Apple's Tipping Point: Macs For The Masses

From Paul Nixon on nixlog.com. In 2005, Apple finally released products from both the Mac line and the iPod line that reached the masses. This created the Tipping Point Effect that has rocketed Apple products and stock in the last two years. Rock on!

The Sweet Spot. 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.

Thanks to Karen for the submission

Map of the Internet (blacklisted)

Found on Information Aesthetics, this is a map of all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses in the world. Blocks of addresses are shown grouped together in squares based on the owner (ISP, corporation, goverment, university, etc.), and individual addresses are shown as grey dots. The IP addresses that are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist are shown as red dots, representing suspect addresses.

The Polar Clock

The Polar Clock, from Pixel Breaker, version 3 is now out as a screen saver for Mac and Windows. It's also available as a Mac OS X Widget.

I don't know why, but I love this clock. I'm mesmerized watching the seconds going around. With a little practice, you can visualize the time. I won't say this is the best way to visualize the time, but it's definitely fascinating.

History of Computer Languages

O'Reilly has created a poster showing the 50-year history of computer languages from 1954 to 2004, available as a PDF. They have also been giving away copies of the posters at O'Reilly conferences. I love the links shown where older languages split or combined to create the newer languages over time.

I look back around 1990 when I was programming in college and see Fortran V, C++ and the birth of Visual Basic. I remember having to convince my engineering professors to let me program assignments in C++ instead of Fortran.

The original diagram was created by Éric Lévénez. Although O'Reilly is not updating the poster, Eric is keeping his original diagram up to date on levenez.com.

Speedtest.net

Speedtest.net does a great job showing you the data while testing your own internet connection speed. From locating a test server on the map, to animating the speedometer as the test runs. Without much text at all explaining what's going on, you understand the test, and the results.

Then you get the code to embed your results (see below) into a blog post, email or website. How fast is your connection?

searchCrystal

Check this one out! The graphic above is an embedded object from searchCrystal that lets you search multiple sources for images (or other forms of information). I've preloaded it to search for "inforgraphics" from GoogleImages, Flickr, AskImages, YahooImages and MSNImages. When you dig a little deeper, you can choose the different sources you are searching from, save searches, share results with others, etc.

The arrangement shows the overlap of the results from multiple sites. Simple navigation like scrolling over images enlarges them, and clicking takes you to the source image.

Also works for video, blogs, tags, news, etc...blah, blah, blah. We only care about images don't we?

The Bloomberg Makeover

Three design firms took on the challenge of re-designing the Bloomberg terminal interface, and the results were fantastic. The challenge came from Portfolio.com. The original article is here, but the fantasy terminals are here with an interactive interface that lets you highlight and zoom in on particular features. The design above is from thehappycorp.com and is my personal favorite.

Bloomberg claims to be constantly improving their interface design, but it still looks like runs on DOS and is straight out of the 80's.

Here is the desing from IDEO.com:

And one from Ziba.com:

Microsoft Car HUD

Found on arstechnica.com, this one has me really excited. I have been disappointed for at least two decades that real HUDs (Heads-Up Displays) have not become standard, or even available as a third party product for our cars. Now a US patent application from Microsoft has been published showing a possible future HUD for your car.

More than just your speed, with today's technology we should have things like incoming caller-id, compass direction, outside temperature, current playing music title, live GPS map and distance to the car in front of us showing around the edges of our windshields.

We can only cross our fingers and hope that this would some day become a reality.

Web Trend Map 2007 v2

Our friends over at InformationArchitects.com have updated their WebTrends poster showing the...

...200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. We have done it again – and better. Upon popular demand – here is iA’s next Web Trend Map:

Thanks to Brian Johnson from the Microsoft Mac BU for pointing this one out.

Gapminder on Google!

Here it is! Live on Google. Gapminder is the Trendalyzer software used by Hans Rosling and acquired by Google. It's now online at Google, but it looks like an early test. I'm not sure if you can use your own data yet or not, but that is one of the goals.

Check out all of the Gapminder tools, and see more presentations using the Gapminder software at www.gapminder.org