David Cope, a fine composer in his own right, has written software that rivals, or even surpasses, his own composing skills. His work is based on copying the great works of the past, analyzing patterns and disruptions, and creating new music following similar rules.

Some people apparently find this a bit frightening, but Cope suggests this is nonsense:

“I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is,” he says. “But Bach peed, and he shat, and he had a lot of kids. We’re all just people.”

We’ll see…

Data visualization magnate Tufte will be part of an advisory board that oversees Recovery funds and keeps the public informed of how those funds are or aren’t being used.

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

Good to see that the administration is putting such a high priority in ensuring that this kind of work has some real design thinking behind it.

Thorough overview of best practices in designing achievements. While these mostly happen in games, it’s more and more common to use game dynamics in more traditional apps. If you’re considering this kind of thing, there is a lot to consider:

When players come across poorly designed achievements, the bottom line is that it lessens their psychological investment into the system as a whole. It is impossible for this to happen without also lessening the sense of accomplishment the player feels when he does earn an achievement in this system.

It’s not necessarily about statistics, it’s just the basics of doing any kind of decent analysis.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to best address users from other cultures, and as she spends a few months working in India, some of my good friend Ali’s posts have been particularly thought-provoking.

Fantasy versus emotional marketing: The core of U.S. marketing – whether for a product or a mission – is trying to make something more emotional to “tug at the heart strings” and make you act (or buy)… But in India, some argue that people are consistently surrounded by emotion (or reality) such that escape is more attractive. One person told me that you only need to look at the movie industry to see this: Slumdog Millionaire was not as acclaimed in India as it was in the U.S., for example, as compared to the dramatic, dancing, singing Bollywood style of film.

It’s easy to think that users will all more or less act like Americans, but when your product is used in a different cultural context, is it still doing its job as well?

Awesome essay on the iPad and how it will impact book publishing. Great illustrations, great thinking, and it makes me want to see what this guy does with the iPad in the coming months.

In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.

We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.

This kind of interface revolution has happened with the web, mobile, the iPhone, and will happen again with the iPad, and it’s always exciting.

Pretty sick little experiment

If you use an auto-complete or type-ahead-find feature in your input boxes, you should be considering accents. This has a nice overview and some sample code.

In case you haven’t heard about it, ChatRoulette basically randomly pairs you with someone else in a video chat. It’s attracted a lot of attention, a lot of curiosity, and its fair Interwebs-share of weirdos.

Danah’s piece is basically what I wish I’d written:

And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.

The best way to protect your kids from weird situations is to let them learn how to get out of them themselves. Sure, there are weirdos on ChatRoulette, but there’s an interesting opportunity for social growth too.

A very thorough guide to the new styleguide the BBC is using online, covering not only the results, but a bit of the process too. Jealous? I am.

A bit off-topic, but this bit of sleuthing by Bunnie is both awesome and a great insight into a piece of the industry you probably don’t know much about:

Second, the small vendors are entirely brazen about selling you well-crafted fakes. Typically, the bare cards are just sitting loose in trays in the display case; once you agree on the price and commit to buying the card, the vendor will toss the loose card into a “real” Kingston retail package, and then miraculously pull out a certificate, complete with hologram, serial numbers, and a kingston.com URL you can visit to validate your purchase, and slap it on the back of the retail package right in front of your eyes. Hey, it’s just like new!

The moral of the story is not necessarily that Kingston is a lousy vendor, though they may well be, but just how cut-throat their side of the industry can be, with tiny margins and sketchy practices in an effort to save pennies.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

Sage wisdom from The Emmerblue about how to address your next cover letter. Hint: the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Always torn about these compiled CSS things. When troubleshooting, it puts yet another layer between you and the styles, which can make it much harder to really leverage Firebug like a master.

This looks pretty sweet though, that objection notwithstanding.

PPK claims that by designing only for the iPhone, we’re setting up for another IE6-like event.

This article counters that:

When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

It’s still early on for the mobile web, and I think that gives us reason to push things a bit more than would be appropriate in a Y2K, IE6 world. If developers don’t accept the limitations of conventional mobile browsers right now, mobile manufacturers may well start moving things forward.

