Mike McQuade is cataloging all U.S. area codes by making hand pulled serigraph posters and smart phone socks. The posters look gorgeous; I’m waiting for 303.

Kyle Neath’s behind-the-scenes look at designing the new GitHub Mac app:

All in all I created 45 comps for 1.0 — each with about 5-10 unique states (with layer groups).

Richard Frisch gives a much better answer than the ones on this Quora question.

For the record, I bought AppleCare once. It was for my first Mac; a 12-inch PowerBook. I never needed AppleCare for that Mac, nor have I needed AppleCare for any other Apple computer or device I’ve owned since then.

Mustafa Al-Qinneh over at Teehan+Lax has also drafted up a concept for iMessage, along with some ideas for how regular text messages and incoming calls could also be incorporated with OS X. Mustafa’s concepts show some cool and interesting ideas for how things from your phone could appear and sync with your desktop. I like the idea of being able to read and respond to text messages from my computer, but I don’t like the idea of iMessage conversations appearing in the Mail app, side by side with emails. That would drive me bonkers; the last thing I want is a hook to keep my email app open for longer than it needs to be.

iMessage is awesome. Having the conversations available and synced between iOS devices is great. Having them also be available and synced on your desktop or laptop would be fantastic. I very much like this video concept that Jan-Michael Cart has put together — it is, more or less, a suped-up version of iChat that incorporates iMessage conversations.

(Via MacStories.)

John Banana produced and directed an animated short based on The Rocketeer to honor the 20th anniversary of the film.

(I just realized I haven’t seen this movie since it was in theaters; my parents took some friends and I for my 10th birthday party. Guess I need to add it to the Netflix queue.)

The OmniGroup posted a whole slew of short videos (videolets?) to their site which cover a wide range of topics and skill levels with OmniFocus. Definitely worth checking out.

(There’s a good 2-minute video on Perspectives that you may want to check out if you’re not too savvy with custom perspectives yet. They are, in my opinion, one the best and most-powerful features of OmniFocus on the Mac.)

But only for stock SSDs apparently:

The new native TRIM support does appear to limited to stock Apple drives, as users who have installed third-party SSDs into their machines have reported that TRIM is not enabled by the update.

Moreover, the developer preview of Lion, which has always had TRIM support, does not support user-installed, 3rd-party SSDS either. Well, at least not on this machine.

New Pixar film due out next summer.

Yun Xie interviews Vikram Savkar for Ars Technica. Savkar is the Senior Vice President and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group.

According to Savkar, it seems there is a huge interest in digital textbooks:

Ars: How will you introduce digital textbooks to university professors and instructors? They’re the ones who will ultimately choose textbooks for classes.

Savkar: California State University is the first to adopt the interactive textbook, so they’ve helped spread the news. We only announced our plan for the textbook about a month ago, and 800 faculty members from colleges signed up the first day to get a demo.

I’m not surprised. The opportunity for digital text books has got to be wide open. Textbooks are a multi-billion dollar market and cost the average student $700 per semester. For the cost of one semester’s worth of textbooks a student could instead buy a tablet computer and then purchase cost-efficient, backpack-friendly textbooks at a lower rate for the next 7 semesters.

However, after reading this answer from Savkar during the interview, the future of digital textbooks suddenly seems a little less bright:

Ars: Would a student be able to read these interactive textbooks on laptops, iPads, Android phones, and other devices?

Savkar: Our textbooks are born digital, which means we created it for what digital can do. As I said before, we didn’t write a regular textbook, make PDFs, and put it online. Our textbooks will be available for iPad, smartphones, Androids, and other devices. These textbooks are born accessible.

What does it even mean these are “born digital” and “born accessible”? I fear it means they will be awkward, buggy, and frustrating.

If 1,500 blog posts are published every 60 seconds I wonder how many refreshes to Google Reader there are by subscribers.