“To live in the world of creation – to get into it and stay in it – to frequent it and haunt it – to think intensely and fruitfully – to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation – this is the only thing.”

Think about it while reading this.

A couple of people who noticed what I was doing asked me how it’s done, so I thought I’d share the process:

• I assemble the layouts in OmniGraffle. Set the canvas size to iPhone resolution at 320×480 pixels and use one of the free stencils out there containing the basic iPhone UI elements, such as Ultimate iPhone by Patrick Crowley. (If you’re creating a web app, the iPhone Webapp Wireframes stencil by Theresa Neil will help get you started).
• You’ll probably need Toolbar icons such as these ones by Glyphish (or, try this more limited common toolbar icon set).
• For more UI libraries, see iphonedesigntools.com (Photoshop and Illustrator libraries only, no OmniGraffle version yet).
• For Home screen buttons, try this Photoshop template or use this browser-based icon maker.
• Now for the fun part: once you’ve completed the layouts in OmniGraffle, export to PNG and upload the folder containing the images to Dropbox (you’ll need to create an account if you’re not yet a Dropbox user). Then, access the folder using the Dropbox iPhone app — and voila, you can view and browse the 1:1 mockups on your iPhone screen in a convenient, easy to update format.

• Google wants to put a Search box on top of your TV, Facebook wants a Like button. Which would you rather use?
• Google Wave should’ve been marketed as reinventing the wiki rather than reinventing email
• Google and the Big Banana – advertising is changing to become social graph-based. How much of that will Google own in 5yrs?

See also the comments posted on Friendfeed during the live broadcast.

At age 15 I moved to Helsinki to study at a gymnasium specializing in fine art. My family remained in California, and relatives lived outside the city except for grandfather Georg, a recently widowed painter.

He lived in a cobwebbed apartment on the top floor of a Jugend fortress built during the Russian era. The building looked confidently over the officers’ casino on the frozen bay as if it was expecting the imperial schooner to dock shortly at its feet, and Alexander the Blessed to hop ashore and claim back his old Grand Dutchy. He had an excellent library, which could only be accessed using a ladder so as to not disturb the dust (which, if it got in the air, could have been deadly to the asthmatic inhabitant).

Grandpa Georg tutored me in languages and the history and philosophy of art. I studied Swedish conjugations late into the night with the help of strong black Caravan tea in his studio, and accompanied him on morning excursions where he taught me his methods of “people-snapping” (quick sketches on café napkins with a felt tip pen) and painting aquarelle landscapes in any weather. Although he and I inhabited different centuries (the sight of him in public without a decent black tie would have been scandalous), we were both rather lonely, and I began to genuinely value the company of the gruff old aristocrat.

More than anything he was intellectually preoccupied with the notion of beauty. He held beauty to be a value on its own, saw it originating in nature, and considered its reverence a precondition to ethical human discourse and politics. The task of the artist was to be the intermediary who raised in his audience an awareness of beauty where none was apparent – within unremarkable landscapes and unappreciated members of society – and thus a sensibility for the subjects’ worthiness. Although he disliked Heidegger, he was closely aligned with phenomenology in emphasizing intentionality (consciousness being always about some external object) and, through the craft of painting, the portrayal of the world as it presented itself to the eye, as free of presuppositions and intellectualizing as possible.

Speaking about his teacher, the early 20th-century Russian painter Valery Semenoff-Tianchansky, he says:

“When I think about Valery Semenoff-Tianchansky, and what he, an old man, meant when he exclaimed: “Look! Just look at that field!” It may have been wheat growing, or perhaps rye – it was the color of bronze, and quite spectacular. He said: “There is nothing more beautiful in existence.” His friend Picasso — he said Picasso could not have painted that. And indeed Picasso couldn’t. Because no man is capable of painting it. We can only adore it, and try to teach others to revere it too. “

The full 8 1/2-minute interview is below.

Painter Georg Engeström a.k.a. GEM (1921-2008) reflects on his life’s work and the role of the artist as an intermediary between man and nature. This interview was recorded at his summer home in Finland shortly before the opening of his 85th anniversary exhibition. Although GEM applied a range of methods (he studied the fresco in Italy and spent five decades as a political cartoonist), and painted thousands of portraits during his 70-year career, he is still mainly known as a landscape painter. His work was influenced by Goya, Turner, and – more than any other – the Russian master Ilya Repin (he was born in Repin’s home village). He passed away in 2008.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

… And those whose “sole misfortune,” in the words of Tracy Chapman, “was having mountains of nothing at birth” – personified in the novel’s namesake James Gatz a.k.a. Jay Gatsby:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

Despite all the zeal, Gatsby’s impetus to get ahead in life and pursue his dream is a paddle race against the tide of time. It is an effort to relive his one long-gone moment of genuine happiness. Predictably, he never gets to live that dream.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Whether you’re Tom, Daisy, or Gatsby, salute the past that colors your future.

