Easy Reader

Sad news, friends… Design In-Flight is closing shop. This very young, yet stellar PDF-based magazine was off to a fantastic start, but, as Andy put it, changes in his personal and professional life have conspired to make DiF’s continued publication an impossibility.

Though I am disappointed at losing such a great publication, I understand where Andy’s coming from. Having spent six years of my life devoted to a magazine I started in college, I know how tough it can be. I put the fritz on hiatus in the summer of 2000 when I moved to Connecticut, hoping to restart it again as a solely web-based publication, but time has conspired to keep it only a homepage. Will I ever find the time to get it going again or is it only wishful thinking? I’m not sure. I guess time will tell.

Andy, best of luck to you in your future endeavors.

I’ve been doing a little research lately into new laptops and I am finally starting to understand a little more about processors, etc., so I am dumbfounded to hear that Apple is dumping IBM’s PowerPC chips for Intel’s Pentium line. From my experience, Intel chips a) run really hot and b) suffer from a severe processing bottleneck (3.2 Gigahertz with a 533 Megahertz Front-Side Bus? WTF?). It seems to me that it would have made more sense for Apple to go with AMD, they’ve got incredibly powerful chips which I understand do not suffer from these problems. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, after all, I’m not a chip guy (or a Hollywood mogul).

Enough about the switch, I wanted to share some humor. I love this exchange on Slashdot in reaction to the news:

Dispel any remaining doubts; we are now living in the evil mirror universe.

I’ll believe that when the Red Sox win the World Series!

Yeah, right — that’s about as likely as finding out who Deep Throat is.

You can read the whole trail if you like.

I opened the latest issue of Baseline to find a giant 2-page spread for 1&1 (a hosting company), touting their “Dynamic Content Catalog” and it’s ability to give you “website content like the big players.” Basically, they are offering to syndicate content (news, sports, games, etc.) onto your site, so you no longer have to worry about keeping your site fresh or interesting.

I feel like this is an attempt to reintroduce the idea that every site needs to be a portal (why that concept is still floating about I’ll never know). I also see this as as flying in the face of one of the most important business objectives: establishing a brand, voice, etc. through copywriting. If all you have to offer your clients is data with no distillation, why bother?