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Given that people nowadays – due the the economical situation – spend less money on expensive furniture, young designers are pushed to think how they can succeed. Athens, Greece based designer Alexander Xanthakis adds:

In order to sell my design, without notoriety, the object has to be simple, strong and affordable.

A minimalist chair because it has to be minimal. A chair which is both strong – tested to support a weight of 1000kg – and elegant on the one hand, but made with less material and production labour on the other hand.

He came up with the “7.11 €/kg” Chair, made of 5 bended pieces of steel welded together, one consolidating the other. The 7.11 € per kilogram is the mass production cost that Xanthakis aimed for since the project started.

Before Buddha became enlightened he searched enlightenment by following different masters. Each one promised him that if he followed his way he would find what he was looking for. Buddha starved himself, lived a live of poverty and did other things as he was told by his masters.

After several years he realized that none of this was going to give him what he was looking for, so he picked ideas and notions from the different ways he followed in the past and started following his own way. He attained enlightenment.

I came to realize that minimalism is the same. You can follow different masters, but at the end of the day you will have to follow your own. Take ideas and tips and incorporate them into your own Way. Learn from it, make it part of your life and pass it forward.

This is my enlightenment. I have my own way now, one I call Practical Minimalism. It is now time for me to pass it forwards and live my own life.

With this I am closing this chapter call Minimal. I hope you had fun and, like me, learned something from it. I might post here and there but my focus now is going to be Pack Light, Go Fast.

Thank you all for the support.

Dedicated to all the Mac haters.

logicalism over minimalism:

Someone sent me the link via Twitter.

I’m not going to comment, he has his opinion and frankly it’s a good opinion. However I will state that after having worked, coded (in different languages) and generally suffered while using PCs for 20 years, I can simply say that no, PCs are not a good tool to work with, regardless of minimalism, no, it is near impossible to do work in any way with Windows without suffering crashes, viruses, malware, spyware, bloat, DLLs hells, programs that don’t support previous version of its own file formats, bad brand support (try calling Dell for help for example) and other nasties. I chose to be a Mac only person. They are way better, in my opinion, in every way: better hardware, better software, better support and, yes, way more pleasing to the eyes as well.

That’s all. I hope you all have a great weekend and if Notepad crashes again and takes the entire system with it, well, don’t come crying to me.

A Lions Prey (See Ya Finder) | The Brooks Review:

What is our ultimate goal here: is it to have the ultimate version of Finder, or is our real goal not to have to constantly troubleshoot other peoples computers? For me it is the latter. (The argument can also be made that in simplifying computers it helps to better society, but such an argument is far more complex.)

Ben makes the argument for a more simple Finder that makes it easier for the average user to, well, find things. Good insight and speculation.

Furthermore, as a consultant I can attest that way too much of my time is spent simply walking people through the filesystem.

Also, Mr. Brooks has been en fuego lately. Read only if you are interested in thought provoking Apple related content.

KuraFire writes in “Is Canvas the New Flash?”:

When ads on the web start to become JavaScript, Canvas and/or CSS3–driven, we most certainly won’t have an easy way to block them anymore. Except for the relatively easy way we already have, which is to block the ad-serving servers and scripts via extensions such as the JavaScript Blacklist.

A “ClickToCanvas” is certainly not out of the question, but it is unlikely to be as needed as ClickToFlash is. The difference between 30% CPU and 1-2% CPU is very serious, as is the difference between one third of battery life and a negligible impact on battery life.

And even then, if we really get annoyed by CSS3 and Canvas ads that keep on rotating, even on sites we insist on visiting regularly, simple things like the user preference file and (as-yet unwritten) extensions allow us to simply disable such animations. The difference between standards-based techniques and proprietary plugins is that there are myriad ways to deal with the former, and only one with the latter. That’s why things like ClickToFlash came with features such as letting Youtube work anyway—because we couldn’t distinguish “good use of plugin” from “bad use of plugin.”

Standards-based ads may be every bit as egregious in design and interaction as the current spawn of Flash-based ads, but their negative impact on battery life will be hugely different, and for those still bothered by the former, many more solutions will be available to make their lives happily ad-free.

This, together with the entire post, makes a lot of sense and points out different problems, more specifically the fact that Flash is power-hungry beast of a plugin/technology.

However, the problem is not only Flash. The problem is the ads. A HUGE part of today’s Flash usage is ads or other similar annoyances. Not a menu or a navigation tool, not a video or other media player, but annoying ads that move and keep our already busy and focus starving mind from getting things done. All that while sucking the life out of our batteries.

When Flash is gone - and I am sure it will be gone or at least relegated to a secondary solution - the assholes that are the advertisers will use the next technology available to make your Viagra buying experience better. If this is HTML5/CSS3 then so be it. We’ll find a way to block those ads as well.

Long live Readability.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

- William Morris