The Economist’s article on the rise of the cognitive elite describes Jan Pen’s compelling way of explaining income inequality in the United States:

Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

via A special report on global leaders: The rise and rise of the cognitive elite | The Economist.

In looking for alternatives to Amazon, I’ve come across quite a few websites that are completely new to me. One of them is The Book Depository, a well-stocked online bookstore whose prices seem, so far, to be competitive with Amazon’s.

The Book Depository has a nice feature called “Book Depository Live“, which allows you to see people buying books in (quasi) real time. Using Google Maps, the feature scrolls across the globe to show you the buyer’s location and the purchased book’s title.

Someone in South Africa buys a book

If I could make a suggestion to the people behind this feature, it would be that the links to books should open in new tabs. That way you could click on a book that looks intriguing without being taken away from the map view. As it is, you need to hold Shift (or Cmd if you’re on a Mac) while clicking if you want to stay on the map.

Despite this minor quibble, though, I like this feature. It reminds me of when Twitter was still new and visualisations of tweets superimposed on top of world maps were doing the rounds. Those projects were hypnotic but ultimately empty, because Twitter content suffers when isolated from conversational context. But in The Book Depository Live you might come across an interesting-looking book that you end up buying, and maybe being affected by in some way. I guess that’s something a book has over a tweet.

The Apple Store on Regent Street has been open for a while, but my first visit was just before Christmas. I went to get some things for my work laptop, and had a slightly confusing time.

The Apple Store on Regent Street

Once I’d found the stuff I needed, I spent an awkward few minutes hopelessly looking for somewhere to pay. Mild panic gripped me when I realised that it wasn’t going to happen – because there were no tills. No tills! And not only were there no tills, there were no signs saying “Pay Here”, no queues of patient shoppers, no beeping scanners. I simply could not figure out how to purchase the stuff I was carrying – a strange feeling to have in a retail environment.

Luckily a passing staff member noticed my confusion and asked if I was OK. I asked about paying for my things and he said, “that’s fine, we can do that right here”. Using an iPod Touch to scan my things, he then processed my card using equipment tucked away discreetly behind a bench. I was finally free to leave the store.

At first I thought Apple just wanted to use technology to look clever while streamlining the buying process. But maybe there was a deeper motive. After all, Apple doesn’t mess around when it comes to design – they execute well, but they also plan well (let’s leave Ping aside for the moment). So what’s the thinking behind the oddly invisible Apple Store purchase process? Here’s my take on it.

Show money the door

The central principle, stated simply, is this: get rid of money. Remove money from the space. Go as far as possible to extract money, the signs of money, the sights and sounds of money, from the Apple Store environment.

Putting this into practise means that there should be no tills, no barriers, no staff members sitting behind desks holding barcode scanners. No “Pay Here” signs dangling from the roof. No obvious places for shoppers to form queues. By taking these steps, the space can be wiped clean of the idea of money.

But why do this? Why take these steps when they’ll cost money while confusing customers, who are extremely accustomed to how normal shops work?

There has to be a good reason for doing it, and there is: to remove money as a mediating presence between the shopper and the product.

Money gets in the way (click for full size)

Money muddies our thinking. When we’re reminded that it exists, we can’t forget about it. When it’s on our minds, every decision we make is influenced by it. It becomes a kind of lens through which we process the world.

For most retailers this isn’t a big problem because it can be exploited. Think of the discount trick – you see a pair of OK-but-nothing-special shoes, then notice a sticker saying “20% off” and suddenly you want the shoes. So-so products can be enhanced by a money message; introducing money into the dynamic can make people more likely to buy. But while this is all very well for the likes of Tesco, Apple is playing a different game.

iThing, you complete me

Apple really doesn’t want us thinking about money when we encounter Apple products. It wants us to engage directly with them, without money intervening. The connection should be emotional, not functional or financial. Thoughts like “that’s cheap” or “is this discounted?” undermine this connection.

Instead, Apple want us to imagine our lives having been enriched and transformed by the snazzy new iThing that looks so glorious in this pristine store. Without money getting in the way, with no visible reminder of its influence, it’s easier to conceive of the iThing as being in our grasp. Without things like checkout queues subconsciously reminding us of money, our desire for the iThing can take more easily root in our minds.

Apple is creating a kind of post-money environment where decisions are based on emotion, not utility value, and that this is why they’ve erased manifestations of money from their store. It fits in with Apple’s broader strategy of being more like a luxury brand than a technology company. And it works – at least if my experience is anything to go by.

