Rams led the Braun design team for 40 years and developed a powerful philosophical approach to design which is summed up in his ten principles of design.

Early portable tape machine (requires several strong people to carry)

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design makes a product understandable.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is long-lasting.
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally friendly.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

The range of items the Braun team applied these principles to was enormous, from toasters and cigarette lighters to tape machines, home film cameras, music systems and shavers. And the exhibition shows off many of them and you can see the realisation of the principles in the spartan design as well as the design vocabulary of the buttons and shapes that have become utterly iconic. It’s impressive how few of today’s products even begin to meet Rams’ principles.

And you can also see the effect Rams’ principles have had on modern industrial designers, not least Apple’s Johnathan Ive, whose commentaries on his designs echo Rams’ early experiences as a carpenter and artisan. In particular, how the design for the iPod epitomises much of what Rams was doing and thinking, much more so than the perforated aluminium Mac towers. It’s just a shame that, while they’ve got a new MacBook and iPod, they haven’t actually got any kind of quote from Ive himself.

Once we all dreamt of having hi-fi systems like this (with a record player and tape machine)

Overall, it’s a nice exhibition and the exposure to Rams’ principles is inspiring, but I would have liked to have more commentary on the development of the principles and when and how Rams came up with them. I’d also like to have had more of a direct link to current products that echo these principles, the one case of stuff they have is hardly enough to suggest a long-term legacy. Otherwise you’re left with a bit of a feeling that this is an exhibition about the past (and the past of Braun in particular), rather than one about a powerful design philosophy that is as relevant today as it ever was.

A small section of the huge mud wall painting at Tate Britain

Something else I’ll be spending more time with is Posterize. A great simple, free app that turns your iPhone pictures into pseudo-polaroids and lets you scribble any message you like on it, as long as it’s 14 characters or less. Simple and potentially stupid, it’s a bit like photo candy or popcorn or crack. Once you’ve done a bit you probably want to do some more. My latest were taken at the Richard Long exhibition at the Tate Britain, which is pretty bloody fantastic too. It’s one of the first exhibitions for ages where the catalogue is genuinely worth having. And you can see what the effect of Posterize is on this too. It just makes the colours look really enticing and I love the stupid writing. You can see more Posterize images in the Posterize group on Flickr and more of my ones on my Flickr pages.

Meanwhile, putting the iPhone and its apps aside for one moment, let me roundly condemn Van Cam for introducing me to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher comic. I’d been trying to avoid it for ages, mainly because I’d taken a somewhat irrational dislike to Dillon’s artwork (no accounting for taste), but I got suckerpunched into it when we were inadvertantly browsing through the racks at the Trafalgar Square Waterstones. Now I’ve read the first issue I’m bloody well crack happy on the book and only too aware that I’m going to have to blow hard earned cash money on the remaining 8 or 9 volumes. Bastard.

Finally, I’m loving the new Little Boots album.

Large copper sulphate crystal from Roger Hiorns Seizure installation

The Kids Who Do Art were obviously very, very clever. Having had the contents of last year’s Turner Prize substantially dissed, they decided to ensure that this year’s nominations at least produced some interesting, albeit highly exclusive, art, rather than tedious monologues of string and manikins.

This time instead of nominating some oververbal, cliche ridden artphags, the Turner Prize people have nominated personal favourite Roger Hiorns (along with three other lucky losers). Hiorns, who poured anything between 60,000 and 90,000 gallons/litres/bathtubs of copper sulphate into a council flat to ‘see what happened‘, is everything the Turner people need after the tedium and torpor of last year. Most essentially he gets noticed outside the patronisingly oblique little artworld that the Turner people inhabit. Seizure, the copper sulphate council house, is fantastically compelling and emphasises that the most extraordinary, most relevant art today is taking place outside the confines of the galleries and museums the Turner people live in. The demand for spectaculars, whether it be Seizure or the recent grafitti under Waterloo station, far outweighs that for most retrospective showpeice exhibitions. Admittedly, at least one of the other nominees, Richard Wright, is interesting, but for my money it’s Hiorns’ to lose. I particularly look forward to seeing the Little Artists’ lego version.

