*I love the phrase “pulling a Carmody.” I hope it catches on.

I think that you are right about the value of something being in place and iterating. And I am working on an idea I have for a Pictory so very much excited about that.

But I don’t buy your claim that the trend-line is taking us away from design. I think quite the opposite. I think that the past decade of the web has been the process of reintegrating design knowledge. Remember, we’re starting from lynx and then from black and blue on grey. And we’ve been crawling back toward rich beautiful design since then.

Remember tables? They were not meant to be used for page layout but by god we forced them into it. And text in GIFs? And frames? And WYSIWYG editors that spit out garbage HTML and WYSWNWYG? And PDF? And CSS 1? And Flash-everything?

Of course you remember all of this.

But yes, at the same time, we have the Googles and the Twitters (and the Tumblrs). I feel like this is a kind of retelling of the Bookservatives and the Technofuturists. And we Hilobrow Bookfuturists say “Pictory combines good design and things specific to the medium, kudos on that”.

So the SI demo.

There’s promising stuff in there. I can imagine myself using that thing. I can imagine enjoying a huge full screen (assuming it wasn’t too glowy) multi-column page of text. I still buy magazines and books (but also use gReader, Stanza, and Instapaper).

Which is not to say that all of your criticisms of it aren’t also true. It’s weirdly unimaginative. It’s just a magazine awkwardly reimplemented with random photos that are secretly moving pictures. Whatever it ends up being, it won’t be like that.

But… but…

We gave up SO MUCH to get all this stuff online. Some of what we lost was worth losing (pace Bookservatives). Some of what we lost is worth bringing back (pace Technofuturists).

Here’s an analogy that’s so closely linked that it might just be an example: Maps.

Google Maps sucks. It really does. The tiles take too long to load, the labels are placed in all kinds of weird places, you can’t see enough of the map at once, so you have to zoom in and out which is really, really, really choppy (see tile loading). Trying to navigate using maps when you are the passenger in a car is harrowing. More often that you’d like, you miss turns because the map didn’t load fast enough to show you the terrain you zoomed in on. It’s very hard to compare notes on Google Maps. You can’t really annotate it. The lines drawn are clunky and ugly, only slightly more than programmer placeholder art.

And yet, it is searchable, linkable, usable on anything with a screen and a net connection, comprehensive, free, embeddable, and there are sattelite photos. All of these frankly stunning positives drown out the negatives so thoroughly that I don’t own a single non-fictional map.

But it could and should be better.

P.S. My favourite line in the knowledge navigator video is “give me all the articles I haven’t read yet”. Content artillery strike.

P.P.S. We hate columns on computers because we end up scrolling in too many directions. Imagine if column naviation behaved like Pictory’s photos. You got to the end of one and it gently floated you up to the start of the next. Maybe we wouldn’t hate them so much.

P.P.P.S. The still picture that turns out to be a movie is the same trick that the Lumiere Brothers used to use in exhibitions, when film was brand new. You’d go into a room hung like a gallery of photos, seeming to be slides projected on to frames. And then someone would turn the crank and set one of these pictures into motion.