(Also, this week’s Economist has an informative article on the uncertainty of the science of climate change, which gives additional context to some of the assumptions above.)

Paul violently persecuted followers of Jesus prior to his conversion to Christianity. You may not have persecuted anyone, but can you honestly claim your actions have never had unhappy consequences to other people? Tillich’s following lines, written (if I’m not mistaken) in the aftermath of the Second World War, are so riveting that I’ll quote them here at length, with a bit of editing to improve online readability:

“Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound”, says Paul in the same letter in which he describes the unimaginable power of separation and self-destruction within society and the individual soul. He does not say these words because sentimental interests demand a happy ending for everything tragic. He says them because they describe the most overwhelming and determining experience of his life.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace.

After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.

In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life.

We experience the grace of understanding each other’s words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation.

We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted.

We experience the grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between man and nature. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belongs to life.

And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self- complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life.

We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say “yes” to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.

Photo credit: ElDave (Flickr)

My little Google Buzz voting experiment broke 20,000 votes this weekend (story on ReadWriteWeb). As of now 1,390 people have submitted 487 ideas and cast 21,218 votes (some ideas are duplicates, sadly there is no way to merge them). Thanks to everyone who has participated!

Below is a short summary of the feedback. It’s not meant to be objective and you should feel free to create your own breakdown (anybody out there specializing in survey analysis?) I tried to take into account the most actively voted topics while also including less popular fixes that I consider important.

I. Clean the stream

1. Hide comments by default (use notifications & hints—see Jaiku/Friendfeed)
2. Don’t re-order the stream when new comments are added to posts
3. Allow clicking posts to expand/collapse threads inline
4. Remove dupes
5. Allow unsubscribing from specific sources

1. Don’t put notifications about new comments in my Inbox unless the comment is directly addressed to me or in a thread that I explicitly subscribed to
2. Make Mute a clearly visible button
3. Better filtering: e.g. allow sorting search results by # of likes & comments
4. Don’t show the same faces more than once in New Followers
5. Stop showing unread count in sidebar (this is not email)

Leo Laporte, Kevin Marks (Vice President at British Telecom and former Googler), Jeff Jarvis (author of What would Google Do?) and I dive into Google Buzz on This Week in Google.

Watch the show or subscribe to the podcast at twit.tv/twig29

Nonetheless people (even Robert!) want it to succeed. Massively. The web is overflowing with calls to fix Buzz.

Google must react at lightning speed. But what can busy engineers do to draw signal from the jumble of rants and raves scattered across the web?

The Gmail help center is a dead end. The Suggest a Feature page contains nothing Buzz-related. The list of Known Issues has two entries.

As a quick solution, I set up an unofficial How to Fix Google Buzz series on Google Moderator. Anyone can participate by adding ideas and voting them up or down. I seeded it with Scoble’s “12 worst features Buzz copied from Friendfeed.”

It has now been live 24 hours, so let’s see if the experiment worked.

• How many ideas have been submitted? 209.
• How many votes have been cast? 7,016.

Not bad considering it took about 5 minutes to set up.

Here are the top 10 requests:

1. “Provide a way to hide all comments until I want to see comments” (205 votes)
2. “Filter by content type. (i.e. don’t show me twitter from anyone, or for a specific user)” (174 votes)
3. “If I read comments in Buzz mark them as read in Google reader and vice-versa” (162 votes)
4. “Provide a way to group friends into lists. Lack of this makes using Buzz with more than small groups very frustrating” (143 votes)
5. “Let me see all the likes by a single person. Over on FriendFeed I can see what Mike Arrington has liked, or commented on. I can’t do that in Google Buzz” (128 votes)
6. “Add comment moderation. It should be possible to block people right from comments (like on FriendFeed)” (111 votes)
7. “I’d love to see Gmail filters applied to Buzz. Keep most of the keyword based filters that are available on Gmail filters but add new ones like Number of Comments, Number of Likes, etc. Actions should include Mute for hiding noisy threads” (99 votes)
8. “A collapsed list view like what’s available in Google Reader” (97 votes)
9. “Duplicate posts filter / grouping. So I don’t have to scroll past / see all those duplicate Reader shares. e.g. Of Mashable stuff” (92 votes)
10. “Introduce lists (like in Twitter) to Buzz” (92 votes)

Note that #10 duplicates #4. Too bad Google Moderator doesn’t have a way to merge entries (feature request!)

Feel free to add in your votes and ideas.