I was sitting on a barstool next to my wife in a packed restaurant in Little Italy. We were the lone Kansas City Chiefs supporters in a nest full of hipster Philadelphia Eagles fans. After Jon Batiste finished his fantastic rendition of the national anthem, and the teams took the field for kickoff, I noticed something. The scorebug—the broadcast industry’s term for the lower-third or chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen—was different, and in a good way.

I posted about it seven minutes into the first quarter, saying I appreciated “the minimalistic lower-thirds for this Super Bowl broadcast.” It was indeed refreshing, a break from the over-the-top 3D-animated sparkling. I thought the graphics were clear and utilitarian while being exquisitely-designed. They weren’t distracting from the action. As with any good interface design, this new scorebug kept the focus on the players and the game, not itself. I also thought they were a long-delayed response to Apple’s Friday Night Baseball scorebug.

In the early 2000s to the mid-oughts, every designer I knew wanted to be featured on the FWA, a showcase for cutting-edge web design. While many of the earlier sites were Flash-based, it’s also where I discovered the first uses of parallax, Paper.js, and Three.js. Back then, websites were meant to be explored and their interfaces discovered.

A grid of winners from The FWA in 2009. Source: Rob Ford.

One of my favorite sites of that era was Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, where users could type free text into a chat box to command a man dressed in a chicken suit. In a full circle moment that perfectly captures where we are today, we now type commands into chat boxes to tell AI what to do.

Apple finally launched its Vision Pro “spatial computing” device in early February. We immediately saw TikTok memes of influencers being ridiculous. I wrote about my hope for the Apple Vision Pro back in June 2023, when it was first announced. When preorders opened for Vision Pro in January, I told myself I wouldn’t buy it. I couldn’t justify the $3,500 price tag. Out of morbid curiosity, I would lurk in the AVP subreddits to live vicariously through those who did take the plunge.

After about a month of reading all the positives from users about the device, I impulsively bought an Apple Vision Pro. I placed my order online at noon and picked it up just two hours later at an Apple Store near me.

Many great articles and YouTube videos have already been produced, so this post won’t be a top-to-bottom review of the Apple Vision Pro. Instead, I’ll try to frame it from my standpoint as someone who has designed user experiences for VR. 

This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.

The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.

When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.