The client?  HP.

The primary goal of the project?  Not to create fun greeting cards for people, but to encourage the use of ink.  The creative process around that project actually explored the use of colors that required more ink.  When you have to use more ink, then you have to buy more ink.  And thats how HP makes money on printers. 

Inkjet cartridges are to razor blades as inkjet printers are to the Gilette sensor razor.  Inkjet printers are a loss leader.  They are a device to force you to go out and buy inkjet cartridges – the product that holds the real profit margins for HP.

Tabbloid is a service that allows you to take a number of RSS feeds that you read regularly and format the RSS content in a newspaper of magazine styled layout that is delivered to you pdf email attachment every morning.  The idea being that you print it out on your inkjet and read it in your breakfast nook while you sip coffee and munch on a bagel. 

When I first saw Tabbloid, I thought it was a pretty unique service.  I still don’t think it’s half bad.  Not for me probably.  But something that I could see catching on with my parents.  And make no mistake, from HP’s perspective this is good business.  A sound strategy.  Provide something useful for people that help your bottom line.  That’s what business should be about.

I do recommend that you give Tabbloid a try.  I’m not exactly sure why it’s important for me to inform you that Tabbloid wants to force you to buy more ink, but it is.

Alternatively, try Feedly. Which is a similar service but with a screen based content delivery mechanism instead of encouraging print outs. 

Twitter got a little face lift yesterday and its not that bad. I love the look of the larger type for your “following”, “followers”, “updates” count and that your latest tweet is place under the update field. They do use a lot of my design pet peeves… but that’s pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Pet peeve #1: Rounded corners… really?!? I’ve abused corners in some of my designs too, but I just don’t really understand the obsession. I know it’s very web 2.0, but the design stands up without them. I took a look in IE and it does… I almost prefer it. Maybe it’s because I’m missing the squareness of a tweet. It was sort of iconic. (Side note: It’s damn cool they are the CSS3 border-radius property for those silly corners)

Pet peeve #2: Finger tabs… or at least that’s what I’ve been calling them since my boy Shalin added them to the redesigned My eBay. In the new Twitter design, the finger tabs (right) replaced the horizontal ones that used to be above the timeline. I didn’t like the horizontal tabs either and really don’t know what the best solution would be, but those finger tabs just irk me. Maybe it’s because they look like fingers or maybe it’s because they want look like side navigation but act like tabs… something is just confusing about the whole look of them.

Pet peeve #3 Georgia Italics… that’s just gross and should never be done.

So other than that… it’s good step forward. Congrats, I know how hard it must be to please our large, vocal community. Want to see what everyone else is saying? Check out some of the reviews.

So… what’s the deal? WordPress for the iPhone lets you write, edit, and publish posts to you blogs (yup, blogs with an “s”). It supports both wordpress.org and wordpress.com. What’s also pretty cool is that you can upload photos either from your existing camera library or just snap on the fly and post. I can see this becoming really handy when I get my “What’s Holly Eating Now?” photoblog* off the ground. Actually most of the features are perfect for those quick, “check who I just ran into at [insert conference name here]” posts.

How am I going to use the app? Honestly, I probably won’t be doing a lot of writing from it. This is more of a shortcoming of the iPhone itself, but can you imagine typing up a 700+ word post entirely on the iPhone keyboard? I can barely handle 140 characters for twitter. Auto-complete, spelling and plus that lack of copy and paste for links, you can see where this is going… But if you have small fingers and are master with the touch keyboard, go for it. I can’t handle the keyboard on the iPhone, so I doubt there will be any local drafts for me. However, I can see myself editing existing drafts and publishing on the fly.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the app:

Overall I’m pretty impressed and can’t wait for any additions/updates. I’m hoping for more advanced admin feautres in the next release, like post/comment moderation. If you want to check out more screenshots go here or you can download the app now.

*Sidenote about the photoblog: Over the last couple of years, I noticed that people have a tendency to take photos of me while I’m eating… how awesome would it be to have all that on record.