Mega-Drawn post: My Favourite Comics and Art books of 2007

Wikipedia is rolling out a plan to pay illustrators. Yes!
Five dollars. Ugh.

Flickr introduces Places. Here is Montreal.

Here it is in black & white, folks:

“If your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st century.” – Cory Doctorow from this interview on kottke.org.

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart – this is something I would actually consider buying.

Karl just blogged about installing OSX 10.5 Leopard on his Mac. And I began to leave a comment on his post – but realized it’s a full blog post. So here’s what I think…

I was excited as anyone about Leopard. I was hoping to use it as justification to buy a new Mac. But after reading the reviews, I have to say it looks like a waste of time. It’s no secret that Apple moved their top developers onto the iPhone two years ago and this seems to be reflected in the sad lists of improvements that are popping up everywhere.

Let’s have a look:

• Spaces? Okay. Much appreciated, but Linux was doing that in 1999.
• The stacks look cool. But apparently they’re not so user-friendly. I’m eager to play with them.
• Time Machine? Is this a joke? Even Apple themselves are calling it a giant leap backward. I already have a system back-up.
• And according to Dave Winer, the new menu bar is hard to read and he wants the old one back.
• But this takes the cake: Spotlight is now a calculator? MacWorld mentions this in the paragraph after they list the “big changes”. This is 2007 – why wasn’t Spotlight already a calculator? Only Steve Jobs could make people pay for this.

I think I knew Leopard was going to be a disappointment when Walt Mossberg put Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on the spot by asking them (I paraphrase): “Are we going to see anything truly new any time soon? Basically, it’s been twenty years and we’re still using Windows 3.1.” and Steve and Bill just sat there uncomfortably looking at their shoes.

But no problem – between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Picnik, and Google Notebook – I think we’re seeing some truly exciting OS developments. Sadly, not on the Mac.

I just read the brilliantly-written Ars Technica review of Leopard that everyone is linking to: “If Apple is going to make mistakes, let them be made in service of a truly daring design.”

Nicely put.

Playing with FriendFeed, one of Google’s latest acquisitions. It’s Facebook but for people who already have content on the web. Here’s my account.

Forbes Magazine ponders The Future – including an essay by James Surowiecki and a short story by Cory Doctorow.