Noah Michele Blanc was born this past Saturday the 25th of February at 6:21 in the morning. At 8 pounds, 5 ounces and 19.5 inches tall, he is just perfect.
Being a new dad is filled with wonder and joy. Right now there’s nothing I’d rather do than hold my little boy and tell him how much I love him and how proud I am of him even though all he knows how to do is eat, sleep, and poop. Oh, and look cute:
My thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
TinyLetter is the simplest way to send email newsletters. Creating signup forms is a breeze, and TinyLetter even makes it easy to reply to your readers individually. It’s also free.
TinyLetter doesn’t have all the features most email services offer. It’s built for people, not business. Just compose your message, send it to your readers, and find out what they think. That’s all there is to it. 
Nicholas Felton’s annual reports are one of those things I look forward to every year. There are still things where the print version is far superior to the digital version, and the Feltron Report is one of them. I just ordered mine, and you should too before the limited-edition print run sells out.
In his iOS 6 wish list, Federico Viticci wishes for a new iOS Home screen. Viticci has written about the problem of the iOS Home screen before, concluding that “Apple needs to tear apart the whole concept and rebuild it from the ground up.”
I agree. I think Apple does intend to rebuild the iOS Home screen from the ground up. I also think their intentions for the new Home screen are exciting, ambitious, and will prove to be a big deal.
Not until recently have we felt much of a need for a revamped home screen. Since 2007 iOS has evolved significantly in both its functionality (i.e. multitasking and Notification Center) and in the amount of available apps (thus folders, and multiple Home screens). After five years the Home screen is feeling cramped and outdated.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that the iOS Home screen as we know it today is not Apple’s long-term plan. My hunch is that the Home screen is still the way it is because the long-term ramifications of what it could be are huge.
A reimagined springboard is a prime opportunity for significant innovation. And significant innovation takes time.
Rebuilding the Home screen isn’t just about increasing usability. It is also about innovating at that “front-door interface” of how and where we get to the stuff on our devices (you can hardly do anything on your iPhone without going through the Home screen). Moreover, the ramifications of a reimagined Home screen go beyond iOS. As we are now learning via Lion and Mountain Lion, innovation on iOS is a setting of the stage for innovation on OS X.
During a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber talked about how OS X is stuck with the “Desktop” whether they like it or not. Twenty years ago the Desktop as a folder for quick access to your files and your file system made sense. But that was when people predominantly interacted with files first before launching an app. Apple is now steering people away from the need to interact with the file system. With iCloud, automatic and in-app document saving, and versioning, we are seeing a shift in personal computing where people interact less with files first and more with apps first.
Khoi Vinh recently said:
Right now the most interesting [design] thing happening on the desktop, by far, is Apple’s iOS-ification of OS X. They’re clearly in the process of upending a decades-old paradigm for thinking about desktop software, and whether it’s successful or not is going to be very interesting.
A new iOS Home screen is Apple’s chance to get the “front-door interface” right. When they change the Home screen it’s going to be a big deal, and it will become a core part of iOS for the next decade.
Another reason why a new Home screen is such a big deal is because what Apple does to reimagine it on iOS will impact OS X and the Desktop and Dock (or perhaps the next evolution of Launchpad).
Put another way: I don’t see Apple just stealing ideas from Android and Windows Phone and implementing “live widgets” onto the iOS Home screen. When they update the Home screen they’ll have skated to where the puck is going to be.
Duncan Davidson:
For TED2012, there’s a pretty big change in the media room. Instead of dozens of MacPros and piles of SATA drives like there have been in the last eight TED events I’ve been part of, the room is full of iMacs and Thunderbolt drives. Lots of Thunderbolt drives.
In its first nine days in the App Store, Clear sold 350,000 copies. Next stop: iPad and Mac apps.
More from Ryan Cash. This time it’s an interview with that pixel pusher over at Tapbots, Mark Jardine.
(Local aside about Mark, his was the first ever Sweet Mac Setup. His pixel rig has changed since May 2009.)
Photographer Aaron Hockley did a side-by-side comparison of Flickr, Facebook, Google+, 500px, and SmugMug.
Ryan Cash shares about the different ways he is using Flickr and 500px, and how Flickr has become his place for photo storage and 500px is his place for showcasing his photography.
Ben Brooks and I talked for a bit about Flickr and 500px on last week’s episode of The B&B Podcast. Ben has switched to 500px and likes it. I plan on staying with Flickr.
I’ve been using Flickr for years, but I don’t use it for the social aspect or for discovering new photos — I simply use it to store my own images. Even that I do sporadically. The screenshots of this new design look great. I’m glad to see things are buzzing over at Flickr HQ.
If the Tesla’s battery ever gets fully discharged not only does the car becomes non-drivable, but the battery becomes completely useless and has to be replaced. A new battery costs $40,000 and isn’t covered by warranty or insurance:
The affected customers probably would have been in a better financial situation if they’d accidentally rolled their Teslas off a cliff, as insurance would generally cover much of those costs.
Yikes!
Tesla says they have countermeasures in place to help prevent this from happening. And, to give context on that price: a Tesla battery is pretty much the size of an engine.
Since iCloud is part of Apple’s strategy for the next decade or more how aggressive will they be with building data centers? How long until they have more than Amazon?
About 75 videos with Steve Jobs. From WWDCs to Macworlds to Stanford to All Things D and more. (Via MG Siegler.)