writes things here.
John Paczkowski and Ina Fried for AllThingsD via John Gruber:
As part of its case against Samsung, Apple has shown snippets of an internal Samsung document comparing the original Galaxy S phone with the iPhone…[going] feature by feature, evaluating how Samsung’s phone stacks up against the iPhone.
This is definitely some damning evidence. The entire presentation is online, and the message is really clear: be more like Apple.
Mark Gurman for 9to5Mac:
Thanks to some tweaks to the iOS Simulator application that is included in the iOS development tools, we were able to run the simulator at the rumored next-generation iPhone display resolution of 640 x 1136…The iOS 5.1 simulator displayed the home screen with a stretched set of four rows of icons…iOS 6 displayed five complete rows.
Adding the extra row for apps isn’t revolutionary or surprising. And that’s fine. I don’t think Apple is going to try to sell this larger sized screen as either.
Rather, I think it’s going to be what Apple decides to do with this extra space that has the potential to be a big reveal. These extra pixels, when running previous resolution apps, is the talk of the town right now. And if Apple can find a new and interesting way to deal with this extra space, alleviating designer/developer headache while providing extra value to the user, then we’ll have something noteworthy.
This news alone is kinda boring.
Marek was inspired by my magnet implant and decided to build his own external magnet sensor with an Arduino board and some innovative tinkering. Really, really cool. After it was built, he took a walk to test it out:
Friends were laughing at me when during a walk I was stopping suddenly and doing few steps back to identify the source of the magnetic field (it was usually a utility box).
Yup, I’ve been there.
Dom Lesa, CEO of Sparrow:
We’re excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!
Congrats to the team, but farewell to my favorite email app. 🙁
Stephen King, On Writing (2000):
Writing is not life, but i think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.
King’s prose recounting being hit by a car is one of the most difficult pieces of writing I’ve read. He is an expert of his craft, pulling the reader into his body, experiencing the fades in and out of consciousness, the collapsed lung, the aftermath. We are seeing and viewing the world through his eyes; it’s extremely painful and masterfully executed.
One of Google’s main selling points with Project Glass1 is the ability to share first-hand experiences and perspectives. At the I/O 2012 Conference, Google shared a first person perspective of a dentist’s office hoping for a visceral response, bonding the viewer to the picture-taker as well as Project Glass itself. Despite Project Glass being little more than a modified helmet cam, it’s being sold as an innovative way to share the world: allow friends to vicariously live through you.
Project Glass is attempting to use technology to bring Stephen King’s abilities to the general public. I may never write a passage as haunting as King’s accident, but maybe I’ll take a picture or video that elicits an emotional response matching that level of intensity2.
Industries are continually interrupted when the tools of the trade become readily accessible: the music industry with low priced computers, allowing easy recording and mixing; movie industry with the introduction of digital recording; the publishing world with the popularity of ebooks, the internet, and self publishing.
Google is marketing Project Glass as a device as influential as the above interruptions. According to Google, viewing a picture where a baby is making eye contact with the camera, rather than looking elsewhere, is a revolutionary difference, disrupting entire industries built on emotional response.
We’ll have to wait to see if Project Glass has the power to change the world. I don’t think it will happen in Glass’ first form, or the second or third (if the product makes it that far). Augmented reality has a long way to go, and there’s a good chance that Google’s glasses may someday appear in a bin next to Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.
I can’t, however, fault a company for reaching.
David Heinemeier Hansson on levels of aspiration:
To help someone move up the hierarchies, they have to have an intrinsic desire to do so. Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are tell-tale signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical hierarchy and your cue to just quietly back out of the debate.
This is a concept that took me a long time to recognize and to realize that this is ok. This same concept can be applied to any area: I might throw some roast beef between a couple pieces of bread for dinner because it “gets the job done” in sating my hunger. Those who appreciate the finer points of the culinary arts may find this unthinkable, and try to convince me to spend greater time and effort on dinner, but a plain roast beef sandwich often works fine for me.
A commenter, Kathy Sierra, makes a great point:
I think part of this is explained by whether they see the technology as Their Thing vs. the just a Tool…for enabling/supporting Their Thing.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.