Immersion: Video/Photography of Robbie Cooper in New York Times Magazine

I have a vivid childhood memory of watching a friend watch television. The effect on me was powerful and somehow depressing — this unblinking face lit up by the tube, fully enraptured and unemotional. Robbie Cooper captures that face, or rather several of them, in his photos and videos of kids playing video games. The effect is especially powerful because they’re shot straight on, so you can see the kids staring right at the camera, and yet through it.

Cooper’s photos are both beautiful and slightly depressing, but the videos from which the photos are taken (shot using one of Jim Jannard’s Red cameras) take the cake. Cooper was inspired by Errol Morris’s fantastic Interrotron technique. You can’t help but imagine a camera watching you watch this.

(Incidentally, I just noticed how the NYT video player page keeps ancillary portions of the site dim until you mouse over them. I’ve seen this technique used frivolously elsewhere, but here it’s a nice touch, because it really lets you focus on the video and lets the color in the video come forward. Really nice.)

Refreshing take on web design

This is one of the most original, inspired designs for a website I’ve seen in a while. And from The Dude, no less — Jeff Bridges. For example, I love how he draws button draws buttons to represent links, and even characters pointing at the buttons to get you to click on stuff.

His photography is great, and his lettering (I’m assuming it’s his) is even better, like in the Iron Man set. The 1700 pixel-wide layout is interesting, too. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Of course it’s not terribly accessible or practical, but it’s fresh stuff.

What happened to you?

Great information design for a sling. Don’t know who designed these, but a great idea.

Emote with your hands

Apple’s “guided tours” are really well-crafted: informative, engaging, and a great showcase for their products. Most tours are led by Apple employees — like the new iPhone 3G tour by Bob Borchers, senior director of worldwide iPhone product marketing.

For amateur actors, the tours are quite good, for which the directors of the videos should be given credit. But the one thing the directors get wrong, I think, is overcompensating for what might otherwise be dry delivery by coaching the actors to make lots of hand gestures — or at least the same gesture, over and over and over again. In the new iPhone guided tour, Bob’s hands are out of control.

Nemo, Wall-E writer/director: Listen to your gut, not the audience

Andrew Stanton on not anticipating what the audience will or won’t like:

…That’s the part of the film audience to trust — the audience in ourselves. We don’t need to guess what other people want. I don’t go to see another filmmaker’s movie hoping he’s guessed what I want. I go to see it because I like his sensibility and I want to see what he wants to do next, or she wants to do next.

Wonderfully irritated with the OmniFocus UI

Matt Neuberg just wrote a somewhat positive review of OmniFocus, but he lambasts the user interface, even recording some screencasts to demonstrate the interface’s shortcomings. I love just how audibly peeved Neuberg is. And rightly so! Good for him.

Via Gruber.

To avoid Flash lock-in, Apple looks at SproutCore

Matt Asay writes about SproutCore, the Javascript framework behind Apple’s “Cocoa for Web Apps“ concept:

It will be interesting to see if this gamble on a relatively unknown open-source JavaScript framework will pay off—or whether it would have been easier to just buy into Flash. Apple has the developer clout to make it pay off, but for most developers, Flash or Silverlight are likely going to be better options.

By “Flash or Silverlight” Asay probably means “AIR or Silverslight”, but why are these going to be better options for developers? I’m no Cocoa developer myself, but from what I can tell, devs are very happy to work with Cocoa. Apple could release a “Cocoa for the Web” integrated development environment that would beat Adobe’s and Microsoft’s IDEs for AIR and Silverlight.

Once the browser-specific hoo-ha and Javascripting jumping jacks are handled completely by a framework like SproutCore, and once there’s a beautiful IDE to work in, and when there’s no proprietary plug-in needed because all the underlying technologies are open-source, I’m not so sure AIR and Silverlight will be the tools of choice.