May sound funny coming from a typography-obsessive whose website has used Verdana as the text face for its entire nine-year existence, but I just don’t care much for Verdana for anything other than use on relatively low-resolution displays at small sizes. (E.g. Verdana’s uppercase I and J. Ugh.) Interesting expansion of the two families, though.

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Tumblr:

Congress is considering two well-intentioned but deeply flawed bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.

That really is an accurate assessment of this legislation. Hats off to Tumblr for bringing so much attention to this — they’ve changed their dashboard interface to direct all Tumblr users to this page.

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The EFF at its very best. If you haven’t been following the saga of this SOPA legislation, here’s some background on just how dreadful it is. It’s a power play from big corporate media companies — the sort of legislation that nearly everyone strenuously opposes but which might pass because the money is on the wrong side.

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Dave Winer, on Google’s “tablet”-optimized layout for search results on the iPad:

Designers really need to hear the following, loud and clear: The iPad browser is fully capable. It doesn’t need you to treat it differently. You’re fighting with users when you get fancy. Just stick with what works on the desktop.

I agree, but Google’s search results are not best example here. At least the layout is “tablet”-optimized.

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Let’s be clear though, NPD also shows Android phones, combined, outselling iPhones, combined. What’s interesting here is just how different a game Apple is playing than every other company in the racket. The company with a majority share of the industry’s profits makes just one phone per year — and the gap between the 4 and 4S was 16 months — and yet their model that debuted in June 2009 remained the second-best-selling handset in the country as late as last month.

Sniper rifle versus a bunch of guys running around with shotguns.

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A “the sky is falling in Cupertino” piece by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:

One reason Jobs was so good at selling was that his product demonstrations were, for the most part, grand reveals of closely held secrets. Apple secrecy has made for great theater. Great theater makes for an excellent brand.

Our source close to Apple employees says that with Jobs gone, some of them are starting to loosen up about what they’re working on.

“Everybody has kind of dropped their guard,” he says.

OK, what have they “loosened up about”?

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Board of director news from Apple:

Apple today named Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. as the Companys non-executive Chairman of the Board. Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apples board since 2005, has served on all three board committees — audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation — and will continue to serve on the audit committee. Apple also announced that Robert A.

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Re: the previous item, on ideas being merely multipliers and the real value of anything being in the execution, here’s a terrific excerpt Philip Elmer-DeWitt pulled from Robert X. Cringely’s 1995 interview with Steve Jobs:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. []

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want.

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I’ve linked to this short 2005 piece by Derek Sivers once before, but it’s worth a re-link today, in the context of assessing Steve Jobs’s accomplishments:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

So succinct, so accurate, so widely misunderstood.

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