Brad Lauster .com

The Amiga lives!

That's right, coolest OS from "back in the day" is still alive and still being developed.

Amiga recently published a preview of AmigaOS 4 containing screenshots of the upcomming OS.

At this point it looks largely like most Linuxes, save Intuition's snazzy menus. Also, there are no descriptions of how a user will interact with the system, but that's (unfortunately) to be expected from an OS company at this stage of the game.

If you poke around the Amiga website a bit, you'll find some of the principles guiding the development of the new OS. Quite interesting...

Getting the itch for a brad lauster (dot com) re-design, I started looking through the list of Movable Type Donors for some inspiration and found the moreCrayons - color cube.

The link between software design & architecture seems to come up quite often and has, once again, in today's SF Chronicle, in today's Architext column by Arrol Gellner, "In home design, get with the program."

Well, it appears the magazine, "One - Design Matters," is still defunct (I'll see if Selena can get the inside scoop for me), but after a long hiatus, the One Media website is back online.

Check it out for some tasty design goodness!

Oh - as a result of this find, I updated this post.

The article is pretty weak, but the image at the beginning of the BBC's "Web design 'causes confusion'" is great!

Of course, the solution to this problem is to hire an Information Architect. Duh!

Now that I live in Palo Alto, I keep bumping into the sort of people I consider super stars, so I've decided to keep track of my encounters with my new "Palo Alto Sightings" category.

For example, a couple months ago I saw Alan Cooper while grocery shopping. Then, last week I saw Sue Cooper downtown. This morning I saw Nick Ragouzis (at least I think it was him, I didn't have time to stop). And last but not least, I bumped into Steve Perlman this evening at a local sushi place.

The Stanford Report is running a short story about a decanting cradle designed for a 27 liter bottle of wine from the Charles Krug winery. There is also a short video of the students at work. Neat!

(click on the image to view the related video)

[ Note from April 2003: Found this post saved as a draft in Movable Type. Not sure why I never posted it before, so I'm doing it now. ]

Found via Instapundit: Happy Fun Pundit's review of the "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act"

This is just awful! Please urge your representatives in congress to oppose this bill.

Read the letter I sent by clicking MORE.

Tom Kelley, general manager of Ideo, whom I swear I saw riding a bike on Bryant St. in Palo Alto earlier this week, will appear on TechTV, in a spot called, "Innovate for a Better World".

Broadcast times are available if you follow the link.

Thanks to Challis for letting me know that issue 5 of Loop. the AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education in now online. Yay!

If you're like me - a Bay-Arean without a car - you'll dig the TakeTransit Trip Planner.

It seems to be broken a lot, but when it works, it's pretty good. I used it last Friday to figure out how to get from Palo Alto to the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station so I could meet some friends for a weekend of camping.

Have I told you about my new found interest in Design Management? No? Well, I am now...

The Design Management Institute looks like a tasty source for information on the subject. The DMI Publications area has lots of downloadable articles and some are even free (most cost a small fee for non-members).

Are any brad lauster (dot com) readers members of the DMI? I'm thinking about joining, so I'd like to hear from you.

Mucking about in Stanford's web space, you run across the most unexpected things. Today I found a site called Jonathan Korman - Designer, which is an interview of Jonathan, complete with video, done by Michael Thompson (who I assume is a student at Stanford).