“Pixel Union” is synonymous with “beautiful Tumblr themes”. Go take a look at their site and try out the demos of themes like Sticks and Stones with its hand-drawn charm, the retro-urban New Yorker theme or the simple but powerful grid of the Insider theme. Pixel Union themes turn Tumblrs into gorgeous sites that make you want to visit over and over again.

That same gorgeousness that goes into Pixel Union’s Tumblr themes can now go into your Shopify shop. Starting today, you can get your hands on Pixel Union’s new Shopify Themes and turn your shop into a place that customers will want to visit over and over again.

You’ll find the same magic that goes into Pixel Union’s Tumblr themes in their new Shopify themes: Carleton, Jitensha, Technophile and Vintage. They all come with a boatload of features:

• The same beauty and craftsmanship that goes into Pixel Union’s Tumblr themes, for both your shop’s catalogs as well as its blogs
• Lots of customizability to make the theme fit your shop: logo, fonts and colors
• Ties to the big social media services so you can harness word-of-mouth for your shop
• MailChimp integration so it’s simple to set up an email newsletter campaign to reach out to your customers
• Pixel Union’s speedy, expert and personalized support

Here’s a closer look at Pixel Union’s Shopify themes…

Carleton Classic and Modern

The Carleton theme is reminiscent of those thick, high-end clothing catalogs and comes packaged with two similar but distinct “flavors”. First, there’s the traditional, clean Classic:

Carleton Classic: See its page in the Shopify Theme Store | View the demo

…and there’s the contemporary, bold Modern:

Carleton Modern: See its page in the Shopify Theme Store | View the demo

Jitensha

Jitensha takes its inspiration from Japanese culture: the word means “bicycle” in Japanese, and the theme takes its design cues from Japanese minimalism.

Jitensha: See its page in the Shopify Theme Store | View the demo

Technophile Dark and Light

If your shop is about gadgets and gear, you should check out Technophile. It pays homage to Apple’s legendary interface design and comes packaged with two styles. There’s Dark…

Technophile Dark: See its page in the Shopify Theme Store | View the demo

…and if you prefer the white iPhone, there’s the Light style:

Technophile Light: See its page in the Shopify Theme Store | View the demo

Vintage Theme

If you have a shop that specializes in hand-made, artisanal products, you should check out Vintage Theme, with its letterpress-on-high-grade-paper look and boutique “feel”.

Vintage: See its page in the Shopify Theme store | View the demo

See Pixel Union’s Themes and More at the Theme Store!

Shopify gives you lots of options. If you’ve got the time and know-how, you can create a theme that’s your very own. You can also find the right “look and feel” your shop with a free or paid theme at the Theme Store, whether it’s one created by Pixel Union or any other of the wide range created by shopowners and designers.

We’re very happy to welcome Pixel Union to the Theme Store, and we think you’ll love their themes!

This article also appears in the Shopify Blog.

Welcome Daring Fireball readers! In case you were wondering if I’ve prepared a response to the article titled The Types of Companies that Publish Future Concept Videos, take a look here.

Pictured above is Microsoft’s most recent technology concept video. Here’s their description:

Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.

As you might expect, John “Daring Fireball” Gruber, who’s often been called Apple’s freelance PR guy, viewed it with a jaundiced eye:

This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today.

Of course, he’d never say such a thing about Apple’s classic Knowledge Navigator video, which at the time it was made – circa 1987, when the Macintosh II and SE, IBM PS/2 series and Amiga 500 and 2000 were brand new machines – was at least as pie-in-the-sky as this newest Microsoft video. It’s contained within one of the segments of the video below, which features videos by Apple:

Now I’ll agree with Gruber that by and large, Apple technology is generally more enjoyable to use and feels more like “the future”. I will also agree that my former employer, whom a former coworker recently referred to as “The Fail Ship Microsoft”, seems a shadow of its former self and far less likely to be the company to create future industry-defining products than Apple — or at least the incarnation of Apple with Steve Jobs as Chief Tastemaker. Today’s Microsoft doesn’t have a keeper of the vision: Bill Gates has left to focus his on saving the world, Ray Ozzie, the guy who took on the role of “chief visionary” at The Empire, resigned last year along with the Entertainment and Devices division’s last, best hopes, Robbie Bach and J Allard. The people who remain are extremely skilled techies, astute suits who can continue to drive sales and “keep their managers’ scorecards green” (that’s a common expression within the company) and an evangelism team that’s second to none and of which I was a proud member, but they’re all hamstrung by decision-makers with the sense of vision that God gave oysters. That’s one of the reasons I left the company: to be an evangelist, you have to believe, and I didn’t believe anymore.

I part ways with Gruber in his declaration that Microsoft should spend more effort making some cool stuff today and less on creating concept videos. Concept videos aren’t promises of products coming in the next one or two years, but act as a star by which people can navigate the future and an inspiration to invent it. Working with technology means dealing with overwhelming amounts of minutiae, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the technology for technology’s sake and forget about what it’s all for. I would argue that if Microsoft wants to rehabilitate its image and regain its relevance in the hearts and mind of both the alpha geeks and the public at large, they should probably make more of these videos, not only for the public, but for their own benefit as well. Without visions like concept videos to guide them, especially with the lack of someone in the visionary role, they may remain stuck on their current course: doing well but effectively coasting, content to make incremental improvements to already successful products or playing catch-up as with Internet Explorer, phones and tablets in efforts that are in danger of being too little, too late.

Some other concept videos worth watching include these old AT&T ads from that played all the time between shows in the early 1990s. Many of the predicted devices and services in these ads came to be, but AT&T had little to do with their creation:

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini was a user interface guy at Apple from 1978 to 1992, after which he worked at Sun and created the Project Starfire concept video, a little drama that illustrates his vision of the office of the future. Just as Apple’s Knowledge Navigator has the 1980s all over it, this video has all the earmarks of early 1990s television, right down to the incidental synth music that’s straight out of the better, earlier seasons of Beverley Hills 90210.

Here’s part one:

The first thirty seconds of the video shows how risky it is to try and add little “realistic” touches to a story about the future. In the first thirty seconds, Princess Di is mentioned as having joined the British House of Lords; in real life, she died seven years prior to the story’s setting of 2004. Also sad is the fact that while Sun existed in 2004, it would be absorbed by Oracle six years later.

Here’s part two:

Compare the Starfire video with this “vision of the future” video that Microsoft debuted at the TechReady conference in early 2009. Popular Science said that "The 2019 Microsoft details with this video is almost identical to the 2004 predicted in this video produced by Sun Microsystems in 1992." I’ll leave it to you to make the call:

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

The Ads

Rather than tell you how great-looking and clever the new ads for Windows Phone 7 are, I thought I’d show them instead. Here’s the first one, which features Donovan’s song, Season of the Witch:

Here’s the other one, which asks this question: “Really?” (In case you were wondering, the tune is In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg.)

The Hint

The message in both these ads is pretty simple: Smartphones eat up a lot of your attention and time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one that didn’t do that?

There are lots of little goodies in Windows Phone 7 that address this issue. The ones I can think of off the top of my head include:

• The lock screen. You don’t have to unlock your phone just to find out what the next appointment on your calendar is. The lock screen displays it, along with the date, time and the number of voice and text messages you have.
• The Start page. The start page is where you pin your favourite and often-used items so you can access them quickly, so you don’t have to riffle through page after page of apps.
• What you can pin to the Start page. You can pin more than just apps to the Start page. Is there someone – a spouse, significant other, friend or family member – whom you phone, text, or email often? Pin that person to the Start page! Is there a website you hit many times a day? Pin it to the Start page!
• Communicating quickly with people. The People Hub on your phone makes looking up and reaching people fast and easy. Tap on a person for all the ways to reach him or her and tap on any of one of those ways to start communicating. A quick swipe shows you that person’s Facebook updates. Getting in touch and keeping up is pretty easy with this UI.
• Finding. The context-sensitive Search button is all about finding what you need, whether it’s some information on your phone, on the web or in the real world, and you get this all from a single button press.

In all these cases, it’s about getting what you need from the phone, as quickly as possible.You should ideally be able to “glance and go”: fire up your phone, get the information you need, then put it away and go do what you set out to do. The phone is supposed to augment your life; it’s not supposed to be your life.

And therein lies the hint for your app designs. If you’re designing an informational, non-game app for Windows Phone 7, take a cue from its “glance and go” philosophy and ask yourself this: What one question does my app answer for the user, and does it answer this question quickly?

Examples of questions that apps can answer include:

• Where’s the nearest Tim Hortons?
• Should I take an umbrella with me today?
• Am I getting a good deal from this store, or should I be shopping elsewhere?
• Given a choice of three different wines, which one should I buy?
• What interesting stuff is happening in this city tonight?

If you’re thinking of building a WP7 app, think of a question it can answer for the user, provide the answer and then get out of the way. Let that be your guide and you just might code up a winner.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the tricky things about helping developers build for a platform that has yet to be released is that it’s a tabula rasa. There’s no history, which is both blessing and curse: we developers get to make that history, but at the same time, we’re working in the dark. There are no examples to emulate and no best practices to follow – it’s just us and whatever user interface guidelines there happen to be (which, in the case of Windows Phone 7, is the Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide).

That’s why I’m glad that Microsoft is building WP7 apps like USGA Shot Tracker, a gorgeous golf scorekeeping app that practically announces to developers: “This is how you do it. This is how you write a usable, beautiful, truly Windows Phone 7 app.” Here’s a video of USGA Shot Tracker in action:

Give the app a look, and also make sure you check out the article on Long Zheng’s blog, istartedsomething, which includes images of USGA Shot Tracker’s screens.

Keep an eye on this blog, because I’m a couple of days away from starting an ongoing series on well-designed WP7 apps and how you implement them. I’ll take a closer look at USGA Shot Tracker and other apps, going through them with a fine-toothed comb in attempt to learn as much as possible from them, and share that knowledge with you.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t have Silverlight? You can download it here or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) and Zune formats.

Here’s a Channel 9 video shot at Emerging Languages Camp 2010, the first conference on up-and-coming programming languages held in Portland on July 21 – 22. It’s a casual conversation with:

• Rich Hickey, creator of the Clojure (pronounced “closure”) programming language. It’s a dialect of Lisp intended general-purpose functional programming language with a lot of support for concurrent programming. If you caught our Ignite Your Coding webcast with Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin earlier this year, you heard his high praise for the language. Clojure targets both the JVM and CLR.
• Joe Pamer, compiler developer for the F# programming language. F# is a “hybrid” programming language, built with functional programming in mind, but also programmable in a more imperative object-oriented way. Much of it is compatible with the OCaml programming language, there are some C# ideas in there as well, and it’s one of the languages baked right into Visual Studio 2010.

In this conversation, Rich and Joe talk about their ideas on programming language design and evolution, functional programming, concurrency, how F# fits into Visual Studio and the granddaddy of them all, Lisp.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What you see above is a slide from Jason Putorti’s slide deck titled 10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design. Don’t let the title throw you off: everything in the presentation is even more important for developers because we actually make the things our customers use.

If you decide to commit only one of these ten things to memory, commit this one: Design is more than pretty pictures. It’s about combining different aspects of intelligence – rationality, creativity and empathy – to meet your users’ needs and drive business success. It’s about crafting the user experience, which is how the thing you’re designing works in the real world and how your users feel about it.

I’ve included the slide deck below…enjoy!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

That most hated of typefaces, Comic Sans, gets anthropomorphized and bad-assified in Mike Lacher’s piece for McSweeney’s titled, (in)appropriately enough, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Last night at a gathering of Toronto digital marketing and social media types held by TheBizMedia – I’m not sure I qualified for an invite, but hey, free beer! – Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, gave a very entertaining, funny and insightful presentation in which he talked about the lessons he learned as an online marketer.

I shot a five-minute video snippet of his presentation, where he talked about:

• First name and email address are often enough. When you need users to sign up for things like contests or surveys, do you really need to take up their valuable time by collecting information that you probably don’t need? (I know that at Microsoft, we ask for great gobs of information when you sign up for even the simplest of things. I do try to get them to tone it down.)
• How to get people to take your surveys. Telling them that “your answers will help us” isn’t going to get them to take your surveys. Scott found that what works for him is offering a chance at a prize – even a $50 Amazon certificate – boosts the number of people who take survey by orders of magnitude.
• Auto-DM replies on Twitter. Don’t. Just don’t.

You’ll probably want to turn up the volume on the video. Scott was speaking without a microphone, and as good a videocamera as the Flip Mino HD is, I would’ve had to get obnoxiously close to the stage to get better sound.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re in the Greater Toronto Area, have basic knowledge of database queries and want to help a grad student with a research project, Zuzel Vera Pacheco, one of Greg Wilson’s students at University of Toronto, needs to borrow your brain! In exchange, you’ll get a chance to win a $100 Best Buy gift card.

Here’s her description of the project:

Want to win a $100 Best Buy gift card? Do you have basic knowledge about database queries? If so, I need you!

Subjects are needed to take part in a study concerning the visualization of database queries. Participants will be asked to draw diagrams that represent the execution of database queries or to determine what queries are represented by a set of diagrams. This study will help design a tool intended to help expert and novice programmers to design and debug such queries. The time needed for the study will range from 30 minutes to an hour, and can take place in the Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto or elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area.

A basic understanding of relational databases and database queries is required. The examples will contain queries in SQL and other programming languages like Ruby or Python. The participants should be fluent/conversant in English.

Participants who complete the study will be entered into a random draw for a $100 Best Buy gift card. The odds of winning this prize are 1 in 30.

If you think you can help Zuzel with her project, drop her a line!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

In an earlier article, I wrote that Brian Fling’s book, Mobile Design and Development, led me to a couple of instances where the number 7 appeared in writing on mobile development. The first was Tomi Ahonen’s thesis that mobile is the 7th mass medium.

The number 7 also appears in Chapter 5 of Mobile Design and Development, titled Developing a Mobile Strategy. In it, Fling lists seven rules for developing your own mobile strategy, which I’ve summarized below.

1. Forget what you think you know.

The mobile industry is highly competitive, evolves quickly and produces a lot of press releases full of speculation and empty promises on a scale that dwarfs that of the early dot-com days.

“Do yourself a favor and forget everything you think you know about mobile technology,” writes Fling. Instead, he suggests that you:

• Ask the hard questions about your business, your customers and your development capacity without considering the latest hype about a new tool or technology.
• Focus on what’s right for your user instead of simply emulating what your competitors are doing.
• Forget what you think you know about mobile – it’s most likely wrong.

2. Believe what you see, not what you read.

Fling writes: “In mobile, any argument can be made, and for a few thousand dollars you can buy a
report or white paper that supports your argument.”

His suggestions include:

• Mobile industry reports have a short shelf life. Anything over a year or so old is probably useless. (And you should probably ignore anything pre-iPhone other than for a good laugh.)
• Ask your users questions in person, in their context, rather than relying on focus groups.
• Record what your users say. “Nothing makes your case like your users’ own words.”

3. Constraints never come first.

There are many constraints in mobile development: the size of the device, processor speed, battery life, networks, business issues and so on. You will have to account for them, but if you do so too early, you might end up killing some ideas before they even get prototyped, never mind implemented.

Fling writes:

If you are concerned about the constraints of the mobile medium, know that there will always be constraints in mobile. Get over it. It isn’t a deal breaker. Just make sure you aren’t the deal breaker. Focus on strategy first, what they user needs, and lay down the features; then, if the constraints become an issue, fall back to the user goals. There is always an alternative.

4. Focus on the user’s context, goals and needs.

Here’s how Fling defines the terms:

• Needs are simple. The example he uses is the need to eat. He says that our of context, goals and needs, a user’s needs are the easiest to predict if you know some basic information about the him or her.
• Goals arise from needs. In his example, the goal is to get food.
• Context is the user’s current state. It could be something like “I am at this location and I’m in the mood for Thai food.”

Fling’s suggested strategy for focusing on context, goals and needs:

• Define the users’ context first. Without that context, you don’t have a mobile strategy, it’s just a plan of action.
• Uncover the users’ goals, then try to understand how the user’s context alters those goals.
• Once you know the users’ goals, find out the actions they want to take.
• Look for ways to filter what you present to your users by their context.

5. You can’t support everything.

That’s right! Just stick with supporting Windows Phone 7!

But seriously: unless you’ve somehow got access to a big pool of developers to cover them all, you’re going to have to narrow down the number of devices you support – possibly even down to one. I’ll do what I can to make sure that Windows Phone 7 is the platform people want, but you need to see what platform your users are using.

Fling’s tips:

• Start with the devices that your customers are using.
• The most popular device or the one that’s easiest to develop for may not be the best device for your project.
• If you’re converting a web application into a mobile app, look at your server logs and see what mobile devices are accessing it. Target those devices.
• Go mobile phone window shopping and see what devices the stores are targeting at different types of users.

6. Don’t convert, create.

My mother, a piano player, bought an “electronic sheet music” tablet. The idea was that instead of having to keep lots of books and folders of sheet music, she could get rid of the clutter and have a convenient, easily expandable music library. Unfortunately, the device uses a standard desktop interface – actually, a sub-standard Linux window manager, not even a decent one like Gnome or KDE – and it’s a royal pain to use. Mom went back to sheet music on actual sheets of paper and the device is now gathering dust.

On the other hand, the TiVo – also a Linux device – has a great user interface. It’s designed around the way you use a TV, not around what’s easier to implement. It’s not a port of desktop TV recording software (most of which is terrible to use), but a whole new thing, and it’s better for it.

With that in mind, here are Fling’s “Don’t covert, create” tips:

• Understand your user’s’ context. Knowing how, when and under what conditions your users will use your mobile app will allow you to create a better user interface and experience.
• Don’t forget that mobile isn’t just a shrunken-down desktop; it’s its own thing, with its own strengths. 

7. Keep it simple.

That’s simple, not stupid. People tend to use their mobile devices while they’re on the go or doing something else, so helping them get their task done is far more important that loading your mobile app with features. Mobile users have to deal with many constraints, so show restraint in the mobile products you build.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Time for another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

If you’re following what’s happening with Windows Phone 7, you should follow Charlie Kindel – both his blog and Twitter account. Charlie is one of the people behind the new “Phone 7” experience; I don’t think he’s exaggerating in his Twitter bio when he says “The future of application development for Windows Phones is in my hands.”

In his latest blog entry – Focus, Focus, Focus – he writes that the reason that Windows Phone 7 seems atypical of Microsoft is the power of “no”. The Windows Phone team didn’t just decide what they were going to build, they also decided what they were not going to build, and work around the “5P” framework of:

1. Purpose
2. Principles
3. Priorities
4. Plan
5. People

Here’s the Windows Phone developer experience team’s stated purpose:

Our purpose is to harness the energy, talent, and attention of developers and designers with a platform and ecosystem that delivers on the developer experience end to end; that, combined with the phone’s end-user experience, results in a winning virtuous cycle.

From that purpose, they derived some principles, among which are:

• Every decision we make must be made mindful of the effect on end-users. Simply put, the end-user is king. 
• We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.
• No API will be created or documented without a clear use case; “build it and they will come” APIs almost always do nothing but create bad legacy.
• We will build on the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.
• We will strive to not show our organizational boundaries to developers.

What’s truly interesting is the list of Windows Phone 7’s targeted developer segments. This is an ordered list, with the highest-priority segment listed first:

1. Consumer Developer - Pro Devs who build products that are sold directly or given out for free to general public end-users.
2. Non-Pro Developer – Non-Pro Developers building products for academic/personal use.
3. In-ROM Developer - Pro Devs who build products & technologies that are sold to mobile operators or device manufacturers.
4. Enterprise Developer –Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are sold to corporate clients and businesses.
5. IT Developer – Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are only for use by their own corporation.

I have often quipped that sometimes using Microsoft stuff “feels like eating from the dumpsters outside a cubicle farm”; that is, that their software targets enterprise and IT first and small-shop/indie coders like I was last. This list inverts the priorities I image the Windows Mobile team had, and my response to that is “good”.

Charlie makes a point of saying that the prioritization is temporal; over time, the priorities may change and they will serve some of the lower-priority segments, but all the while adhering to the purpose and principles listed above.

Then there’s the plan. The plan is to have Windows Phone 7 ready for the MIX conference, and it looks like that will happen. “Events,” Charlie writes, “are great forcing functions for engineering teams”.

Finally, the people. The Windows Phone 7 team is a diverse bunch coming from all across Microsoft – the Xbox people, developer division geeks as well as members from Windows Live, Exchange, Windows OS, Office and Developer and Platform Evangelism.

Go check out Charlie’s full blog entry, which describes the Windows Phone 7 team’s purpose, principles, priorities, plan and people in greater detail, and check in on him often. If you’re planning on building apps for Windows Phone 7, he’s one of the people to follow.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon!

What is MIX?

The email sigs for people involved with MIX claim that it’s a “designer/developer lovefest for the web”, and I think it’s a pretty one-line summary of the event. It’s a conference for people who develop and design for the web, with particular attention paid to user interface and experience. This will be the 5th MIX conference, the first one having been held in 2006.

What Sort of Sessions Will There Be at MIX10?

Here’s a selection of some of the sessions and workshops at MIX10:

• Boot camps on up-and coming frameworks, such as Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• Molly Holzschlag’s all-day HTML5 workshop
• Sessions on user experience such as:
  • Design Fundamentals for Developers
  • The Art, Technology and Science of Reading
  • The Laws of User Experience
  • Running with Wireframes: Taking Information Architecture into Design
• Technology sessions such as
  • Building Cloud Services with Windows Azure Platform
  • Miguel de Icaza’s session on The Mono Project
  • Robots at MySpace: Massive Scaling a .NET Website with the Microsoft Robotics Studio
  • Touch in Public: Multi-Touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences

There are some other cool things happening at MIX10 that I can’t talk about until the conference. Be there, or if you can’t, watch this space!

You Get to Vote!

You can help choose some of the content for MIX10! We took a number of submissions for presentations in an open call for content, and now it’s time to vote for them. You can see all the submissions here, and voting ends on Friday, January 15th.

Early-Bird Discount

If you register for MIX10 by January 15th, you’ll save US$600 off the admission and pay only US$795 – and you’ll also get a free night at the conference hotel, Mandalay Bay! After the 15th, the price goes up to a full US$1395, so if you want to go, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This morning at the Mesh 2009 Conference, Microsoft’s Mark Relph (my boss’ boss) and OCAD President Sara Diamond announced a Microsoft/OCAD partnership. Microsoft will provide OCAD with a Surface tabletop computer along with software and support (which includes training and courses by Infusion Development, who know a lot about developing software for the Surface).

We’re providing OCAD with a Surface development unit along with Visual Studio and other developer tools related to building software for it. The Surface will be put in OCAD’s Digital Media Research + Innovation Institute, whose first phase is currently under construction. It’ll be used as a tool within the school’s -disciplinary Digital Futures Initiative (DFI) program, whose goals include establishing a research and innovation laboratory for interactive design, art and digital media.

Mark Relph writes:

Microsoft Surface will help OCAD students, faculty and researchers to apply interactive technology to their work in digital media, art and design.  In conjunction with our partner Infusion Development, we will be directly engaged with teaching students how to harness the power of these new technologies.  This is only the start – in the years ahead we’ll be bringing in our technology and design experts to OCAD to help further strengthen this relationship. Our focus will not just be on the Surface technologies – as we move into a world where the interaction with software will depend on new user experiences like touch, speech and other capabilities it is critical that we prepare the next generation of software designers and experience experts.

As programmers, engineers and techies, we at Microsoft can come up with all sorts of interesting uses and applications for Surface, but we can’t come up with all of them. We feel that the students at OCAD, who have a strong bent towards design, will come up with some interesting ideas and applications that would never occur to us whose bent is towards geekery. Having worked at a job where OCAD graduates were the majority, I can say from experience that there’s a certain “something” that you get from design-oriented minds that you don’t get from engineering-oriented minds. You can see that “something” in Apple’s products, and it’s something I’d like to see more of from The Empire.

Last night’s episode of The Simpsons made some pretty funny pokes at Apple, or as they’re referred to in the episode, "Mapple":

In three minutes’ worth of opening sequence, they manage to get in a fair number of jabs and gags, including:

• Apple stores’ design aesthetic: “It’s so sterile!”
• The price points of Apple products – even the fake “myPod” earbuds cost forty bucks
• The "silhouette” iPod ads
• Steve Job’s keynotes and the breathless, worshipful way they’re received
• The “cool factor” associated with Apple products
• The “1984” ad for the original Macintosh. Comic Book Guy is the perfect guy to throw the hammer – he even has the same shorts as the hammer-throwing revolutionary.

There are many lessons that tech companies (and yes, that includes the empire of which I am part) could learn from Mapple – er, Apple – from differentiating yourself with good design to making an emotional and experiential connection with your users. It’s not just feature sets and price points. After all, even though we’ve had electric light for over a century, candles remain a $2 billion dollar industry and can be found in seven out of ten homes.

(As for Bart’s bit about Steve Jobs and Bill gates smooching on a pile of money, that’s been done before in the form of hot Steve-on-Bill slash fiction.)