If we can get close to parity or unanimity in the mobile browser space, we’ve succeeded, and then need to start getting back to traditional principles of progressful degrahancement and the like.

The single most important skill a product manager/designer/guy/girl can have…

Worth it for the punch-line.

Borne from a hackathon project, Facebook’s engineering team is now throwing their PHP through their new HipHop framework, which effectively transforms the easy-to-write PHP they’ve always used into much faster C++.

This is pretty huge for a site like Facebook — it allows for the productivity of writing in a scripting language (PHP may not be quite as productive as Ruby or Python, but it’s miles better than Java), with the speed of a compiled language.

After all, for a site that relies on users viewing many dozens of pages per day, largely while procrastinating, speed is user experience priority number one.

Jason Calacanis pretended to know iPad specs first-hand, and duped a lot of people. Why anyone would trust anything that man says is completely beyond me, but many bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Mike Davidson has some sage wisdom to share, and provides some perspective about people in our industry who are increasingly filled with hot air.

Fantastic article on fidelity in interface design:

The trick is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning. Some details help users figure out what they’re looking at and how they can interact with it; other details distract from the idea you’re trying to convey. They turn your interface element from a concept into a specific thing. Thus, if an interface element is too distinct from its real-life counterpart, it becomes too hard to recognize. On the other hand, if it is too realistic, people are unable to figure out that you’re trying to communicate an idea, and what idea that might be.

Phil Gyford:

For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.

Zeldman opines on options for our content after we’re long gone.

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

John Siracusa looks at his reviews of the OS X preview releases and the first 10.0 release.

What’s most amazing is how gracefully things seem to have improved in those ten years. The old screenshots now look dated and sometimes downright ridiculous, and Siracusa’s evaluations were nothing short of dire in the beginning, but it’s slowly and steadily become the clear market leader.

One of the best things about Apple is their willingness to put something out that might be a bit of a reach, and then to go back and iterate and fill in the gaps. They pay a boatload of attention to making it a great experience in the first place, but they are always willing to acknowledge that improvements can be both subtle and major.

Huge blow to the Gowalla and Foursquare camps.

Yelp has boatloads of venues already, they obviously have an even larger number of legit and useful reviews, and they most importantly have existing relationships with these businesses (at least on the order of Yelp window stickers). Soon to come, deals for having a Regular badge at a given bar, or special happy-hour specials if you check in with multiple friends.

I’m a huge Gowalla fan, but these updates leave only one feature necessary for the Yelp app to really put the future of both Gowalla and Foursquare in jeopardy: contact import from facebook/twitter/etc. At that point, Gowalla will look like a “not as powerful, more game-like” version of Yelp’s offering.

Dave McClure:

If investors don’t have operational backgrounds in design, development, or marketing from proven consumer internet companies, you probably don’t want their money.

Agreed.

Brad Burnham, from Union Square Ventues, describes the problems faced by small companies whose independent inventions overlap with established patents:

Our companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed.

And proposes a solution:

If, on the other hand, the troll was required to show the startup had some prior knowledge of their technology, the burden would be shifted to the attacker, and this blatant abuse would come to a grinding halt. If you believe as I do that innovation is key to social progress, please support patent reform.

A fairly wide-ranging conversation with a Facebook employee about infrastructure, privacy, security, and culture. A lot has changed since the beginning, and none of this should be terribly surprising.

When I visited the new Facebook HQ a few months ago, the receptionist shared a couple stories of people trying to force their way in there, so there’s an element of physical security that is becoming increasingly important around there.

Christina Wodtke on why she’s over wireframes:

I haven’t heard much lately about why wireframes are so awesome. I know they are incredibly useful as a thinking tool. I can’t work through an idea without getting out a pencil and scribbling out some wireframes on a pad of paper. I’m not sure they are good as a communicating tool.

The article itself has a reasonably articulated argument, but the discussion is probably more valuable.

Wireframes are just a tool, and all tools can be used inappropriately just as easily as they can be used well. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that in certain situations, wireframes aren’t particularly valuable, and Christina may exist in one of them. I think most folks, however, find themselves in scenarios where there remains a legitimate need for the wireframe, both as a thought aid and as a communication tool.