Steve Jobs on Apple’s core value:
We believe that people with passion, can change the world for the better.
That is a lot different from Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ motto. This is also a great video where Jobs talks about marketing while wearing shorts.
Also here is a link to a better quality version of that Think Different ad.
On Wednesday I stated this:
It is Wednesday, August 25th, and I am tired. I am really tired, I don’t know why, but I am. I have been all over today and just read this great post over at FiftyFootShadows
(via Minimal Mac) on minimalism and consumerism. It got me to thinking about a goal I have had for the past year. That goal is to get rid of all the crap I am filling the nooks and crannies of my life, my hope is that in doing this I am less tired.The problem though is where to start, and when to stop. So I had an idea, to fill one bankers box a week until October, roughly 6 bankers boxes. All that is to go into the boxes are items that can go to Goodwill or be sold online. Any garbage I come across is to be disposed of immediately.
Once full the box is to immediately go to Goodwill or items posted online for sale. My hope is that by doing this in small chunks with a definite timeline I will be less overwhelmed and instead take to the challenge in a new way.
I’ll check back in once I get the box full.
Today (August 28, 2010) I have filled the box and it feels great. It took me about an hour and a garbage bag but the one corner that has always been full of crap is now cleaned and organized. I am also getting rid of quite a bit (to Goodwill) and it feels great. I encourage you to do the same.
Before:
After:
(I did remove the cat first)
Dare Obasanjo on Google Wave’s announcement
The product announcement read more like a technology showcase than an announcement for a product that is actually meant to help people communicate, collaborate or make their lives better in any way. This is an example of a product where smart people spent a lot of time working on hard problems but at the end of the day they didn’t see the adoption they would have liked because they they spent more time focusing on technical challenges than ensuring they were building the right product.
It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email. I often write emails where I write a snarky comment then edit it out when I reconsider the wisdom of sending that out to a broad audience. It’s not a feature that anyone wants for people to actually see that authoring process.
Alexis Madrigal:
It allows you to stash a piece of content (say, a website or an e-book) and only allow access to it after a user has tweeted something about it. In other words, it’s like a paywall in which you pay by tweeting about something.
Sounds terrible to me.
Does anybody think that the translucent Windows Vista/7 UI looks good. Looks like crap if you ask me.
Thomas Davie:
The concept is simple but formidably clever: a tiny camera gathers light and shape data, before sending it to a computer that processes it and uses hundreds of tiny electric motors to shift the wood blocks into the image in front of the device. Subtle gradations of shade are achieved by both the natural grain of the wood and the angle at which they are displayed, casting shadow if necessary.
Doesn’t look like a mirror, nor would it be useful for anything other than art, but it is very neat.
[via Hacker News]
Leander Kahney:
Instead of renting individual TV shows for $1, customers will pay $1 a month for ALL EPISODES of a show that aired during that month. In other words, fans of CBS’ “Big Bang Theory” can rent all the episodes broadcast during the month, for $1 a month.
Now that would kill cable TV. I hope this is true.
Helveticons redesigns the save icon, interesting idea but I am not sure if it speaks ‘save’ to me.
Lovely new iPhone app that allows you to write text messages before hand, and choose if you always will send it to the same person or not. Either way you can send the message very fast, great tool and it’s only $0.99.
Apple:
…adds export compatibility to Pages for the standard ePub file format (for use with iBooks).
Tips #8 and #9 a sweet, but #6 takes the cake:
If you want to change the style of quotation marks or if you need to use a longer dash punctuation mark instead of the default hyphen, hold the corresponding key as show in the above screenshot.
I have been reviewing some software (among other items) lately and they are starting to become rather popular, that is why I thought it important to take time and share with you how I review things. In other words, what it takes to get a positive review from me.
The most important thing is that I am not looking for things that I review to reinvent the wheel, I am just looking at how well they do what they are made for doing.
The first thing that I look at is how usable the item is, I want to know if I can figure it out without much work or if I find myself scratching my head. I want and like things that are straight forward, I shouldn’t be required to read a book or take a class in order to figure out how to use your product, it should be intuitive.
An example of a well known product that is not intuitive to use is Microsoft Excel, an excellent program that is only excellent once you know how to use it. Think about that for a second, if you had never seen a spreadsheet program before and were to open Excel, would you know what to do with it? Surely you wouldn’t know the functions and calculations that you can type in, let alone be able to find the buttons that help you. Excel is not very straight forward.
