January 2011
24 posts
The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs →
Mike Daisey’s newest show is currently playing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It’s an unforgettable look at what it means to be an Apple fan - which Mike unapologetically is - contrasted with his experiences at Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner in China. Nearly everyone has an opinion on whether the conditions at Foxconn are really that bad, and whether Apple should or can...
Americans strongly favor military cuts (Times/CBS... →
seoulbrother on where the budget should be trimmed:
Here’s the thing: When they do make cuts in military spending, the government doesn’t make fewer missiles and bombs, they either freeze or cut pay and benefits for soldiers, sailors and their families. The soldier’s quality of life is unfairly held hostage by the defense budget as a whole.
A story I may have told before:
When I was in...
WatchGreg Borenstein sweded our game. This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a cool thing or two. Greg, you’re a monster champ.
TestFlight has launched →
If you’ve been working on an iOS app, sooner or later you’ll have to send it to someone for testing. It might be one of your devices, your best friend’s iPhone, or the various iDevices of a dozen friends and professional testers. This process currently requires testers to find and send you their UDID, then install the app build by syncing via iTunes. It’s hardly ideal, let...
Blast-from-The-Past Link Day
Today, Shawn Blanc and Marco Arment are linking to some interesting things they’ve written over the years. Piling onto the pile, here are some rather random selections from yours truly:
Standard of Living
Cloudmoney
Some ClickToFlash-like plug-ins Sebastiaan de With and I would like
Apple Products of The Future
Nature (A Story)
Battle Soup Recipes
(Re)enjoy.
Why is the iPhone located where it is in the Find... →
implodr:
I put [the iPhone in the Find My iPhone icon] there because it looked terrible in San Francisco. The iPhone was originally in Africa, but a design review moved it to NYC. FACT.
Seriously, not everything is deliberate or hidden or a clue.
WatchPancake Breakfast released a video for perhaps my favorite song of theirs - ¡Hoot Hot Damn! I Got a Job of Work. And you know who shot it? I did! With a camera and all!
(YouTube link here. Vimeo’s player is being a bit weird for me.)
NYT's "Emphasis" →
The nytimes.com team has released a pretty awesome new feature: the ability to link to specific paragraphs and highlight sentences on a page. I don’t mean just locally; these get baked into the URL you then share. The implementation makes the end result super-simple. You initiate the whole process by double-pressing the Shift button. Read more about what all it does and how.
Watchsuperpartyawesome:
After I tried to play The Incident using my laptop as a controller I decided to see if it was possible to create a game controller using mobilesafari.
This is indeed super and awesome. Patrick, email us!
As far as native support in The Incident for the Controller Mode, where you play on your iPad (or your TV) using an iPhone or iPod as the controller: we’d love to do...
Software Outlets
Apple is attempting to trademark the term app store. Microsoft thinks it should be a generic term. I’m leaning that way as well.
That said, this is an admission of failure on Microsoft’s part. For years they’ve been trying to make their Windows Marketplace stick, with absolutely no interest from developers or consumers. In 2008 they said they’d retire it in favor of the...
France is Bacon →
This was voted the best comment on Reddit in 2010. Enjoy it.
WatchPhotoshop Tutorial Rap from College Humor. It’s a thin premise, but the execution is A-level. Bonus points for actually pretty good tips.
"Nigger"
As a chronic sufferer of white guilt, I was hesitant to say anything about this whole dumb idea of replacing the word “nigger” with “slave” in a goofy new edition of Huckleberry Finn. But I can live with reblogging Albert’s smart little piece about it:
To edit the word from our literature we actually decriminalize the climate and context in which it was used. We...
The Incident, one year ago
Matt and I started working on The Incident in late 2009. Today I dug out my iChat logs and peeked back at where we were a year ago, about one month into development.
I had just started drawing the first level, Street. At that time, it was combined with level 2, City; we later split them up to have a shorter level 1.
Matt wasn’t 100% sold on my design for the “radar” (the top...
Redundant data in the Weather app
If you’re a serious weather junkie, you might use a special weather app to get your daily klimate kick. And if you’re Edward Tufte, you might think the iPhone weather app is “a bit thin”. Me, I don’t mind it - it’s a nice, big dashboard view of the weather features I care most about.
But here’s something crazy: the app shows the same exact data twice....
My Support Profile →
Literally no one knows this, but Apple has launched a whole new website perfect for business owners, forgetful folk, and organization-afficionados. Basically it’s a mostly-automated dashboard of all your Apple products, purchases, and service interactions. It’s like Amazon’s order history crossbred with a 2011-friendly update feed. It could use a bit of work, but it’s...
