Updated: 11/19/05; 12:33:59 PM

 Friday, September 16, 2005
Apple's Other Legacy: Top Designers
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"I learned a lot about empowering people [at Apple] -- pushing responsibility down as far as you can ... and letting people loose," says Larry Tesler, a user interface guru who worked at Apple from 1980 until 1997. "You'd show Jobs something, and he might look at one part and say that just sucks -- but he never said 'make that button bigger.'"

Apple's greatest innovation can't be measured by product sales or design awards. It's the company's culture of innovation and its existence as an incubator of the best designers and engineers that will have the biggest long-term impact. Because when Apple's talent moves on, they take some of that culture with them.   Full story

6:19:24 AM    
Sparkle — Microsoft finally takes UI design seriously
Microsoft is making all kinds of noise on the web this week as their PDC conference wraps up and if I was a Windows user, I might actually be excited for once. Keep in mind, the PDC is aimed squarely at developers - not end users so much of what is shown at the PDC is really geared towards getting developers excited about the upcoming technologies from Microsoft.

The technology looks really nice and if Microsoft can actually fully execute on this, meaning getting the word out to the people who need to hear it in a way that they need to hear it, then the world of technology is going to get a lot more interesting when many of these products ship. Empowering people with great technology has always been a very lofty goal for many technology companies and quite honestly, Microsoft has really fallen down over the years in this department and in comes Web 2.0 which has everything to do with empowering what people can do with technology and I think it kind of freaked out the old guard at Microsoft and some of these products are the result of that kind of thinking. If it benefits the user at the end of the day then the world will be a better place for it. If they fail to execute properly on it, well, on the bright side, at least the unrelenting attacks of viruses and malware will have a much better looking environment to infect.

I wanted to pass along an interesting bit from Technoranti talking about Microsoft's new UI design capabilities via Sparkle (a truly horrible name considering its competitions name, Flash - more MS originality there folks!)

4:32:03 AM