I next look at how well the product stays out of my way. If I am reviewing a bag or case, do I find myself constantly fiddling with the straps or nick nacks on it? If I am reviewing software do I find myself constantly in the preferences, or toolbars adjusting things? The best products are those that let you do your work and stay out of your way.
Look at TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows) these two are very good at staying out of the users way, they allow you to type stuff, and they don’t stop you by trying to guess what you want to do (looking at you Word, thanks for that great auto list that I never wanted).
By that I mean does the way the product works make sense – which is different from whether or not it is straight forward. Perhaps a better way to explain this is by saying: when you do something, does the product react in the way that you expect.
For example if you hit return in Tweetie, does it send the tweet or return to a new paragraph – the fact that it returns a new paragraph is not logical at first, but it is highly useable. If Tweetie sent the tweet when you hit return, there would surely be a lot of mistakenly sent tweets, therefore it is rather logical for a Twitter app to do this, but it may not be what the user is expecting.
This is 50% of the grade if you will whenever I evaluate something – does it look and feel good. People don’t just buy Macs because they look good, they feel good too. ‘Feel’ is not just about the physical touch of the object (though that is part of it) it is also about all of the above criterion that I went through.
Feel is the single most important thing about any product. Imagine if your iPhone was very rough, like holding a split faced brick – yuck. If the iPhone felt like that no one would buy it. Imagine if all software looked like Windows 95 applications – yuck. Feel is so very important.
If you look through my reviews I rarely touch on every feature, I often leave out the big features. I left out talking about versioning with the Simplenote update, not because it isn’t important, but because it isn’t a reason to use the app. Rarely will you find me nitpicking on pricing, if it is a good product then the money aspect really doesn’t matter to me (not that I am rich, I have just decided that I want good products and I can and will save up to buy them).
Often times I will mention a very small thing on a product, the feel of a switch that I rarely would use, the placement of a button in a piece of software and that small thing will sway my opinion – and it should. For me the small things are what can make or break a product. I recently bought a new case for my iPad, a Hard Graft sleeve, a beautiful sleeve that I truly love. There is one thing about this sleeve that is so small, yet just makes me smile every time I see it, that one thing is the little red and white striped fabric stitched along the bottom of the leather pocket, great detail.
Next time you read a review that I write, know that the above is where I am coming from.
Go get this icon if you use Notational Velocity, a thing of beauty.
Another meme by Patrick Rhone, here is what I keep in my Simplenote:
What’s in yours?
So a developer sees that his software has been cracked and is being shared on The Pirate Bay, and this is his response:
I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minimoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the better crack be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the use experience of my beautiful program…
Now that is a great way to deal with piracy.
A must read quote.
Smoking Apples:
It doesn’t automatically load the entire story once you open it; doesn’t even cache the next image. You have to wait through a spinner every time (which I’m afraid will be quite a while on a slow net connection). Thankfully, it caches the story once you’ve viewed each image, even through an app relaunch. But, the moment you start viewing another story, it flushes the cache of all other stories. Perhaps it has something to do with licensing issues, but I love the fact that I can pick up the Eyewitness app at any time and view past images (Big Picture doesn’t even launch without an internet connection).
I have to agree, I was really excited for this app when I got my iPad. Having the app now though is a bit disappointing.
It is Wednesday, August 25th, and I am tired. I am really tired, I don’t know why, but I am. I have been all over today and just read this great post over at FiftyFootShadows
The problem though is where to start, and when to stop. So I had an idea, to fill one bankers box a week until October, roughly 6 bankers boxes. All that is to go into the boxes are items that can go to Goodwill or be sold online. Any garbage I come across is to be disposed of immediately.
Once full the box is to immediately go to Goodwill or items posted online for sale. My hope is that by doing this in small chunks with a definite timeline I will be less overwhelmed and instead take to the challenge in a new way.
I’ll check back in once I get the box full.
I agree with his sentiments, and the update he posted at the bottom nails the model that needs to be in place.
Ross Rubin via Caolo:
…if Apple really wanted to avoid subscriptions per se, it could offer pre-paid access as it has for 3G on the iPad, with a lower fee offering a limited number of TV episode rentals per month and a higher number offering unlimited rentals during the month.
I hate paying Comcast for 9,000,000 channels when I only watch a handful of them, I want and the industry needs, to have an a la carte subscription system. Why should someone get paid when their content is crap and I never watch it?
Shaun Inman:
Safari 5’s new “Smart” Auto-Complete has bothered me since the first day I updated. While this feature has been available in one form or another in previous versions of Safari it never ranked page titles over the urls when auto-completing and there was always a defaults write option to override the behavior.
One annoyance solved today.