Meanwhile, I’ve been adding to my overbearing web presence. In particular I’ve been forced (forced you understand) to upgrade my Flickr account. You can see all my pics from the copper sulphate house, along with a whole load of other stuff, most of which has been taken by and manipulated within my iPhone. I can’t wait for Apple to put together a halfway decent camera lens for it in the next release.

I was super happy to find out that after what seemed like three or four lifetimes worth of waiting, Powers volume 12 is out. I had worried that, as with many comics, I might have got bored during the interval and it would be a hideous disappointment, but I needn’t have wasted the worry. Powers 12 is the best volume yet, finalising the Deena Pilgrim story arc along with a bunch of in-the-wings characters. Overall it feels as bittersweet as the final episode of The Wire series 3, it’s hugely satisfying, but I’ve no idea where they’re going to take the series now. Pilgrim sitting on a beach somewhere feels very reminiscent of McNulty swinging a baton as he’s returned to the beat. Still in Bendis we trust. Like David Simon, he seems to have his finger on the pubic bone of the police procedural and is capable of playing it about at will.

After all that messing about with sequencing, I thought I’d mess about with video. This has been made with iMovie and really it couldn’t be simpler. iMovie imports all the video on your machine – not that much in my case as I don’t actually have a video camera and have to rely on the video from my camera and strangely it didn’t catch the movies from Ratter’s Flip camera – but it’s enough to play with.

Putting the clips together and trimming the various clips is also pretty simple, although I’d like to be able to see the audio waveform when trimming, rather than simply hearing it, to ensure I got the trimming absolutely spot on. However, given I haven’t bothered to read any documentation or view anything other than the opening You Can Do This movie, I’m sure there are ways to do this. In any case it doesn’t seem to have proved too much of a deterrant to getting the cuts in the right place.

Anyway, this is a video of the Boon cavorting to my latest tune Kyle.

Garageband, Apple’s basic, mass market music recording software, has had a whole new tutorial module attached, along with some upgrades to the guitar amps, but it’s the tutorials that are the outstanding thing. Although there aren’t very many of them – you can see it’s a tentative early days implementation – but what there is is pretty fantastic. You’ve got 9 lessons for both guitar and piano and each one lasts 5 – 10 minutes. You have a video lesson, complete with music notation and a mockup of either the piano keyboard or the guitar fretboard, then you can play a song along with prearranged accompaniment. So far I’m about halfway through both and I’ve learnt a couple of key things as well as being able to play Ode To Joy along with what sounds like a rather half arsed oompa band and some basic blues. It’s great. The tutor, Tim, is all Apple cool, but effective nonetheless and the format is great. The only downside is that there are so few lessons. I can see myself wanting more comprehensive ones pretty damn soon.

Actually that’s not the only downside. In keeping with its iTunes Store and the iPhone AppStore, Apple has launched a Lessons Store for these lessons, and while the initial ones are free, the idea is obviously to charge people for additional lessons, including lessons teaching you how to play ‘popular’ songs featuring the people who wrote them. And while I don’t have a fundamental problem with this, the current execution is terrible. You have to think that a supposedly hip company like Apple would have been able to sign up some proper stars, rather than the dross that’s featured here – Sting being the only one I even recognise. It’s a very short line up of, I guess, Gap style blands like Ben Fold. Again I suspect that this is a case of a featured rushed out slightly before its time. Next update let’s hope they bring us the likes of Radiohead etc. Also at £3.45 it’s a little too expensive.

The other major upgrade is iPhoto and I’m not sure whether to be amazed or afraid with its latest feature, Facial Recognition. To use it you identify a particular individual’s face (the programme’s intelligent enough to identify faces themselves) and iPhoto takes it from there, showing you additional images that it thinks might be that person. The more images of the person you identify, the better iPhoto gets at identifying them. I spent a lot of Saturday going through my images and I was gobsmacked. It’s a fantastic feature.

