Outside China, people tend to assume that the country’s impressive economic growth is due to exports. As the chart below, drawn from our special report on China’s economy, shows, this notion has always been exaggerated and is now plain false. China grows thanks to high levels of investment—far higher than those seen in previous Asian miracles such as South Korea and Japan. The corollary of this is low levels of private consumption. Some argue that this must lead to imbalances that one day will send China’s economy off a cliff. We disagree.
As China’s middle class starts to grow, I think the private consumption will start to go up. We’ll see if the investment spending is high because of cheap labor.
Who Said Art is a Worthless Degree?
Whether you’re building something new yourself or you are employed by others, you’ve got a lot of work to do. You might as well make it look good. Get to know some designers.
As an economics major, I can really appreciate where Matt Hodges is coming from. So many people discount art degrees as worthless or less rigorous. Art degrees are just on a different end of the spectrum.
I believe the world needs more collaboration between the engineers and designers. Who wants to read economic journals with crappy typefaces and bad design? I want all of my stuff to look like designed masterpieces.
Human Centered Design Toolkit
Great document on designing with humans in mind from IDEO. It goes over everything from the research stages to the completion of a project.
Familiar is not a design
The core problem with the Quasar model is that it’s not designed for the needs of the device or its users. It’s the desktop windowing model, designed (or perhaps more truthfully, evolved for better or worse) for lean-forward, stationary, pointer-driven, large-screened and comparatively high-performance devices. Everything that, relatively speaking, a tablet is not.
Too often people are okay with taking an existing system and forcing it where it shouldn’t be. iOS and the tablet space in general do need a better form of multitasking and the Windows Snap feature shown in the article looks to be a great start.
I think the multitasking feature for tablets would need to be relatively automatic - no resizing windows or moving them around. Tiling window managers, which are more common with the Linux crowd, offer the automatic management of multiple apps. With some modification, a system similar to these could be sensible on a tablet.
There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)
The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me - keeping me in over my head - encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up, quickly. I was learning so fast, it had the adrenaline of sports or a video game. A two-way game of catch, he tossed every fact back at me and made me prove I got it.
A few shots of the annular eclipse by Sean Wood, who runs one of my favorite photography blogs.
Amazing collection of photos of the Ulm School of Design in Ulm, Germany by Hans G. Conrad.
The use of gestures to move the cursor back and forth is an amazing idea. I really hope Apple includes this, or something similar, with their iOS 6 update. The main reason why I’m unable to type out larger pieces with the onscreen keyboard is due to the time wasted going back and trying to edit any of my mistakes.
