002 — January 8, 2017
A Concept Drone, The xx, First Impressions Matter +
Welcome to the second issue of whatspop!
CES is over and you’ve probably read all about it over the last few days. I’ll just give you my quick take: PCs are interesting again, Amazon Alexa is being integrated with everything, car manufacturers showed off interesting concepts, and TVs continued to get thinner.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s jump into this week’s issue.
ichelle im: What if a drone were friendly?
001 is a modular drone designed to be easy to use and maintain. The soft, rational form signals approachability. The detachable panoramic camera can be mounted either to the drone body or handle.
Interesting drone concept by the new design outlet, ichelle im. I’ve been following Andrew’s blog for years and am hoping to see more concepts now. I still look back quite fondly on his HTC work from a decade ago. Link
Coachella 2017 — looks like a great weekend of live music. The first night steals the show w/ Radiohead and the XX. I’m a huge fan of experiencing Coachella from home, where I’m in a dust-free climate-controlled environment with a bathroom that’s 20 feet from my couch. Link
Empathy is how you make things that don’t suck.
Dan Kaminsky on creating an NIH for the security industry — It’s an older podcast episode with some gems worth repeating. Link
In 2016 I started an experiment of doing daily sketches in the form of short animations posted on instagram. In these sketches I tried out different visual ideas involving geometry, animation, gesture and graphic form. I had no idea what to expect but it felt like a good new years resolution and nice way to experiment with some ideas I had been thinking about.
Daily Sketches in 2016 — Zach Lieberman shares his journey and process for creating beautiful sketches in 2016. You don’t have to be interested in programming to be inspired by his output. Link
The crack in question has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When the fissure reaches the far side of the shelf, an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off, leaving the Larsen C 10 percent smaller.
A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger — Going on a photography trip to Antarctica has been on my bucket list for years. Looks like I’ll need to bump that up the priority list. Link
Moves — this is an interesting step tracker that I’ve been using this for the past week. As with all trackers, this one drained my battery faster than usual — your mileage may vary. The UI/UX is beautiful and it’s fun to watch things move on screen as you walk around IRL. Available for Android and iOS. Link
In 2016, Google launched new messaging apps like Allo and Duo, and the company has now begun pre-installing Duo on new Android devices, replacing Hangouts. However, both Duo and Allo are currently mobile-only apps, while Hangouts also has PC desktop support, along with deep integrations with other services like Gmail and Google Docs. That makes Hangouts better for its many business and enterprise customers, which Google still wants to support.
Google needs to figure out what they want to do regarding messaging and share their plans publicly. As an Android user I can tell you that this is a hot mess right now. I assume that at some point that there will be a transition from Hangouts to Allo for texts…I am dreading this day.
But buying a majority ownership of shares in Hasselblad would make sense for DJI. Although it’s already the dominant player in the drone industry, it would benefit from Hasselblad’s technology and its brand to further increase its appeal to professional photographers.
I’m ready for drones equipped with medium format cameras. Bring it.
But when I got the cookies right, he calmed down. His aggressions became less ferocious and less frequent. Mealtimes became less fraught. He was able to maintain enough self-composure that he even learned to ride a bike — despite every expert telling us it would never happen.
The xx have a new album dropping this week. This was a live SNL performance from a few months ago.
Listeners Playlist — neat! Thanks to Jamie for sending this over. At some point, I didn’t even realize that I was listening to Korean soul. Link
Darth Vader’s Castle — concept art from The Art of Rogue One book. My only gripe was not seeing more of this in the movie. Here’s hoping for a solo Vader flick. Link
…and we’ll end this week with some feels.
Thanks for reading issue 002. Nintendo’s big presentation about the Switch is happening next week in NYC and I’m super excited to see it in action!
See you next week! 🐨
