Update on Stephen Fry's smartphone post

So it's been a couple of days since I came across Stephen Fry's post (link, via Daring Fireball). I cannot thank John Gruber enough for posting a link to Fry's webpage. I had to mention it on this blog, and have since come across it on Boing Boing Gadgets, but have noticed the following. I can get to the article in the mornings, but by afternoon, I run into 503 errors. I can only guess that the site is very popular, and I hope it gets a lot more visits, and that it can hold up to the traffic (let me know in the comments if you can think of another reason for the outages).

In case you're wondering, I went back to the article to re-read it. And then to re-read again the next day - twice. It's just ... "delicious" would be the word that comes to my mind.

Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite, it's Fry's sidebar rant on design

By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.” … I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT??

[via Stephen Fry's Blog]