When I got back to the office I realised I hadn’t even checked how much my stuff cost, and was amazed to find that I’d paid £25 for a USB network dongle without batting an eyelid. If I ever visit the Apple Store again, I’ll have to be on my guard.

Over the last month I’ve been following a new(ish) trend in web design that I call “the ribbon”. I’ll show you some real-world examples shortly, but first here’s a mockup illustrating the basic idea.

Bunsen's website, using straightforward boxes

Here’s the homepage of Bunsen’s. The designer has separated the list of links (“log in”, “sign up”, etc) from the main content of the page by putting them in a little box. This is fairly standard practise, and works well enough.

But now let’s imagine Bunsen’s wants to refresh their site design. “Can we make it a bit more 2010”, they ask the designer, “without really changing anything”? It’s at this point that the designer might reach for the ribbon and produce something like this:

The ribbon to the rescue

It’s nothing more than a positioning adjustment, drop shadow, and a little triangle, but it makes the “links” box look like it’s been draped over the larger one. The design has a bit more depth to it even though the change is purely at the visual layer (as opposed to structural or functional).

Now that we’ve seen “the ribbon” in its basic form, let’s look at some screenshots of real “ribbons” found in the wild.

Avaaz.org

The first is from online activism site Avaaz.org. The “ribbon” is used for the box’s title, “Sign the petition”, and probably helps it compete for the user’s attention with the main image to its left:

And here’s a close-up:

Vodafone

The next one is from Vodafone, and was used on their “12 Days of Smiles” campaign site in the run-up to Christmas. You might remember this campaign for its ill-fated #mademesmile Twitter stunt. After all it generated more press than this ribbon did:

Vodafone's festive campaign site

Close-up:

A decidedly festive ribbon

What’s interesting about this ribbon is that it definitely has a seasonal dimension. The cut-out triangle at the edge intentionally references festive ribbons (wrapped-up presents, mistletoe, etc) to make the campaign site more Christmassy. I guess that working with Vodafone, you can’t evoke a yuletide atmosphere the easy way by using lots of red: it’s their main colour after all. So “the ribbon” is a handy gimmick here.

Western Union

This ribbon example from Western Union is also intended to have festive connotations, I think, but it’s not as explicit. You’ll notice that that isn’t from a website but from a poster campaign (yes, this is my attempt at being “cross-media”):

Western Union poster near Kensington Olympia

The final two examples aren’t festive, but instead show the ribbon being used by companies that want to appeal to an early-adopter, urban, techie kind of audience. If “the ribbon” is to the early 2010s what the curved-border gradient button was to the “Web 2.0” mid-2000s, these sites are at least partly to blame.

Foursquare

The first is Foursquare, who have used “the ribbon” pretty sparingly. It makes an arrow leap out of the screen slightly, but it’s not very prominent:

The Foursquare "arrow" ribbon

The next example is far less subtle, however, and is the most extreme use of “the ribbon” that I’ve found so far.

Notion Ink

Here’s the website of Notion Ink, the company behind the forthcoming Android-based Adam tablet. They’ve had a lot of attention over the last year and its old Flash-based site was rightly criticised for looking like a bit of a relic. So they launched this new site shortly before making their product available for pre-order:

Click the image to see in full size

A fairly normal “ribbon” crosses the header of the page, acting as a backdrop for the primary navigation links, but after that it goes out of control, bouncing around the page’s background like a 3D game of “Snake”. In fact the ribbon pretty much is the design – apart from the slightly discordant bird, there is no graphical (e.g. not text or video) element on this page that is not part of the ribbon.

Here’s another page from the Notion Ink site that shows the “ribbon” off to maximum effect:

Hyper-ribbon!

This ribbon seems to extend very far into the space of the screen, emerging from the distance to jut in front of the Adam tablet and the main text box. The page title (“The Philosophy”) is the only element that remains in front of the ribbon. This is the most extreme use of the ribbon I’ve found so far.

Conclusion

Is the ribbon a good or bad thing? I can see why some designers like it – it helps situate screen elements in a quasi-3D space, contributing to “user illusions” of spatiality that computer interface designers have been relying on for decades. But it could also become a modish gimmick, something designers lazily reach for when asked for “something that looks a bit more Web 3.0”. Maybe there’ll be a ribbon backlash. Or maybe it’ll become a strictly seasonal piece of design frippery, used only for festive campaigns as in the Vodafone example.

What do you think about the ribbon? Is it something you’ve noticed yourself? And if you know of any more examples of it, let me know in the comments.

