gondry motorola ad

I was delighted to see some new Gondry work in a medium that he is really well suited to: the advertisment. Showing here with an ad for Motorola. Gondry is the king of the lo-fi look. In his last movie The Science of Sleep there were several dream sequences where the city seems to be made of cardboard. He is obviously exploring this a little further here. I absolutely love the way he explores the features of the new phone by imagining it as a real world entity complete with people inside operating the various functions. Gondry loves the surreal but he is never over-indulgent. Always charming and forever creating a tangible and enticing world to explore. His new movie Be Kind Rewind is out soon.

Interactive Shopfront

I really love this ingenious way to showcase your wares in a shop window seen here for New York Fashion Week for Elle MacPherson Intimates. Devised by Human Locator this is a great way to generate interest in a shop display as it encourages people to explore the window at their leisure and spend more time there than they necessarily would. Adding a level of interaction like this breaks the mold and reminded me of this banner of the day over at bannerblog. Exploration with your mouse to mimic your finger movement is the same in this banner as waving your hands by the window to see what is underneath. This really appeals to our inherent nature to be nosy and explore.

Review: Sticky Windows

I've been using Sticky Windows for about a week now and I've got to say I'm impressed. This great little app sits in the background and is launched on start-up. It is an alternative to minimizing windows to the dock which I've got to say I'm not a big fan of. I find that doing this I often forget about what I have open and using the application switcher can often work in unexpected ways. With Sticky Windows you drag your window to the side of the screen and it morphs into an elegant tab. You can see what you have open but the windows aren't all cluttering your desktop. If you're anything like me you have several windows open at once, this is a great way to manage your workspace. That is until Leopard arrives and we have Spaces, but more on that soon.

The countdown to Leopard

One of the most exiting new features in the upcoming Leopard has got to be Stacks. This could be a great new workflow for people who have to manage several files all over their system. For myself, I often find that I have a desktop littered with various files. What Stacks aims to do is to group those files by kind and stack them ontop of each other in a 3D style pile. With a click you can open the fan of files or have them arranged in grid. Thus saving a whole bunch of real estate on the desktop. Here's what you can expect from Apple in Leopard...



But of course what Apple does well has usually been done by other people first. I recall seeing the following video about a year ago and just highlights exactly the kind of bleeding-edge stuff that people are working on. An attempt to make the desktop a more intuitive space and more like the kind of space we actually have around us. Don't forget when the personal computer first came out we were expected to take on the notion of files and folders to understand the hierarchy of a computer's directory. This is just the next step....



And could this be the future. Apple is well in place to provide a home computing system like the following video. Multi-touch iMac? Open GL graphics. It's all there. The question is do we really want to be using hand gestures to navigate our personal computers?

iPhone vs iPod touch

So with Apple's touch line-up now in place for the UK holiday season I must admit that I am hankering for one of these devices. But which one to choose? There are three choices.

8GB iPod touch for £199
16GB iPod touch for £269
8GB iPhone for £269

The iPod touch is undoubtedly a great device but the iPhone is an iPod as well. And it would be so great to do away with that extra device I carry around with me, my phone. So are any of these configurations worth me giving up my 60GB iPod and my Sony Ericsson? Ok so storage is undoubtedly an issue. At the moment I carry around about 30GB of data. Half of this is in the form of music and the rest is a few movies and most of my picture library. I also use my iPod as an external hard drive carrying various essential bits of data as and when needed. For me to purchase any of these multi-touch products I'd have to rethink how I treat my media and move away from the notion of carrying it ALL with me. This is do-able. I have a vast amount of music that I never listen to and I could treat it the same way I treat movies on my iPod and just have a few. But realistically is 8GB just a bit too restrictive? I think it probably is. In this sense I should really hold out for a 32GB option especially now that the touch devices have an OS to hold too.

The next question I'm asking myself is could I live without the phone facility. In reality I don't make that many calls. Most of my call activitiy is in the form of texts. Actually a wi-fi option on the iPod touch is pretty good. You get great browsing speeds and where I work falls into the city of London which is a free wi-fi network. This could work. The only downside is that Apple has decided to not bundle the mail program (along with a couple of other nice online apps) which is a great shame as I subscribe to .mac and I don't want to be going online to check my mail all the time. Big black mark against the iPod touch for this one.

So it really seems that this first round of multi-touch devices just aren't for me. I think it makes sense for me to get the iPhone at some point but I need it to be my fully functioning iPod too so 32GB is a must. Some food for future thought is that Apple must get on the 3G bandwagon for the iPhone to be a viable competitor to other UK phones (without losing battery life). They also need to address the camera in my mind. It should really be on the front side so that video chats become possible and a flash option should be included for still shots. Although camera phones have always been dodgy in my mind. My Sony Ericsson has a 3MP camera phone with a good flash but it is VERY slow and the images are just OK. Camera phones need to address their lag time to make them a viable option to replace carrying a camera with you. But when you see the quality of the video on a product like the Nokia N95 you know it is possible and really does give hope that the all in one device is just around the corner.

5 gum

Wrigleys are bringing out a new line of designer high tech gum and have tasked The Mill LA to produce these awesome ads depicting what it is like to chew on their product. Some incredible production values here as you sense and experience the sensations for each flavour Rain, Flare and Cobalt. I just absolutely love the ball bearings version. I want to lie in that pool, what a great massage. You can check out their microsite here

pickled onion site is live

Got the Pickled Onion (Bermuda) website finished today. It has been live with a soft launch for a couple of weeks but today I finished some minor amends to get the site fully live and complete. I'm enjoying doing restaurant websites as you get chance to create a rich media site of sorts, graphically rich and with audio. I wasn't given that many assets to work with and would have liked to have a few food shots as I feel this would really enhance the site. Perhaps I can add this at a later stage. Hopefully I have captured the look and feel of the new restaurant but your comments would be appreciated. Check it out here