their minds, substantiated by a handful of photos.

In the MySpace/Facebook/blog/Flickr world, we externalize our memories more than any time in history, constructing our identity one posting at a time. But by the same token, people are able to create their own memories of us, and therefore create their own versions of our identities, sometimes without our knowledge and usually without our control.

While the Replicants of Blade Runner were beholden to their makers for their memories, we today are also highly reliant for others on the construction of our self identities.

Ed Zander is stepping down as CEO at Motorola, having overseen a boom time and a gradual decline. While there are probably many inter-twined reasons for Motorola’s lack of performance after it hit the big time with the Razr, many will point to the lack of innovation following on the back of that spectacularly successful phone.

To his credit he was able to spot the potential of the Razr while it was still in development, and encouraged getting it to market rapidly. He recognized that it was just what Motorola needed to re-energize its image outside the company (which had lacked a hit consumer product since the Star Tac some ten years earlier), as well as to revitalize innovation inside Motorola itself. Time has shown that it was more successful at the former than changing the latter.

A fascinating article about Geoffrey Frost, then Chief Marketing Officer, and the development of the Razr can be found at Reveries. (Frost sadly passed away in late 2005.) Frost said:

There are no facts about certain things that are really, really important — new design directions, new “experience design” directions and new kinds of experiences that can create new businesses. At the end of the day, we have to assemble the best clues and inferences we can, and the best set of facts on what’s gone before, and make the leaps — to make the best — on the new things.

That’s one of the great things about Ed Zander. When Ed joined Motorola, we were already working on Razr and we kind of knew we had a great product. He took one look at it and said, “How many can you make?”

While the success of the Razr seems obvious in hindsight, it was far from a sure thing beforehand. At $499 when it first came out, it was twice the price of previous phones. Frost noted:

There’s a big lesson [here] about the limits of traditional research. Our traditional research told us there was a total available world market of about two million units for a $499 phone; we sold over two million units in the UK alone. So, the real lesson is, the best way to predict the future, as Peter Drucker once said, is to create it.”

He then comes out with this:

The best way to predict the total available market for a new thing is to invent it.

This is a profound statement, but also one that is scary to many middle managers afraid of risk-taking based on partial information, or who want to use information about the past to predict the future.

(I highly recommend this article by Grant McCracken about the development process by which the Razr came to be, there are many lessons in it.)

Unfortunately, it seems that this attitude prevailed at Motorola, and that the magic moment of the Razr was not able to create a broader shift at the company, to create a more innovation-focused and risk-tolerant culture. The later generation Razrs lacked the innovative spark, and did not recognize that the competition had caught up and that fickle consumers’ expectations had moved on. (And let us not speak of the Rokr travesty.) Zander and his team were not able to capture the momentum and convert it into continued growth.

Related articles:

• Motorola Tries to Sustain its Edge
•  Motorola Q: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory