Posts Tagged: jony ive

advertising / creative / iPhone / observatory / technology / windows phone 7 — 8 Comments
28
Jun 11

Jony Ive’s long-lost brother

Meet Marko Ahtisaari, fraternal twin of Jony Ive.

Interestingly, though Marko and Jony were separated at birth, Marko ended up working in the same line of business. He’s Senior VP of Design at Nokia, responsible for that company’s new N9 smartphone. DNA is a powerful thing.

But it gets even more interesting.

It turns out that everyone in Apple’s creative department has a twin sibling — and they all work at Nokia. That would include the launch video writer, the director and the entire video production crew…

It is absolutely true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the world of global commerce, however, it’s also a big, lazy ripoff.

It’s just not possible to create a video so uncannily similar to Apple’s unless you set out with the specific goal of duplicating their work. (With the obvious motive of trying to duplicate their success.)

We should keep in mind that this is the sad work of Nokia’s marketing department, not their engineering department. However, the guys who designed and built the N9 aren’t off the hook yet.

It was last April when Nokia announced their new partnership with Microsoft, which was to result in Windows Phone 7 replacing their Symbian and MeeGo OSes. Yet the N9 is a major new phone from Nokia — still running MeeGo.

A high-stakes double-cross? Playing both sides of the street? Or just a ploy to thoroughly confuse the investment community?

Whatever, all of the above shows that Nokia is one company who has much to learn about sending a simple message. Or an original one.

[Thanks, cbee, for the tip.]

naming / observatory / technology — 11 Comments
23
Oct 09

The mouse completes its journey

mouse_history3

Okay, it may not be the most spectacular part of the computing experience — but Apple has always had a special place in its heart for the l’il critter that helped launch Revolution #1.

Here’s a quick stroll down memory lane, starting with the very first Macintosh mouse (which clearly shared some DNA with the common chimney brick).

Savor for a moment one of Apple’s most wretched mistakes: the hockey-puck mouse that shipped with the original iMac. Having no obvious “up” or “down” by feel, it sent cursors flying in all the wrong directions. A classic case of over-design. For consumers it was a major annoyance, for pros (it also shipped with the Power Mac) it was an outright insult.

Fortunately, chief designer Jony Ive recovered from that one. Form and function then lived happily ever after as we got the multi-button mouse with no buttons, the innovative scroll wheel (on the questionably named Mighty Mouse), and now, fresh out of the oven, the Magic Mouse. Clearly, this is the mother of all mice — now standard with the new iMacs and also available separately.

I tried one the other day and, creepy as it may sound, it actually made me smile. The entire mouse is a button, the entire surface is touch sensitive. You scroll or flip through pages simply by sliding a finger or two. It really is one of those “what will they think of next” moments. And it gives you the feeling that Apple puts more thinking into their mouse than most computer makers put into their PCs.