Ben and I had to reschedule last week’s Friday episode to yesterday. And apparently recording at the beginning of the week gives us more to talk about. Such as pens and hipster PDAs, the old Palm Pilots we’ve owned, Ben’s affinity for microwave popcorn, and other various news goodies.
Month: September 2011
VirtualHostX 3.0 [Sponsor] →
My thanks to Tyler Hall for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote his Mac app, VirtualHostX 3.0.
In short, VirtualHostX is a Mac app for setting up, running, and managing virtual hosts on your Mac.
As any professional Web developer knows, doing your development locally is simply how it’s done. Setting up your Mac to run the necessary server software is the best way to build and develop websites and web apps. And if you have more than a single site you’re building and working on then you’re going to want to set up virtual hosts. And that is where VirtualHostX comes in.
This app is professional-grade, and it has been used by many of the best in the business for years.
- Sean Sperte recommended VirtualHostX in 2008 as one of the most important tools to setting up a killer, local web development environment on your Mac.
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Derek Punslan, one of the guys who helped me cut my teeth on Mac and web nerdery back in 2006 and 2007, has been recommending VirtualHostX since 2009.
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Brian Warren, the senior designer/developer at Happy Cog Studios uses VirtualHostX.
VirtualHostX works on top of the server software on your Mac. Your Mac can easily be used as an Apache server, and all you need to do is install PHP and MySQL. Most people, myself included, recommend you use MAMP for that. MAMP is free and it installs all the necessary server software so your Mac can run websites which require databases (i.e. local WordPress installs).
I suggest you read Sean or Aaron’s tutorials on getting MAMP set up and then installing VirtualHostX. The setup is extremely easy (it took me longer to download MAMP than to set it up), and in just a few clicks you’ll be all set to install and run a WordPress or Expression Engine website right from within your Mac.
For a long time I did my web design and development on a live server. I guess that is fine (though it is a bit dangerous, but hey, that’s how I roll), but doing web design and development locally is so much better and more convenient for two primary reasons: speed and speed. Moreover, you can design and develop even when you’re not connected to the Internet.
(Note that if you’re using Typekit, you can add your localhost sites to your Typekit Kit. Simply edit your Kit and add “localhost” as well as whatever URL you chose for your local development URL to the domains list.)
Version 3.0 of VirtualHostX, which just shipped a few days ago, has some very clever new features. Namely Lift Off, a new Domain Details tab, and a new icon.
With Lift Off you can share your site with anyone online. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received emails or Twitter DMs with a screenshot of a site that a friend is working on. If that friend were using VirtualHostX they could send me a working URL via Lift Off and I could see the live site in my browser.
Tyler describes Lift Off like this:
Lift Off creates a secure connection between your Mac and the VirtualHostX Cloud then gives you a unique URL that you can pass around to your boss, client, or friend to view your site.
Since your virtual host is being served live off of your Mac, there’s no uploading files or waiting. Changes you make locally appear automatically for your users.
The second big update is the Domain Details tab. It’s a tab that is specific to each virtual host you have set up. In there you can log and store all the various details related to the domain you are doing design and development for (such as FTP, SSH, DNS, database config info, and more).
VirtualHostX 3.0 would be worth it for its new features alone. You can try it for free to see for yourself, but you may want to pick it up soon as it’s currently on sale for shawnblanc.net readers.
Twenty-Five Pieces of Basic Sartorial Knowledge So You Don’t Look Dumb →
Apparently many of my friends dress like nine-year-olds.
Ground Zero: September 11, 2001 – September 11, 2011 →
Forty images on The Big Picture weblog chronicling the destruction and cleanup of the towers and the building of the memorial site.
The New Gowalla →
MG Siegler reporting on the upcoming Gowalla app that is being announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt and will soon be shipping:
The main middle tab is now “Guides”. Here you’ll find curated travel guides for various places around the world. For example, if you load up the app in San Francisco, you’ll see the San Francisco guide, as well as the East Bay guide and the Stanford guide. You can quickly scroll through other guides not near you as well. And Gowalla has the ability to make special guides on the fly. For example, they made a TC Disrupt guide for event-goers.
Clicking on these guides loads up a bit of information about the city as well as all of the must-see spots. Again, because Gowalla has years worth of location data, they’re able to easily populate robust guides. Some of the locations are curated, some are based on check-in data and people favoriting places. The Gowalla “Highlights” feature also plays a role here.
This is a fantastic move for Gowalla. I have always fancied the app and its service, but I never could sustain using it every day when I was out to lunch, out to coffee, out shopping, out on a date, etcetera. This change in focus towards “traveling and storytelling” sounds like just the right move.
