Ports Thoughts

Yesterday IBM announced the next major release of Notes and Domino will be called "Social Edition" reflecting the fact that Notes and Domino are very much a part of IBM's social business strategy along with other products such as IBM Connections and IBM Sametime. Through the support for industry standards such as OpenSocial , OAuth and SAML it also opens up a whole new world of social integration with other social networking systems and more importantly line of business applications through embedded experiences and activity streams. Now that Notes 9 Social Edition is announced and just about to go into public beta I though I would share the new icons (still subject to change of course)

Over on the Microsoft Windows Team blog they have been discussing the new design of the Logo for Windows 8 and the history of the Windows logos. I always find it fascinating how logo's evolve over time (for example IBM ) and it is especially interesting when the designers explain what they had in mind. Apparently one of the key observations was from a designer from a top agency who observed “ your name is Windows. Why are you a flag? ”. You've got to love designers. If something is stylised they say it should be more literal . If something is literal they say it is too obvious. They get paid either way. I think it is pretty clear that in reality the old Windows logo reflected the rich Aero style interface while the new one reflects the starker more angular Metro interface introduced in Windows Phone 7. However, given that it appears that Windows 8 is going to have both Metro and Aero , perhaps this might have been more appropriate?