The booting screen of Apple OS 7.5.5

This is your current finder icon.
The Finder icon on your Macintosh was inspired by the loading screen for Apple Mac OS System 7.5.5. In turn, the boot screen was inspired by this image: Susan Kare’s original notification icon for Finder dialogs.

This front and sideways person was displayed as your Mac booted up. You either loved it or hated it depending on how often you had reset the machine that day.

Apple is always regarded as having a fascination for Dieter Rams and functional industrial design from the 50s and 60s. The inspiration for this image goes back a little further.

A poster for the first Bauhuas exhibition in Weimar, 1923.

Recently, I was in a friend’s apartment in New York and saw something that reminded very clearly of Apple’s Finder icon. The poster was for the seminal first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar.

This specific poster is similar to the first poster and either designed by or styled after Joost Schmidt’s original. The poster incorporates the stylized face icon for the Bauhaus movement, designed by Oskar Schlemmer.

In the image above you can see Schlemmer’s original Bauhaus mark compared with Kare’s dialog notification icon for Apple.

I like Khoi Vinh. I may not always agree with him but he’s one of the few designers or thinkers who’s had a tremendous impact on me over the years. I used his work as a model for my work with The Associated Press. I listened to him a few times in New York and Austin discussing the NY Times organization as well as reaching back into the past and comparing differences between generations at The Times. Both performances were understated, modest and entertaining. He has a finely-honed sense of appropriateness in his work that has instilled itself into the team he brought together at the NY Times.

He once likened his work to turning the steamship around. It’s hard work, best done by tugs: small, determined boats with significant pulling power to be drawn from their engines. I guess I feel that Khoi has that power within him and it is impressive to see. Near the end, I can only imagine what issues he was facing within the organization — or within any organization that faces at its core such a radical shift in its way of doing business.

I’m also impressed to see that he has the power to cut the guidelines and use that energy in new ways. I’m sure there’s a relief in the sudden lack of tension, a giddy unsteadiness in the momentum from such a move.

I have another friend, who lives quite close to Khoi, in Brooklyn. This friend of mine once hired a tug boat to bring him and his then girlfriend on a slow cruise of the New York harbour. With this slow-burn power idling, he proposed to her. Things have changed between the two of them but I’ll never forget the power of the paradox: strong determination set against the frenzy of the city.

Khoi has it and I wish him well.

Recently I bought an Olympus XA2 that I saw in a shop here in Berlin for the price of a couple rolls of film. I also bought a couple rolls of film. The Olympus XA2, designed by infamous Olympus camera designer Yoshihisa Maitani, is a strange little beast of a camera. It's a 35mm zone camera with a slow-ish f3.5 lens in a tiny package. The original, the XA, is a true tiny range finder. It wasn't available for purchase but I'll keep my eyes out.

What drew me to this cool-to-the-touch metal camera was that the lens does not protrude from the front of the camera while in use. The lens and viewfinder are revealed when you slide over the front side of the camera. You choose a zone (face, <1.2m; body ~1.2m; and landscape, >1.2m) with a little lever which springs back after you close the camera. There's a big, beautiful and very sensitive red button you press to take a shot. The release of the shutter curtain is quite silent and you can effectively and surreptitiously wind the camera on under a table. This piece of 80s retro gear now sits in my bag, dwarfed by the D80.

Cecily Robyn Lough in Exberliner has a long-ish piece about Jamba and other Berlin start-ups.

While Berlin may seem to be an obvious match for a music-based company, the hightech start-up network is becoming so strong now that even fields not traditionally associated with the city are pulling in global talent.

Not sure about the title of the piece but agree that Berlin is a good destination for hi-tech and startups. I’m feeling good about my newly chosen “poor but sexy” city of residence.

Julia Moskin, writing of Ireland’s Darina Allen:

As more Americans teach and study at Ballymaloe, it has gained a reputation as an artisanal nirvana, where the scraps from the organic vegetables are fed to the chickens, which in turn produce organic eggs; where nasturtiums grow into thick hedges and where the jam is always homemade.

Reminds me of Ireland 25 years ago.

I named this weblog heltering after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that resonates closely with the power and rage of nature. At this time of year, the imagery of nature’s savagery in Hopkins’ poetry manifests itself in the world, so I thought I might take a moment to explain why I call the blog what I call it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (from Wikipedia)

If you have not come across Hopkins’ poems before (and even if you have), I suggest that you read the poem out loud, slowly. Take particular care when pronouncing the words: Hopkins took great labour to let you know how to pronounce the poem, right down to the marks.

SRIKE, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail
May’s beauty massacre and wispèd wild clouds grow
Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.

Heltering is a sort of reverse kenning. A kenning is a compounding of single ideas to create a more dramatic tension in the language. I say “sort of” because helter is a reduction of helter-skelter, disorderly speed and confused action.

There are some fine other Helter-Skelterers: the Beatle’s Helter-Skelter, an out of order track on the White Album, of which Paul McCartney said was added because he wanted to create loud, dirty noise. The song’s been covered by everyone from U2 to Oasis (I’m going to pass over the Manson cover and its morbid details).

Helter-skelter, like pell-mell, hurly-burly and harum-scarum, is an example of a rhyming reduplication, a word that only exists in pairs: breaking it down is to add meaning to a word without one. The additional layer of meaning comes from how the word sounds.

So there we have it: an appreciation for the unkempt power of nature, a reduction, a confusion of loud, dirty noise.

David Bellos gives a timely review of the limits of machine translation and a nice review of translation linguistic theory that Google Translate’s “electronic magpie” throws out. Read the op-ed.

Little emphasis on St. Patrick’s Day here in Berlin. Quite refreshing really. Can’t wait to see how they celebrate Martin Luther Day.

As Eric Pfanner writes in the New York times:

Why should a technology company in California be allowed to decide what is objectionable to the rest of the world, they ask. By comparison, imagine a Japanese television manufacturer determining what Americans are allowed to see on their sets.

Platform owners need to understand the grey area between application stability and content censorship. Both, subjective fields, need to be unwoven. The US does have its right to freedom of speech so it seems ironic that German publishers are taking a US manufacturer to task.

Ian Fette of Google:

If you’ve wondered why there haven’t been many Gears releases or posts on the Gears blog lately, it’s because we’ve shifted our effort towards bringing all of the Gears capabilities into web standards like HTML5.

Thank you, Google.