Updated TestFlight SDK →
A hefty update to the TestFlight SDK today brings in-app upgrading for users, crash reports for developers, and much more. TestFlight is the greatest thing to happen to iOS app beta testing since Apple’s iPhone SDK.
Regarding T-Shirt Shipments
On Friday I picked up the Tools & Toys t-shirts from the print-house and they look fantastic. Over the weekend Anna and I arm-wrestled PayPal, printed shipping labels, folded shirts, and packed the shipments. I am going to the Post Office this morning to drop everything off, which means the shirts will be arriving at your door within the next several days.
If you ordered a large shirt, they are unfortunately back ordered from American Apparel. The local shop that printed my order is expecting the shirts to arrive from American Apparel later this week, and as soon as they do your shirts will be the first to get printed.
Again, thanks to everyone that ordered a shirt. Wear it often, and wear it proudly.
— Shawn
Ten Years of The New Yorker’s September 11 Covers →
This year’s September 11 cover of The New Yorker is wonderful. It makes a great tribute to their 2001 September 11 cover that was black on black, as well as nodding to the reflecting pools and the memorial that will open this Sunday.
Lowe’s Is Buying 42,000 iPhones for Its Employees to Use to Help Customers →
CIO Mike Brown: “Forget about the competition, we are playing catch-up with the customer psyche.”
[Sponsor] WhereCloud: Beautifully Crafted Mobile Apps →
WhereCloud is proud to sponsor the RSS feed this week. We are a talented mobile creative studio! We build custom-made applications that are state-of-the-art, user-oriented and easy to use.
Founded in 2006 with a focus on technological innovation and the highest quality standards, we have built an impressive portfolio of iPhone and iPad apps encompassing local search, social media, movies, productivity, tourism, health and more.
Our team of forward-thinking designers and developers have created some of Canada’s top-grossing and highest-ranking iOS apps, such as the Yellow Pages directory for iPhone or the NFB portable theater for iPad.
If you need help with your mobile strategy and are looking for a partner to design your next great mobile product then please get in touch.
Apple’s Four-Year Product Rollout
Apple has but one product: Their products. Their product lineup is, in a sense, one single product. The “walled garden” is the whole point.
It hasn’t always been like this. Their products used to be silos — they were individual pieces of hardware that ran independently of one another. You could buy a desktop or a laptop and the files you kept on those computers stayed on those computers unless you intentionally and manually did something about it.
In 2001 the iPod was introduced, and with it you could take the music that was on your computer and put it onto a portable device. And that music could still exist on your computer at the same time it was on your iPod. In 2004 your iPod could also hold photos; in 2005, video.
For those with one or more laptops or desktops then there was probably a frustrating attempt to keep them somewhat in sync. Apple offered .Mac as a subscription service which in part allowed users to keep more than one computer in sync, but it was mostly just the smaller details and data of your computer that were synced. Things like passwords, contacts, and email rules. The big items, which comprise the actual work and play we do on our computers, were not synced.
It wasn’t until 2007, with the advent of the iPhone, that it became clear Apple was trying to incorporate everything together and to build a single product.
I think that Apple is just now finishing the first step of what it began in 2007.
Up until recently, they have been selling tangible products: devices with software. Soon, Apple will be selling universal, ubiquitous access. Or: all your stuff on all your devices in any place.
The future of technology is extreme usability coupled with extreme simplicity. Up until now we have only ever known that as product silos. Look how great this divide is or that app. But the GSMA is predicting 7 internet-connected devices per person in the next 15 years. My home already has 10. And so the future of simple and usable technology will require devices that are connected. And the more simple and usable that interconnectedness is, the better.
Through this lens we can see that the past four and half years have been one single, epic product rollout for Apple:
2007: iPhone (noteworthy refresh in 2010)
2007: Apple TV (noteworthy refresh in 2010)
2008: MacBook Air (noteworthy refresh in 2011)
2008: MobileMe (noteworthy refresh (iCloud) coming)
2008: App Store
2010: iPad (noteworthy refresh coming)
2011: Mac App Store
2011: OS X Lion
The iPhone, iCloud, iPad, iTunes, OS X Lion, iOS, Apple TV, the MacBook Air, and the iMac are all Apple products. But they are more than that. In aggregate they are one single product. Apple’s product lineup is, in and of itself, a single product.
These are devices which are built to be connected. They are built to work with one another. They are built for the purpose of having all your digital media accessible on any (Apple) device at any time.
The chapter that was opened with the iPhone in 2007 is coming to a close this fall with the advent of iCloud. Mobile computing, cloud computing, simpler computing… it is all phase one of the future. And it is now upon us.