It is also profoundly scarey. Imagine, this is a consumer application that can go through my not inconsiderable iPhoto library in less than 10 minutes identifying all the faces (and admittedly some elbows, hands and other bits and pieces, but by and large faces). It’s then able to sort those faces based on my input confirming the identity of various people. And its suggestions are, pretty much, accurate, it’s able to separate me at various ages from my family at various ages and it throws up relatively few errors. And this is what consumers get. For less than £60.

Imagine what the spy community gets! Imagine how much more accurate and swift that software is. Imagine being able to scan, sort and identify an entire airport of users in seconds, being able to track people through traffic and security cameras, I used to think it was as unlikely as Tony Scott’s Enemy Of The State. Now, I’m not so sure.

And mapping people couldn’t be easier. Assuming I have a camera with GPS, iPhoto will even arrange my photos by location. So I can theoretically follow someone, identify them and have a series of photos that show where they’ve been going. And while I can see numerous great family uses for these features, they raise some sinister questions.

Personally speaking, I’d make some sort of effort, but then I’m not O2, the spanish telephone company that has the lock on the iPhone in the UK. They thought of a very special way of making their customers’ iPhone upgrade memorable. First you send them a text message at 8 in the morning telling them you’re offering them a special deal. It’s so special it’s a web only deal.. You tell them that it’s extremely limited and demand is expected to be high. You tell them it’s first come, first served. You direct them to a part of your website that is 3 clicks away from where they get to sign up. And then.

Your server crashes at 8:02.

How bad is that? Well. It’s pretty bad. Admittedly it’s not bad in a ‘Hover, we practically blew the company on that free flights offer’ way, but it is bad. Bad in so many other ways. Bad in a ‘we had a chance to marry our brand (which no one gives a toss about) with Apple’s (one of the world’s best brands) and we decided we’d rather stab our customers in their eyes than take the opportunity’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘aren’t we supposed to be, like, a telecoms company?’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘shouldn’t we have some idea of extendable server systems’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘do you think anyone will trust us to set up ANY kind of internet sort of thing EVER again’ kind of way. And very, very bad in a ‘do you think they’ll notice’ kind of way. Hmm, let’s ponder that last one. Nope, I think they’ll definitely notice. But just in case they don’t, let’s redirect them to look at our iPhone tarrifs, I mean they’re all only going to be EXISTING IPHONE CUSTOMERS. They’re only currently paying for the service, so they’ll probably have AN IDEA of your bloody tarrifs.

So O2, the telecoms company that thinks it’s better to sponsor the millennium dome than actually provide a, get this, mobile telephone service, this is how badly you’ve blown it. You’ve managed to convince ALL the early iPhone adopters in the UK that you’re systemically unable to live up to the Apple brand. You’ve managed to convince us that you know NOTHING about technology, NOTHING about the internet and NOTHING about your customers – except that apparently it’s OK to treat them like scum. You’ve managed to convert an opportunity into a catastrophe in a way that can only be described as self-inflicted. You’ve demonstrated an incompetence of planning that is somehow also deeply, deeply strategic. This is long term brand-nuking stuff. This is a well known major supermarket selling poisoned food manufactured in sweat shops by slaves to children and exposed in a popular Sunday tabloid. This is incompetence, ignorance and technical illiteracy as core brand values. This is ‘Ratners sells crap’, but sent by text message, individually to each of your customers. This is getting really, really, really close and personal with them and then, giving them a full-on blowback of your festering halitosis.

Compare and contrast with the Nike +, a partnership with Apple that worked for both partners, where Nike win a Palme d’Or at Cannes, while Apple reinforce the iPod as the natural choice for runners. Here Apple must be really pleased to work with people who can’t even keep a server running. I mean Apple only sells billions of tunes via iTunes and here’s its specialist mobile partner and they can’t even keep a website up. For the morning. This makes Apple look like twats for selecting this bunch of amateurs for their partners. Worse, it makes Apple look like stupid twats. It makes Jobs look like an asshole. And you’ve got to think, How long is he going to tolerate that?