Convergence of some sort

So, I was reading the comments to my last post, one of them from a woman at Hallmark. I figured she was a longer-term peterme.com reader. Well, it turns out I’m in Hallmark’s offices, and when I open up iChat, I see this woman on the local network. So I say, “Hi! I saw you [...]

Heading to Kansas City

Tomorrow I get on a plane for Kansas City. I’m there for a few days of business. Evenings free. What should I do? Post a comment or email me at peterme@[thisdomain.com]

petermedia update

Batman Begins – …and ends, with little to show for it. Before it opened, I had little interest in seeing it — the Batman film franchise has been one long disappointment. But both critics, and many many friends raved about it, so I thought I’d take a gamble. Particularly because I wanted some escapism. What [...]

Egads, eBay!

A friend pointed me to a survey that eBay is conducting. Because that survey will likely expire soon, I grabbed screen shots of the survey, because it was a fascinating example of how not to understand user behavior. The first page of the survey is straightforward enough: Click to see at full size They want [...]

Latest Essay: Create Value By Relinquishing Control

My latest essay is up on Adaptive Path’s site: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Relinquish Control.” The thesis is that the more control companies give up, the greater value they receive in return. As I started writing that essay, I thought I’d write more of a diatribe against designers who feel that controlling [...]

Comics Review For People Who Like, But Aren’t Obsessive About, Comics: Street Angel

Many comics lovers have known for a while that Street Angel is something to crow about. A few weeks ago I bought issues 1 through 5, based on the strength of the cover art and flipping through a few pages. I was not disappointed. Street Angel has gotten me the most excited about comics since [...]

Designing for the Sandbox

I’ve been thinking a lot about control and design. People who design experiences often believe that in order to succeed they must exert complete control. And while in extremely rare instances they might be afforded the opportunity to dictate an entire environment (say, in a casino, or a theme park), when designing for the real [...]

Nancy’s living in the future!

Nancy van House, a professor at SIMS at Cal, has had the fortune to play around with mobile phone cameras and GPS devices that are being explored in the Garage Cinema Research program. Her comments on why she wants a GPS-enabled camera shed some light on where things may be headed.

Laptops are mobile devices, too

Something I’ve been wondering about is why laptops aren’t really treated as mobile devices, in any interesting way. Laptop manufacturers tend to treat them as portable desktops, and people interested in “mobile device design” focus on PDAs, cell phones, and the like. Now that laptops outsell desktops, it’s worth treating them as interesting and distinct [...]

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Links, thoughts, and essays from Peter Merholz