It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’sTwitter / jaiku feeds.
We all acknowledge Apple as one of the iconic brands of our times, if not for anything else, for being the brand behind inspiring products like the Cube, iMac, iPhone or the just release MacBook Air. Objects that make up our dreams, objects that, subtly, crafted and enriched our collective sense of design and style, objects that used to to be designed aiming their function, rather than the pleasure or value of their use. By introducing design in such objects some brands like Apple have obviously managed to capitalize on and progressively enriched our experience in their products use.
Good ideas and in particular good design tend to foster new, better designs. Yet I’m sort of surprised to realize the influence Dieter Rams work have had on the Apple products line (especially if put together side-by-side) while reading a Gizmondo post about them:
Braun T3 and the multiple generations of iPods:
T1000 radio vs apple’s professional line products like PowerMac G5 and Mac Pro:
and you can find even more examples on the Gizmondo article about these ‘resemblences’ between these two men’s work.
Nevertheless, rather than look at them as mere ‘copies’ or ‘evolutions’, this similarities seem more like a tribute by Jonathan Ive (designer at Apple responsible for products like the iPod and iMac) to Rams life time dedication to excellent design.
Dieter Rams work was somehow unknown to me up until today and yet I’m thrilled to discover how so many of his designed objects have been an intrinsic part of my life (I just discovered that the shaving machine I use is one of his design signature products for Braun - Braun 5500). Dieter Rams was head of Design at Braun for more than 40 years, from 1955 up until 1998 when he retired, his legacy there it’s beyond impressive and many of his works during that period managed their way into museums collections as excellent design pieces.
From his teachings, I found particular interest in his powerful (and yet simple) guidelines for excellent design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.
If nothing more to retain from Rams work and teachings, I would suggest that his maxim:
‘Less, but better‘
be retained on the minds of each and every software developer or user interface designer to be applied on their works. If you’d like to know a bit more about RAMS I also suggest that you read his interview for ICON Magazine.
I confess that my daily commuting has been somehow different, since I bought my Segway last October. But it was with some surprise that I got a call from Público, a portuguese newspaper on the last week of 2007, asking if they could interview me for a special article on Segways, which I ended accepting!
What I wasn’t counting on, was that some hours after it was published, I got another call from the national TV channel, asking if they could interview me too! Well you can be the judge and check the result:
DISCLAIMER: Unfortunately it’s only in Portuguese…
First and foremost a Disclaimer: Who hasn’t ride one, doesn’t comment for now, unless if it’s for asking to try it out. Trust me, it’s the best approach!
And now the story! Me and Patrícia just lost our minds and decided to buy two Segways. The first has arrived by a lucky strike last Friday!
The intro is short and for those who don’t know what the heck its a segway, to put it simply, a Segway it’s a Human Personal Transporter, something with a nifty name and that I assure we’re just starting to hear, but it will in our life span give a lot of conversation.
The Segway has been part of my dreams, for as long as the day Dean Kamen introduce it to the world as his “Ginger” project. At the time I found it amazing, and from the first images that I wanted to try it. Well it wasn’t exactly easy, even Patrícia tried it before I did, well she had actually tried a x2, the whole-terrain version, which I haven’t yet tried, so I guess she still leads the way!
During a weekend in Porto, some weeks ago, while I searching online for some guided tours and what to visit on such short break, I found the amazing Porto Tours from Santiago and Mariza, and I have to honestly tell you that I really never expected it to be as amazing as it was! In fact 3 very special and unique 3 hours in my life. Best advice, if you don’t want to increase your expenses, don’t try it! All the rest, add a Segway ride to your personal list of things to accomplish before you die and start saving money!
It’s expensive, way expensive for the Portuguese income, but not all in this life can be bad, and sometimes, you just have to work for something that really drives you and makes you a little happier, something that might change all that’s coming for good!
So I just declare this post an open-invitation for try outs! Will all safeties ON, the helmet and me running aside, as a friend I am most delighted to let anyone that requests try-it out.
Next stage? Be able to commute every day for work riding it. In my case involves two separate tracks: home-train and train-office, besides all practicalities I still have to realize how can I store it while at the office.
A versão portuguesa deste post está no meu blog pessoal, o “/var/log/“
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
Last year Jeff’s demo at TED made sensation throught out the net! This year he just showed us a bit more about the future of interaction, check out his demo video:
Miguel just sent me the email alerting to it, but I couldn’t resist to actually write about it here, Sun just release what seems to be a self contained portable datacenter:
After today, you’ll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.
Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future–where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.
I can’t stop thinking about the whole list of possibilities for its use, from war conflicts to international aid missions there’s a whole lot of situations to choose from. I actually haven’t read the policies of its use,if its just a demo product or something to be used only by Sun, but one thing is for certain, these are indeed great times, one we can already pack an entire datacenter into a container box.
Check out some more use scenarios Sun just put up online for its use.
Plazes is still in beta, but today i just noticed they launched a new website with a whole lot of new features.
For those who might not know plazes yet, Plazes is a geo-reference serviced based on ip, meaning that you don’t need to have a gps for pin-pointing your location on the web, you can just trust on the connection points that you hang to (to be more precise, it uses the mac-address of the router you’re connected to, to save your location at plazes). If the “plaze” is unknown plazes asks you about details on that particular location, otherwise it just saves your locations based on the information others have submitted on that precise location!
Well, it might as well be the revolution that personal computers might need, I certainly like it, but might just be the geek side in me. On the site you can read:
BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.
In might opinion this prototype rocks and they might as well be right,just check out the demo video at YouTube, or if you prefer with better quality on the company website.
I’ve talked about it here in the past, but seems that the first pictures of a working model have just made it to flickr, check them out at this photoset.
Will all safeties ON, the helmet and me running aside, as a friend I am most delighted to let anyone that requests try-it out.
Next stage? Be able to commute every day for work riding it. In my case involves two separate tracks: home-train and train-office, besides all practicalities I still have to realize how can I store it while at the 
