You can toss nearly every successful company into the problem solving equation. Mark Zuckerberg is introverted and he needed a way to find more cute girls at Harvard. He built Facebook to solve his problem.
Great startup advice. Building an idea is bound to fail, solve a problem to succeed.
Daring Fireball sums up iPhone’s fifth birthday very well:
The iPhone is not and never was a phone. It is a pocket-sized computer that obviates the phone. The iPhone is to cell phones what the Mac was to typewriters.
Be sure to read the whole thing.
This is the use case where we see Filibaba being very relevant:
When it’s time to cook, an iPad can be brought into the kitchen for a cook-friendly interface with large fonts and big buttons so the user can touch the tablet with a knuckle in case of wet or messy fingers. The tablet’s larger screen is a perfect size for the kitchen, much like a traditional cookbook resting on the counter.
Ars Technica:
Another frightening possibility is intelligent life is not only common, but that it destroys itself when it reaches a stage of advanced technology.
Evidence that intelligent life is very short-lived is that we don’t seem to have been visited by extra terrestrials.
After me and my girlfriend saw Prometheus, I had to watch the original Alien movie again. The walls of the cryochamber jumped out at me, as I used to draw similar patterns in my sketchbook. I decided to recreated the room for a wallpaper. It was made in Cinema 4D, with touchups made in Photoshop afterwards.
Head over to Max Themes to download!
MacRumors:
The feature is accessed by holding down the center Select button on the remote for several seconds, after which the selected icon begins to wiggle as is seen on other iOS devices when in reorder/delete mode. The wiggling icon can then be moved by using the directional buttons on the remote, with other icons automatically adjusting to make room for the icon being moved.
Now all we need are some third party apps to move around.
Ridley Scott directed all of the films/commercial mentioned in the title, and all three of them use the same kind of sonar-like score. I think it’s pretty great. (I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed this, but only now did I think to mentioning it)
Have a look & listen:
Alien - Official Theatrical Trailer (1979)
Facebook Messenger got updated with a revised icon, with some subtle gradients inline with the Camera app. And they are now also offering Facebook Pages on iOS for managing your Facebook page.
I hope to see the Facebook app icon updated in the same manner. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Spotted by Sebastiaan de With:
The spinning gears in [REDACTED] beta are fantastic. Loving these details.
Update:
Jin Budelmann clarifies how the gears can be connected:
Marco Arment:
If a 27” Retina Display is a “2X” version of the current panel, that’s a 5120x2880 panel — running that at 60 Hz requires more bandwidth (over 21 Gbps for 24-bit color) than Thunderbolt offers today (up to two 10 Gbps channels).
Is this accurate? It would be a shame. Could Apple somehow use both Thunderbolt ports to drive a 27” Retina Display?
Update:
Marc Edwards from Bjango confirm Marco’s calculations, and adds:
Given the other stuff that passes into the display, it seems like it’s not possible. My money’s on Thunderbolt 2 with double bandwidth, and the MBPr not being able to use the 27 inch Retina display.
Well, here’s to hoping that Apple will make a 24” 3840x2400 Retina display (2x of 1920x1200), that can be driven by the new MBP’s. It would require a little over 13 Gbps bandwidth (following the calculations done by Marco & Marc), which should work with the existing Thunderbolt standard.
Pretty funny. Poor Microsoft.
WP 7.8 contains some of the changes coming to WP 8, but for existing hardware.
I wonder if it’s possible to create gaps in the start screen grid? Or will it rearrange to always fill those gaps?
Update: Terrence Scoville informed me of this narrated video, where it seems they are able to make a gap in the grid.
Terrance also points out another tidbit:
Says here you have always been able to swipe to view all apps, interesting to see if users will know.
So the removal of the gutter and the arrow to the right of the tiles is meant purely as a visual change, not a feature removal. I agree it might be hard to understand that you can also swipe the screen horizontally without any visual cues.
Interesting read from John Gruber about the Surface tablet and the future of Microsoft.
Design is about making decisions, and Microsoft could not decide. ARM or Intel? Who should be on stage? Soft or hard keys on the keyboard cover? They went with “all of the above”.
The only hard decision they made was the big one: to turn against their OEM hardware partners.
To be a good citizen in Apple’s world, they should make borders 2 retina pixels to match what they had on a regular display. Those 1 px borders will look razor thin.
Update: ImagineThis points out that’s it an early canary build. Still, if they chose to highlight this design side by side with their old design, they must be happy with the result. I hope they change their mind and make the strokes 2 px.
Update 2: Thijs van der Vossen posted a comparison to how Safari handles the same adaption to retina.
My conclusion from this change is that there is an optimal information density, where you get an overview and don’t have to do excessive scrolling, and Microsoft was a bit off with their previous large, two column tiles. They’re correcting it with the addition of small tiles and up to four columns.
While I appreciate Microsoft’s determination to keep everything flat and “truly digital”, would it kill them to add a slight radius to the tiles? It’s a fine balance between having a simple, clean style and something that just looks unfinished.
I also agree with alex_dlc that it would be nice to be able to set a wallpaper. But I would suggest an unsual way of doing it; by making default tiles to act like peek-holes. This would allow the surrounding black to still blend with the hardware and avoid any garish color combinations in the process.
I made a mockup of how it could look (based on a low res image, so forgive the fuzziness), using my orange Candybars wallpaper. Maybe something they’ll be able to squeeze in before release?
