Edward Tufte: “The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with ‘Where am I?’ puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space).

This video shows some of the resolution-enhancing methods of the iPhone, along with a few places for improvements in resolution.”

Hey folks: I’m a judge in Crestock’s annual contest this year. You can win some nice Mac stuff — check it out.

Compete for free in the biggest Photoshop contest of the year to win amazing prizes for four whole weeks ranging from iPods and MacBooks to the designers’ Holy Grail – The Quad Core Mac Pro with dual 30″ LCDs!

Here’s how it works: There are four rounds with different themes, and you can contribute one image for each round. Sign-up and submission is completely free and without commitment.

For each round we will supply a set of source photos from our image library. Your entry must be based on one or several of these photos, but you are free to do with them whatever you like. You may also use other elements in your design, as long as one or more of the source images can be recognised as a central part of your design.

“Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result — as seen by a color blind person — in a floating palette.

Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see.”

” There’s no need to restate the high reverence (or pangs of envy, depending on where your loyalty lies) of Apple. They have innovated, floundered, and in recent years, risen from the ashes to make one hell of a run in computing and electronics devices. Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that they are adored by their fans. Their brand has reached that highly sought-after place in the world of marketing: they can do no wrong.

So how did they get there? Is it dumb luck? Or are they just much smarter than the rest of us? The most common reason given is Apple’s rabid devotion to design. That is, without a doubt, a key component of Apple’s success. But I think there’s more to it than that. Here are ten reasons why I think Apple is so successful today, and what we can learn from them…”

“Bill’s quick exit from the set of The Daily Show aside, he has not been doing Vista or Microsoft any favors with his recent performance. Contrast this with his alter-ego, Mr. Jobs, who even in the face of controversy surrounding the Apple options backdating scandal can get up on stage and wow his employees, his customers and the technology community at-large. Steve is a rock star. Bill looks as if he’s been living under a rock.”

Aside from its overall greatness, this is my second-favorite part of the whole Apple iPhone deal. As Rafe at rc3.org said, “a bit passive-aggressive.” UPDATE: Here’s more from Mark Chandler, Cisco’s SVP and General Counsel.

“ince Apple developed its ‘digital hub’, with iLife and now iWork, I have wanted to have a system-wide panel that would let me choose pictures from my iPhoto library without having to open the application. For example, if I want to add a picture to a TextEdit RTFD document, I had to launch iPhoto, chose the picture, and drag it to the document. Waiting for iPhoto to launch can be long if you have a lot of photos. But there is a way to get around this, using an Automator action.” (Thanks Daring Fireball!)

“In this article, I will investigate commonly used GUI backup/cloning tools for Mac OS X. The tools vary widely with respect to their feature set; the features are irrelevant here. I will concentrate purely on the underlying functionality of copying files. A backup tool needs to be able to copy files faithfully for a successful restore in case desaster has struck. The surprising conclusion of my investigation is that almost all Macintosh Backup tools fail at their most basic task, the faithful copying of files.”

“Only recently was all of this — ‘this’ being the chance to work at Apple — laid to rest, ending several months of talks and bringing a close to the toughest challenge, by far, of my career to date. Following is an account of how it started, and yes, how it ended.”

“What are the most significant moments in Apple Computer history? When I first started putting together my list, I thought it would be a simple thing to do. I found out however it was anything but. The first five items were almost a no-brainer, and I pounded them out quickly. Moments six through ten, however, proved more difficult.”

“Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with sofware applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.”

“If unsure as to which of these causes is slowing down your machine, ask a technician to help you isolate it before attempting to use any software to fix the issue. Many of the softwares recommended below have multipurpose functions, which may do other things you don’t want to do to your system. Only use the software to solve the known issue you are having.”

“This document describes how to setup a system for automatically backing up a Mac (OS X 10.2 or later) to an external drive using freely available software. This applies to any kind of external drive including FireWire, USB and network drives. It does not apply to CD-R or DVD-R media. It also does not apply if you want to implement an incremental backup system.”

“Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind. This will not only drive more iPod sales (via the Shuffle), but also fulfill the promised ‘halo’ effect of the iPod products as PC users jump to the Mac mini.”

“A repository for every keyboard secret in OS X. Some of these are well known, some are not. This list should grow exponentially over time.”