DPL Reading List – January 5, 2018
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Apple’s Legendary Lisa Operating System Is Coming to Your Desktop for Free – “Lisa was a cutting-edge machine and one of the first to offer consumers a GUI, mouse, and file system, but it was prohibitively expensive and didn’t catch on. Adjusted for inflation, it cost almost $25,000 at the time.”
Review of Popular Interface Design Trends in 2017 – “No doubt, 2017 was the year of diversity in interface design - and this can be called one of the most user-friendly trends. Every day millions of users, having different tastes and preferences, various favorite styles and characters, particular feelings of what is comfortable and looks nice for them, use simple and complex apps and websites as a part of their routine.”
Falling in Love with the Problem – “It’s human nature to love answers, unfortunately that very tendency can prevent us from coming up with truly delightful solutions. When faced with a problem, we tend to stop ideating as soon as we think we’ve found an answer. This Einstellung Effect keeps us from finding the right solutions since our first ideas are rarely our best ideas.”
This AI Turns Unrecognizable Pixelated Photos Into Crystal-Clear Images – “Remember all the times you snickered when some TV character zoomed in on a photo and said “Enhance!” turning a blurred mess into a highly detailed, razor-sharp image? Now there’s a system-an artificial intelligence-powered image-scaling program called EnhanceNet-that will make that film trope impossible to laugh at, because it’s now a technological reality.”
How Classical Cryptography Will Survive Quantum Computers – “Four to six years is also not an unreasonable amount of time to wait for a new cryptographic standard. Government agencies are concerned about protecting data that might have to remain secure for decades into the future, so they are preparing now for computers that could still be 10 or 20 years into the future. If you are worried about quantum criminals getting your credit card number off of the Internet, you can breathe a little easier. When quantum computers come, cryptographers expect to be ready for them.”
What Apple’s New Office Chairs Reveal About Work In 2018 – “The Pacific Chair is meant to blend in with and defer to an interior design, in a way that office chairs almost never do. Compare it to the Aeron Chair, which came out in 1994 and looks the exact opposite of calm, and you get a microcosm of how radically our ideals about work have changed in the past three decades.”
Don’t Laugh at “Storytelling” – “Storytelling is often associated with an earlier “analogue” age: an era of paintings, paper books or tales around the campfire. But I genuinely believe that the current digital age - with the dominance of social media - provides a perfect environment for a renewed emphasis on storytelling.”
