No, we’re not talking about Bono. Sigh. We’re talking about Don Lindsay, who was, according to Apple Insider:

Design Director of the Mac OS User Experience Group, he led what was called the “Mac OS X interface concept project” and directed the design team responsible for the user experience of Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah” through Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther,” which included the company’s first-generation of iLife digital lifestyle applications.

From there he was hired away by Microsoft to create — wait for it! — Vista. More specifically, AERO Glass, Flip3D, and Windows Calendar. Redmond start your copiers, indeed.

So what do you get if you copy a copy? Aside from artifacts and banding galore, RIM’s new VP of user experience, it seems. There’s only one problem with this, of course, and it should be obvious to RIM or to anyone who’s seen Vista or the Star Wars prequels.

Great artists need great editors. The best kindergarten teachers know when to pull the paper away from the kids. Steve Jobs is a great editor, a great kindergarten teacher. Word is he would scrutinize the UI down to the pixel level.

Hiring the guy who was already hired away by the other guy doesn’t give you the iPhone. It gives you the Storm. And RIM already learned how that worked out. Vista on the Storm… Good luck with that.

If you’d like a better idea, instead of trying to get the guy Microsoft got from Apple, and trying to dupe the dupe that is Vista, find someone new. Find something new…

Think different!

Seems iTunes 8 for Vista 32/64 will crash if you hook an iPhone or iPod up to it, or, you know, look at it funny. Gizmodo says some users are having luck reverting back to 7.7, or doing a complete uninstall and then installing 8.0. Apple, meanwhile, is asking for crash logs to try to figure out what’s happening.

Could Apple’s Quality Assurance department really not have any Vista machines in-house to run tests on? Any other company, and we wouldn’t even ask but as reader Bryan points out in the comments:

Apple, you’re looking more and more unstable as 2008 progresses. I’m not trying to be a jerk, but today’s press conference was absolutely unnecessary; these were minor product line changes, not something worth throwing an “event.” Please invest more in QA and less in these events.

We’d joke it was the new Gates/Seinfeld ad pressure, but we figure Vista users aren’t in a real laughing mood over this. For my part, I haven’t installed iTunes on my Vista machine yet, but now I’ll make a point of it. Let’s see what happens…

And Apple, break’s over, b’okay?

So, uhm, hey, remember yesterday how we told you that jailbreaking made your iPhone more powerful and added to the fun factor? Well, this skin is kind of the opposite of that. If you want to remember the unintuitive days of PC and its notoriously pitiful/sucky/failure-of-an-OS current version, well there’s a Vista skin that will frankenstein your iPhone’s beautiful layout into something Redmond would create. You’ll probably be disowned by the iPhone community if you flaunt this in public but hey, to each his own.

Supposedly the demand for this is very high and the creator, Spec-Works, is working his way into Installer.app. I can only hope that this is all a horrible nightmare that I need to wake up from. Though as much as I find this repulsive, I have to admit, this is a pretty well made theme. The icons and folders are on point and the color fits thematically with its PC counterpart.

This is our take: NO.  Like when Neo said it.  NO:

What’s next, a skin based off the Blackberry OS? Heck, even they already think that Vista looks better than that.

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