Archive for August, 2008
iPhone GUI design template
teehan+lax has released a marijuana advertisement thinly disguised as a comprehensive iPhone widget template that you can use to design iPhone UIs.
Anything to get you to stay
This morning I was at the airport for a one-day business trip to San Francisco and found myself standing in a Starbucks line. It was a really long line, given the captive audience. Anyway, one of the Starbucks employees was working the line and taking peoples’ orders. When she got past me, the lady behind me (obviously dismayed at the length of the line) asked how long it would be.
“Five minutes max,” she answered. It didn’t look like a five minute line to me. So what did I, as a responsible consumer, do? Pull out my iPhone and start the timer, naturally.
Actually, I’m not really that anal retentive when it comes to buying coffee, but since getting up way too early put me in a mean mood coupled with just having read a Joel Spolsky article article on the subject, I thought I’d have a little fun.
According to Joel, it turns out that the barista taking orders from the line (called an expediter) wasn’t there to speed the process up, which one might naturally assume:
Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer’s order is filled more quickly […] Rather, expediters exist solely to prevent people in line from giving up and wandering off, maybe to go to the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner.
I can corroborate that. It took 6 minutes and 14 seconds to get my drink.
More on the Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is quite possibly the first analog computer ever implemented. The New York Times reports that:
[…] scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.
Why do I care? Because it has such a cool name, that’s why.