In amateur art classes, artists are taught to keep three things in mind while designing: frame, positive and negative space. The frame is of course the border of the picture and positive space is the area occupied by the object drawn. Negative space is defined as the space that is around an object but inside the frame. Utilizing this space brings balance in the picture and harmony to its composition. The image created by the negative space may either be the subject of a picture or it may help that subject stand out.

Even if it were, I don’t see why anyone would want to buy this tablet. The screen is so bad that I can’t recommend the device to anyone. Even if you truly must have an 8-inch Windows tablet for some reason, you shouldn’t buy the W3. You should just wait and hope that something better comes along.

A new kickstarter project:

“Of Beards and Men” is a labor of love for graphic designer and photographer Joseph D.R. OLeary. Over the past 18 months, he’s photographed 130+ bearded men. Each portrait is an exploration into that man’s passions, personality and unique individuality.

Why wasn’t I photographed?

Oopsie.

Sometimes CSS can be frustrating. Learn about some tricky properties, the common issues they can cause and how to solve them.

As a side note: Everyone should have one of those coffee mugs.

Kirk McElhearn makes an interesting case for Apple leading the way to DRM-free books. I especially like the part about Steve Jobs’ open letter to music companies back in the day.

A PC built with the specific purpose of running Pro Tools. I can’t help thinking the new Mac Pro will eat this thing for lunch.

Farhad Manjoo for Slate:

It’s hard to call Android anything other than a resounding success.

Well, except for one small thing: Most Android phones are crap. As part of a New Year’s resolution, I promised to trade in my beloved iPhone 5 for an Android phone sometime in 2013. I reasoned that, as a tech writer, I should spend more time with the world’s most popular operating system. Phone makers and carriers have regularly sent me Android phones to test out in the past, but I’d never given most of them more than a passing look—I’d open them up, turn them on, get aggravated by their bad keyboards or poor touchscreens or frustrating add-on software, and I immediately package them up and send them back.

Pretty damning article for Android.

“My view is it’s working very well.”

WTF?

Interesting chart from Philip Elmer-Dewitt. So Apple’s hobby device is doing better than most people thought with 56% of the market. Roku is doing very well too, but they make some great products.

One day after its release and MacProVideo has posted more than 7 hours of videos on Logic Pro X.

A Rolling Stone magazine cover featuring Boston bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has caused outrage online.

Thousands of people posted on social media networks calling it “tasteless” and “disgusting”.

Good article by Ash Furrow, the developer of the 500px app, on the importance of bringing your app to iOS 7 quickly.

NO COMPROMISES!

We have just released a very important security update for our iPhone and iPad apps addressing an issue that allowed passwords to be compromised in certain circumstances¹. Please download the update now.

If you’ve been using these apps, you should also update your password on Tumblr and anywhere else you may have been using the same password.

That doesn’t sound good.

One of my favorite apps of all time.

A new iOS companion app that allows users to control Airfoil on their Mac.

Shawn Blanc:

If you think you’ve reached a point where you can create work that never makes you cringe again, then you’re saying that what you do today will be just as good as what you do next month, next year, and in 5 years from now.

Shawn is absolutely right. We grow everyday and our work becomes better the more we do it.

A new piece of digitally signed spyware for Mac OS X uses a special Unicode character in its file name to hide its real file extension from users and trick them into installing it.

There’s no indication how widespread this is, or even if anyone besides the researcher has even downloaded it.

This is cool. Send a sketch and they’ll design and build it for you.

Jim and Dan talk about Logic Pro X, Apple TV and ad skipping, insta-deleting iOS apps, the coming public freak-out about iOS 7, releasing beta software as production-ready, Smoke on The Water, and more.

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Constraints expose compromises, and we can judge products (and their designers) by the apparent wisdom of those compromises. Some are barely noticeable, like a laptop that lacks the (bizarrely prevalent) hardware wi-fi toggle switch. Some are minor inconveniences, like a badly-placed USB port. But some are thwarting. There are some compromises that sabotage the promise of the device. The ultrabook with an awkward and RSI-exacerbating keyboard. The tablet with a narrow field of view. The smartphone with a poor touch-screen.

These aren’t compromises, but rather flaws.

Great article.