The hardware are vessels for accessing your music, movies, apps, websites, documents, and more. Pick the device you want to use at the moment. The rest is just details.
Product Development
Each of the above products didn’t start out perfect. There has been significant improvement and iteration upon the original versions, but I think that in the next few months we will see the attainment of the original goals of each of the hardware and software products that have shipped over the past four years.
- I think the iPhone 4 is the attainment of the goal that was set forth with the original iPhone.
- The iPad 3 will be the attainment of the goal that was set forth with the original iPad.
- iCloud is the attainment of the goal that was set forth with MobileMe (yea .Mac; yea iTools).
- The 2011 MacBook Air is the attainment of the goal that was set forth with the first Air.
- The current Apple TV and its upcoming software updates are the attainment of the goal that was set forth with the first iTV.
Or, put more simply: this next season of Apple product releases will mean the drying of the cement that is the foundation for where Apple is headed. The first “phase” is now complete.
Of course there will still be growth and innovation in the days to come, but Apple’s original vision for their product lineup is now nearly realized. They began simple, and they have slowly built upon each product to bring them to where they are today.
The Apple Ante
A common argument against Apple and their walled garden is that their products are too expensive. Those of you reading this likely already know the truth that that claim never actually held up. Just because Apple never sold a $250 laptop doesn’t mean their products were not fairly priced for the quality and value of the product.
But now, that argument has even less ground. Consider this excerpt from John Gruber’s review of the iPhone 3G:
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” — ANDY WARHOL
So too with the iPhone. A billionaire can buy homes, cars, clothes that the rest of us cannot afford. But he cannot buy a better phone, at any price, than the iPhone that you can have in your pocket today.
It is not just for the iPhone. It goes for virtually Apple’s entire product lineup (software included).
- For $29 you can’t buy a better operating system than OS X Lion.
- For $0.99 there’s not an easier way to buy a song — regardless of where you are — than on iTunes.
- For $199 you can’t buy a better phone than the iPhone.
- For $999 you can’t buy a better laptop than the 11-inch MacBook Air.
- For $499 you can’t buy a better tablet than the iPad.
Suppose you buy the cheaper variants: some $250 Windows netbook, a $99 HP TouchPad (if you can find one), and a free Android phone of the month. Those products are silos. You’ll be able to sync your email and calendars over the air but that’s about it. You’ll have to sync them all independently of one another to have your media, and documents available on each one.
The future of simplicity and usability in technology means connectedness. It means hardware devices that don’t operate as silos independent of our documents and media and communication channels. But that future is now upon us. Apple’s version has always been the most delightful, but now it is one of the more affordable offerings as well.
Tablets are Empowering Users →
Ben Brooks:
For the very first time in computing, the user has been put in control of how best to utilize the display portal they have been given — not the manufacturer.
If This Then That →
This new-to-me website — officially known as “ifttt” (how do you pronounce that?) — is brilliant. I signed up yesterday (it looks like it’s currently in public beta), and it only took about a minute to realize ifttt’s potential handiness.
The whole basis of ifttt is that it puts the internet to work for you. You can create tasks based on the structure “if this then that”, and the site has dozens of triggers and actions to populate that equation with.
An example action (ifttt calls them recipes) would be: “If it’s going to rain tomorrow then text message me.”
I set up a recipe so that I get an email with the link to any item I star in Google Reader. It used to be that when I was reading feeds on my iPad and I came across an item I wanted to link to here on the site, I would email myself that article. Now I simply star it and it’ll still show up in my email inbox.
A Supercomputer in Every Backpack →
A great article by Fraser Speirs regarding iPads, public schools, and the need for a better student:computer ratio.
Speirs sites the GSMA’s prediction that there will be 50 billion internet-connected devices on the planet by the year 2025. This would equate to approximately 7 internet-connected devices per person. At first that number sounds outrageous, but then I thought about it for a moment.
In my home there are 10 internet-connected devices:
- Thermostat
- Blu-Ray Player
- Apple TV
- iPod Touch
- iPhone
- Original iPad
- iPad 2
- MacBook Air
- MacBook Pro
- PowerBook G4
In another 15 years that number could easily double or triple.
We have long envisioned the future as being one where everything was completely automated and connected. In some ways, we are closer to it than we think. Or, as Speirs wrote:
To paraphrase William Gibson, ubiquitous computing is here – it’s just not built into the furniture. We don’t have smart floors or LCD walls, sensor grids in the ceilings or the Internet on our fridge. We are almost all, however, carrying a pocket device that connects at some level to the network.