I enjoyed reading this meditation on the subject of Google’s GChat by Caroline Bankoff, posted over at Thought Catalog. The piece is titled “45 Things I Think About When I Think About GChat” and it should resonate with anyone who’s spent time talking on that tool.

“Thing” Number 10 is:

It would be basically impossible to have anonymous cybersex on GChat. There is Group Chat, but there are no GChat rooms and, even if there were, they would lack the dim light of AOL’s “Romance” chat rooms. The best you could do with GChat is some kind of key party, with everyone going off the record with someone else’s contact.

If we’re to believe Rule 34, some people must have done this at one point…

I just searched Evernote for the word “strategy” and it somehow found this illegible whiteboard scrawl:

I think Evernote’s reading ability is starting to outstrip mine…

Update 8th May 2011: This post incorrectly states that Ronnie Hazlehurst orchestrated the theme for Sorry!. In fact, Gaynor Colbourn was responsible for both composition and orchestration while Ronnie Hazlehurst conducted the orchestra. It’s a common misperception that Hazlehurst had a bigger hand in this piece of music than he really did, so I’d like to give credit where it’s due. Gaynor Colbourn remains active as a composer and performer and more information about her work can be found at the Butler Colbourn website.

First of all sorry for not posting in a long time, I got distracted playing video games with elo boost services from ElitistGaming. The Sorry! theme – composed by Gaynor Colbourn and Hugh Wisdom – was a masterpiece of neon jazz-inspired cod-reggae, based around a jaunty organ line, a brass chorus, and a number of twangy synth interjections. I was so into it that in 2006 I released a heavily dubbed-out version of the tune on 7″ vinyl, under the name Apologist. My aim was to deliver on the theme’s cod-reggae promise with two Lee Perry/King Tubby-esque “versions”, based on elements from the tune but with a slower, more spaced-out atmosphere.

I gave the 7″ to a few people, but life just got too busy and I decided not to go ahead with getting proper distribution. It was just a fun project for me at the time.

The label art for Sorry!, created with the help of NCW

But four years later, in April 2010, the Sorry! 7″ led to one of the most surreal experiences of my recent life. I was at a Bleep43 night at Corsica Studios, watching Surgeon play a diverse but mainly techno-influenced set of electronic music when, at around 2am or so, I heard the rhythm from my Sorry! dub drifting up in the mix and gradually taking over the sound system.

It was weird on two levels. Firstly, it’s always weird to hear music you made get played in a nightclub, watching lots of people you don’t know dance to it. But secondly, and quite apart from the fact that I’d released this record, it was weird  to hear the theme from Sorry! make an appearance in the middle of a heavy Surgeon set. It’s not a well-known theme so it didn’t come across as a cheesy, ironic-reference kind of thing – in fact, in Surgeon’s hands, the tune meshed pretty well into the rest of the set. But it was still weird, especially when the horn breakdown kicked in.

Anyway, you now have the ability to experience the weirdness of hearing Ronnie Hazlehurst’s orchestration in a techno club, because Bleep43 have released a recording of Surgeon’s set from that night – go check it out!

And if you want another chance to hear Surgeon playing the dub of the Sorry! theme, here’s his Wax Treatment podcast which also features that track.

While Outlook on Windows has the ability to publish a calendar to the web, this feature isn’t present in Apple’s iCal application. This means that two-way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Apple iCal is more or less impossible. Yes, you can subscribe to your Google Calendar and see its events in iCal, but you can’t have iCal events moved to Google Calendar automatically. This means that you can’t get, for example, event notifications on your mobile device unless you manually copy events over.

Apple probably don’t mind this state of affairs because they’d like you to pay for MobileMe to access this sort of syncing functionality. But you might have lots of reasons for wanting to continue using your Google Calendar. If so, your only option might be Spanning Sync.

The bad news is that Spanning Sync is also a paid-for tool. It costs US $65 for a one-off license, or $25 for a one-year subscription. This is cheaper than MobileMe, which is $99. But the main benefit of Spanning Sync is that it works well and keeps your Mac interoperable.

Once you’ve installed it the process is extremely straightforward. It asks for your Google login details then finds iCal calendars on your Mac. Once you’ve paired up local and remote calendars, the software runs the first Sync and then sits in the menu bar quietly syncing away.

It works well enough, but it’s annoying that third party digital software products are needed to achieve this – let alone software that you have to pay for. So if you know of a better way to sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar, I’m really keen to hear about it!