A few Thursdays ago, Conan O’Brien visited the Intel headquarters in Santa Clara to thank them for sponsoring his tour in San Francisco. The skit he filmed there finally aired on the show last night. It’s pretty funny. I’m surprised Intel still uses cubicles as opposed to contemporary office rooms, but hey, if they can design great chips like the Core 2 in an environment like that, it must still work. (Via Digg)
Update: Original YouTube video removed, another mirrored at Clipstr. Thanks Jovian.
Microsoft in Australia has successfully filed a trademark application on the 24th of April for the Windows Vista melody you hear at startup – the one that took 18 months, 20 people and 500 choices to make. For those musically-talented geeks out there who were wondering what it was composed of, here it is.
The mark consists of the sound of dual ascending melodies played in parallel as 2-note chords E/B, G#/E, a brief rest, followed by two more 2-note chords B/F#, E/B where the initial notes are played two octaves above middle C, as represented in the musical score attached to the application.
You can thank me for this groundbreaking piece of journalism later. Quick, go try it out on your instruments!
A clip from this week’s The Chaser’s War on Everything. A comedy sketch has never had so much educational value.
A desk has never been so fascinating before, but not a lot of desks comes with a touchable surface and heads-up display. It’s safe to say, Russ Burtner’s desk kicks the crap out of every other desk out there, including those irresistible IKEA desks. Of course, this desk doesn’t come disassembled or with an instruction manual, and there’s only two in the world, but it’s Microsoft Center for Information Work‘s latest innovation demoed at the Convergence 2007 conference in early March appropriately named “DigiDesk” – a Microsoft trend for giving cool products crap names.
I’m hitting myself for not picking this up earlier, I thank a friend who brought this to my attention today. What you see here is a prototype of Microsoft’s vision of future computing scenarios in the workplace, because you know, they need something costly to drain some of that $5 billion quarterly profit of theirs.
I really don’t think I could work at a desk like that, I’d be too busy flicking documents around. 😀
Iconfactory, the small design company who holds a near-monopoly over the design of some of the most delicious icons in many commercial Windows and Mac software titles has come out claiming some credit on the design of Windows Vista’s icons.
Building on the groundbreaking work we had done for Microsoft’s Windows XP icon suite, the Iconfactory once again worked hand in hand with the design team in Redmond to help design the look and feel of the Windows Vista icon suite. Over the course of two years, style proposals were created and refined in cooperation with Microsoft’s creative team, to match and express Windows Vista’s Aero vision and styling. Once the final concepts for the icon style were completed, Microsoft’s designers expanded on this visual language and used it to internally create the full suite of icons you see today in Windows Vista.
Assuming the icons above are samples from the final concept, its interesting to see how they differ from the final Windows Vista icons. For example, the concept icons all face rightwards and are lit from the top right corner (like XP), whereas in the final they all face leftwards and are lit from the top-left. Much of the detail on these particular icons have been carried over to the final design, right down to the assortment of paintbrushes in the Paint icon. These guys clearly nailed the concepts.
But they are not the only people who deserve recognition for this massive overhaul of icons in Windows. Taking into account Vista refreshed about 10 times as many icons as XP did, as well as the introduction of high-resolution icons, many design agencies and designers at Microsoft all deserve a round of applause. While they did miss out on some detail here and there, it certainly marks a new milestone for Windows.
Last month, Microsoft had announced that they would spoil every MIX 07 attendee with not only a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, but also a special Commemorative Edition of Expression Studio as a celebration of it’s launch (and for putting up with seeing the Pussycat Dolls for one more time at a Microsoft event in Vegas). Earlier today, Jeff Sandquist posted a blurry photo from his phone captured from behind-the-scenes.
This limited edition packaging features one-of-a-kind artwork said to reflect Microsoft’s beliefs for hand-crafted design and user-experiences. In other words, they wanted to do something cool.
Each copy of the commemorative edition is unique and features different pencil sketches on the cover. But these are not just any sketches, they are carefully scribbled by professional designers and even the members of the Expression team. You can’t deny a lot of work went into each one of these, especially when thousands of attendees will each receive a visibly different design.
Just even thinking of drawing thousands of unique pencil sketches sounds a lot of blood, sweat and tears, not to mention the logistics of transferring them onto the box. However I do hope there’s no blood or sweat going in those boxes.
Miwa Mueller from the Expression team who worked this concept explains,
Pencil is still the number one tool for designers so I thought it would be cool to have a design that acknowledges that aspect of the whole process before designer start doing something digitally. So these are pencil sketches created by designers when they were brainstorming on a new project. Some of the art comes from our own Expression Team. Each one is unique.
Extra special thanks to Miwa and Cherri who went out of their way trying to get me these high-resolution photographs.