Richard Dawkins is surely one of the world’s foremost authorities on how the spread of information and ideas may have more than mere similarities with the evolution of viruses, having, amongst other things, coined the term meme in passing.

Guardian Unlimited, Richard Dawkins: Apple of my eye:

“Nothing in my 20 years’ intensive experience of programming and using computers had prepared me for the Mac. It wasn’t an evolutionary advance on its predecessors; it was a macromutational leap into the future. It is that future we are now living in, whether we use a Mac or a virus-compatible PC.”

Dawkins once dismissed the world’s fastest growing virus of the mind, Catholicism, as being based on the mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young girl as ‘virgin’. He has a wonderful knack for stating things that are controversial but provably true as a given - ‘a virus compatible PC’ - no discussion, no timid assertions because billions of dollars of market share are at risk.

A couple of months ago, the New York Times was working on a piece on the idea doing the blog rounds that the Windows software monoculture is more dangerous when computers are networked together. The piece never ran, because it wasn’t authorative rather than any lack of temerity by the Times with respect to Microsoft. But then a major report suggested the same, and the author of the report had to resign over the assertion.

Dawkin’s has mentioned it as a given - that Windows is virus ‘compatible’ - he should elaborate.

Duralex glasses are a design classic.

I like drinking wine, but even in San Francisco, friends sneer at me, if I don’t order a man’s drink. I think the real problem isn’t the drink, it’s the glass. I hate wine glasses.

The solution would be if wine in bars were served in sturdy Duralex tumblers.

Bormioli Rocco - Products - Duralex

Speaking of AOL, I’m always amazed at how large companies don’t really have to react that fast to threats from better technologies, products or services. In fact in some cases the worst technology actually wins. Email me if you have any suggestions of examples of ‘non-design classics’ that are still around.

Here’s a start:

1. PC Laptops - is it my imagination or, other than Apple, is laptop design actually going backwards?

2. Windows - the original Apple Os was more elegant. We are stuck with impossible uninstalls and no full-text search.

3. Office - I have to fork out $200 just so that I can add comments to other people’s Word files -and Powerpoint - aaargh - the greatest crime in design history, a substandard piece of shareware that pollutes the world with blue blends and horrible fonts.

4. AOL - how did a nasty dial-up service to a walled garden network with ‘get rich quick’ style branding manage not only to survive the Web but acquire a decent media conglomerate?

5. Cadillac - every Cadillac since 1970 looks like a refridgerator on wheels, with a similarly plastic interior and an engine with no engineering finess.

6. VHS - OK DVD’s are finally getting rid of this monster that killed Betamax for the consumer market.

7. Cell phone interfaces. OK, you can get a tricked out Java cellphone with a million added widgets, particulalry if you live in Europe or the Far East, but why can’t you do simple things like store your address book at the provider end - so that you can move to a new phone (on the same network).

8. Stamps - why don’t some mail boxes have franking machines (this personal annoyance is somewhat overcome in the US where you can actually get stamps out of an ATM).

9. Checks - they shouldn’t exist unless the bank personally transcribes all the details into account statements so you can see what the hell has been going on with your money.

10. Retail banks - In a parallel universe, I wish that Paypal had brought them all to their knees.

Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google’s HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity - bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway.

Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups - it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling - each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the ‘tech box’ which had drawers marked ‘cool mechanisms’ and ‘amazing materials’ full of - well what they said. All the items within were catalogued and could be looked up in a database via the intranet.

The highlight, however, was a demo of a thing called a Sound Spotlight - an invention that Ideo have been given the task to productize. A foot square rectangular box, rather like a speaker, is attached to a CD player - in this case playing bird noises. Point the box at any surface and the sound appears to emanate from the surface rather than the box. By moving the box in our hands we had a flock of birds appearing to be nesting in the rafters 50 feet away and then in the palm of my hand a second later.

After a three year hiatus I bought a Mac - largely because design of PC laptops has seemingly regressed to the days before the Sony Vaio 505.

When I last had a Mac, both the hardware and the software were better designed than a Windows based PC. On an Apple you didn’t have DLL’s that made it impossible to manage software installations and you could link several computers together without having to hire a full-time network administrator. Microsoft software was a pile of junk compared to Apple’s until very recently.

These days, however, Apple seem to be able to produce excellent hardware design, but their software has deteriorated. Take, for example, the ‘aqua’ interface in OSX - yes there are animated events just like on an SGI (and where are they now?), but the principal interface issue, text rendering, is a joke on OSX. The latest version of the Apple OS anti-aliases text, period - you can adjust the threshold above which text is smoothed but you can’t switch it off. Even if you were to be able to switch off the text smoothing, which effectively reduces the screen resolution by a factor of 2, you would then encounter the fact that you can’t change the default OS font and the default is not designed to be ‘unsmoothed’ text, kerning letters so that they merge together or are unreadable. Back in the days of System 7, Apple had already solved this, while Microsoft were still to develop screen ready fonts such as Verdana.

Now all this may seem anally retentive, but reading text on screen is a fundamental issue and one which Apple used to be a leader in. Anyone following the evolution of UI design would notice that easily readable non-aliased fonts such as Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen are important on the web, but Apple have ignored unaliased fonts altogether.

Apple should stick to hardware and media software applications, their OS no longer competes with Microsoft’s on the desktop and ironically, letting it disappear may increase the chance of a challenge to Microsoft’s monopoly, the Apple OS is kept alive only to serve the purpose of deflecting anti-trust allegations away from Microsoft.

It seems that Rube Goldberg is the American Heath Robinson, or is Heath Robinson the British Rube Goldberg? Either way, great commercial, shame about the car.

Honda’s New Accord via Azeem Azhar

From the country that brought you the three armed sweater, the transparent skirt.

In actual fact these skirts are not transparent but have an image printed on them to appear so.

Does your bum look big in this?

More on the way to a PacketPC, John Robb would like this wireless enabled hard drive from Toshiba.

Geek.com Geek News - Toshiba’s new HOPBIT wireless personal server

“Apple has to come up with something, a product, an app, a gadget of some kind, that will put a crippling hurt on another established technology or company.”

Why don’t Apple compete with the consumer electronics market and come up with the definitive media PC?

Applelinks: Latest Warp Core Praised

Jon Robb considers wifi enabled hardrives:

“1. Digital still cameras.
2. Digital video cameras.
3. Portable radios.
4. Portable CD players.
5. TiVo (if shipped in combo with a base station that contains a hard drive).
6. Digital audio recorders.
7. Car DVD and tape players (with FM transmission add-ons for the Archos or iPod).

In all of those cases, the core element is the portable hard drive. The recording and/or playback feature functionality is merely a dumb peripheral (directly connected or connected via wireless). Add wireless and server capabilities and it can power your PC, your TV, and your stereo. ”

John Robb’s Radio Weblog