First Day of School and the End of HP's TouchPad

This morning starts a new semester for our college and students.

As I read the headlines of Streaming Media's Website, the first thing that catches my attention is "The TouchPad is Dead." I didn't even know it was alive, and now it's gone.

HP's TouchPad was launched in early July and is now being discontinued and companies such as Best Buy are sending them home (250,000 just from Best Buy). The TouchPad was going to be working with Adobe and the OS was supposed to be a big contender for the iPad so that Adobe could feature its Flash Player on the TouchPad.

One of the most interesting items of the article was this statistic, "A full 80 percent of the tablet devices that Adobe showcased at last October's MAX event either never made it to market, made it to market and floundered, or made it to market and were killed off quickly." This may not bode well for Adobe and the Flash Player, since Apple's iPad still seems to be the forerunner among tablets.

It should be a fun and interesting semester, and I'm sure it will be an interesting rest of the year for technology as well.

-Daniel

On-demand world

We're becoming an on-demand design industry. On-demand books, magazines, clothing, shoes, 3-D models.

Now you can get your own temporary tattoos or buy the paper and print your own.

Check out: Tattly to see a company that has started their own business making and selling designer temp-tats. The company used design friends from StudioMates for their tattoo designs. I'd never heard of Studio Mates before I started reading about on-demand tattoos, so that was a cool find also.

Tatt.ly's website was designed by Oak.

Or check out this company for a printer/cutter combo for making temp tattoos.

-Daniel

Back to school and Blogging all the way.

Welcome back.

School starts on the 22 of August. Am I the only one who thinks Summer vacation seems to have gone way too fast this year.

This will be an exciting semester. I'm teaching a couple of new classes this semester: T-shirt Design, and Photoshop for the first time in nine years.

I'm also preparing a few new elements to add to my projects for students this semester. After reading an article in the NYTs today about students and writing papers, I'm going to add a new writing project this semester.

What if, indeed. After studying the matter, Ms. Davidson concluded, “Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

Read the whole NYTs article.

Every student in my design classes will be required to start a blog and write in it once a week about our classes, projects they're working on, or something about the design industry.

We'll see how this goes over. I think it'll be great for them and fun for all of us to see what they write.

-Daniel