Little by litl, I’m being won over…

litlLast week I ripped on longwinded, narcissistic douchebag tech bloggers, indirectly ripping on the fandango that is (or appears to be) the JooJoo along the way. I can be a bit of a snark at times, and I take pleasure in ripping on things. But it’s a hollow pleasure, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

On the other hand, I do occasionally take the much rarer pleasure of delighting in something really cool… in Steve Jobs’ words, from the days of the original Macintosh project, something insanely great. But those “insanely great” things don’t come along very often. And along the way, there are a lot of false alarms. Many things claim to be the “next big thing” (even if big means being… “little”)… some even go so far as to claim to be… “it.” But in the end, they just turn out to be the Segway. No thanks.

Netbooks have been the “next big (little) thing” for a while now, and although I do see their appeal, they all just seem like cheap, underpowered, too-small laptops. Building a tiny device and then putting Windows XP on it is not going to change the world. Yawn.

But then a few weeks ago I heard about another next big thing, called the litl. Part of the hubbub surrounded the fact that there were some heavy hitters in the design world involved in its creation. This was not just another tiny computer made out of cheap plastic, running an 8-year-old OS from Microsoft. This was something different.

But still, it seemed kind of silly to me. Why would I want a netbook that stored all of its data in “the cloud” (especially given some of the notorious problems “the cloud” has had lately), and especially why would I want one that doubles as a digital photo frame. Yawn… maybe.

Tonight I was reading Slashdot when… of all things… a banner ad caught my attention. I’ve clicked on banner ads maybe 3 times in my entire life, but this was a banner ad for the litl, and it intrigued me. So I clicked, and began to discover that there may, in fact, be some really cool things about the litl that make it worth some serious attention. There’s a litl blog where you can read some press the litl’s been getting, along with some background info on (and from) the team, including some pretty interesting videos. My curiosity is piqued. I’d love to see one of these things in person. I think, as superficial as it may sound, whether or not I would ultimately be interested in a netbook of any kind is determined largely by how cheap the plastic it’s made out of feels. It’s kind of hard to tell from the videos, but one thing I can tell is that a lot of care and love went into creating this thing, and it’s unlike any netbook out there today. Have a look at these videos to see what I mean:

The card concept is cool. This is truly a revolutionary interface… it’s what the JooJoo dreams of being.

I’m still hesitant about having all of my data in the cloud — does this mean you have to be connected to WiFi to be able to do… well… anything with the litl? I didn’t see anything about 3G access. And what happens if there’s a catastrophic server failure? Does litl (the device) become a fancy paperweight while litl (the company) scrambles to get things back up and running? What about privacy and security? (I’d be surprised if these questions aren’t addressed somewhere on their site; I just didn’t encounter those answers yet. And they’re questions any sensible potential customer is going to want answered before they hand over their money.)

Not quite an Apple package design, but close. And this looks like it might actually be made out of post-consumer recycled materials. That’s a plus. I like the overall attention to detail. The people who made the litl love their work, and they want you to love it, too.

Will I get one? I’m not exactly itching to drop $699 on this, or anything else, at the moment. I’d like to see it priced at $499 or less. I’d also like to, you know, see it. In person, I mean. I like the money-back guarantee, but I still think they need to have some retail presence for the litl to really take off.

Consider me impressed. I think this has the potential to be something “insanely great.” I’ll be interested in seeing where this leads… and, if the long-rumored Apple foray into this niche actually happens, how the litl will affect it, or not, and vice versa.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just being seduced by decadent marketing.

Panic’s “Atari” game art, framed and hung at Room 34 HQ

The other day I mentioned the super-cool watercolor-and-pencil game art Panic recently commissioned as part of a reimagining of their Mac software as early ’80s Atari 2600 games.

I ordered both the reproduction game boxes and the art prints, and they arrived just four days later (i.e. yesterday). They look amazing. As recommended by Panic, I headed out to IKEA this morning and picked up a couple of Ribba frames. The art prints were specifically designed to fit perfectly into these frames. I contemplated getting frames for all four of them, but at $20 a pop it seemed a bit much. So I went with two, for the two Panic programs I actually use (Coda and Transmit). It was just as well, anyway. Since they’re so big, two is all that fit on the wall above my desk!

The photo below shows Room 34 HQ, now graced with these fantastic looking prints. This wall was blank for months, and I had just been thinking I really needed to hang something up there, when these prints became available. The timing was perfect and I couldn’t be happier with the results! (Unfortunately the photo probably reveals, more than anything else, the limitations of the iPhone camera, especially indoors at night. I had every light in the place turned on but this was the best I could manage.)

panic_at_room34

No design is good design

Design.

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of late with blogs I find interesting: their design is minimal to non-existent. And sites that did have elaborate designs are severely scaling them back or removing them entirely.

A few examples:

Daring Fireball
Of course. This is one of the most “designed” of the sites I’m talking about today. It actually has color. Well, if you call gray a color.

43 Folders
Merlin Mann’s site may be the inverse of my own, and not just in name. It was once loaded up with “clever” design elements suitable to its “get your (creative) work life organized” philosophy: manila folders, paper clips, etc. But in its latest incarnation it’s stripped down to a bare minimum of design. The only remnant of the old look is the red color of the title at the top of the page, and outside of images and a subtle yellow highlight hover state for links, that’s the only color on the site.

rc3.org
Rafe Colburn’s site is the very definition of minimalist design. White background, black text. But clearly a lot of thought went into the choice of font (yes, even though it’s Helvetica), relative text sizes, and the sporadic use of shades of gray for things like block quotes.

Subtraction.com
Khoi Vinh’s site is masterfully designed, even though (or perhaps specifically because) it’s black-and-white-and-Helvetica-all-over. Oh, except for the slap in the face of bright orange when you mouse over a link. Pow! Bort! Mint! Snuh! (That one’s for CheckersSpeech.)

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Zeldman’s site is an explosion of designy-ness compared to the others on this list. But compared to something like Web Designer Wall it’s strikingly spartan, and deliberately retrograde. (And, in trying — unsuccessfully — to find his old post where he discussed this latest incarnation of the site, I discovered that he also covered this exact topic six months ago. Looks like I’m late to the party, as usual.)

If less is more, then none is all.