Via @MarkEdmondson.

… Baan cuts an unlikely figure. He never finished art school. He takes pictures with a point-and-shoot. By his own admission, he doesn’t “know anything about architecture.”

Interesting interview from @fastcodesign.

World map color-coded by level of touristiness, based on analysis of photos on Panoramio. Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey.

Via @infobeautiful.

Honduras will always hold a place in my heart for the Caribbean coast, the Bay Islands and amazing times spent learning to SCUBA dive. This article from @GuardianTravel doesn’t really veer very far off-piste in terms of its recommendations, but should still be enough to convince you in the 10 minutes that along with the rest of Central America, Honduras is a place you really should consider visiting.

Photo credit: Ira Lippke for The New York Times.

After lusting after Best Made’s axes, now you can read all about them over at the NY Times Design Notebook and gawp at the founder, Pete Buchanan-Smith’s beautiful studio in the slideshow.

All photos taken by London Underground official photographers. View the full set of posters on Flickr.

True, any web designers scrambling to ditch mouse-only interactions from their UIs just because all their friends happen to be sporting iPads now are a classic example of a professional needing to look outside their insular community once in a while. But make no mistake, this is where computing is going and whilst it’s going to take a long while for this new movement to be become first significant, then widespread and finally the norm among the majority of users, I am in no doubt that one day it’ll be more important to account for touch than for mouse gestures.

And to all the vehement anti-Mac users who have been lampooning Apple products over the years for first only having one mouse button, and then no conventional mouse button at all, let’s see where your precious mouse buttons are in 5 years time.

Via @daringfireball.

A great bit of data visualisation using the Flickr and Picasa APIs to plot geotagged location data of photographs onto the maps of various world cities. The real interesting thing is the difference between photos taken by tourists and those taken by locals and how their location and densities vary.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

View the full set of 99 cities on Flickr. Via @markedmondson.

I’m really rather looking forward to taking a closer look now it’s finally open, as the photos (which helpfully all seem to have been taken on a glorious, sunny day) make it look like a little slice of the Indian subcontinent transported to the dreary North London suburbs.

A great article in general, with some pretty sound proposals relating to how we can harness the power of the multi-touch interface while still providing an intuitive experience and without baffling the non-technical user. But the quote that jumped out at me was a quote from Twitter by @mattgemmell describing an interaction with Apple’s Pages app – I can’t decide if it’s the most devious, unintuitive bit of application functionality i’ve ever seen, or a piece of absolute genius. I think i’m going to go with “both”.

Pages, iPad: touch+hold object, then swipe another (1,2,3,4) fingers to nudge it (1,10,20,30) pixels in that direction.

Of the examples cited, one of the most ingenious is FlyOnTime.us, a site that some might (slightly obnoxiously) call a “mashup” of data sets from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which allows travellers to garner and furnish information that will let them make data-based choices on how, where and when to fly:

To report security wait times using your cellphone, bookmark flyontime.us/m/lines/security or tweet “#airportsecurity [three-letter airport code] in” when you enter the security line, and “#airportsecurity [airport code] out” once you’ve gotten through.

Check out this little guy who came to visit over at bigBANG studio.