Charlie Burt has a great interview with Gregory Kolsto, the owner of Oddly Correct, one of KC’s best local roasters and fussy coffee shops:

My mission in life, I think, is to make people feel something. I’m more interested in staff being kind and engaging with people coming through the door than being psyched about coffee. I mean, it has to be both, but because coffee has a tendency to be pretentious on the surface — like you almost expect it to be “hipsters” doing some weird thing with coffee — well, if you can engage people with kindness and information and art beyond that, I think its a beautiful thing. It’s totally disarming to both the weird art world and the weird coffee world. I feel like we have a fun opportunity to engage people where they’re at.

(Thanks, Jorge.)

Letterpress and Design With Oddly Correct Coffee Roasters

Andrew Kim wrote an excellent review of Braun’s beautiful, 51-year-old “Phonosuper”:

This is it, the SK55 is my all time favorite product and there’s nothing in the world more important for me to share on this website than this. The Braun SK55, or the SK4 to be more specific, is in my opinion, the most important product in Braun’s history and therefore the most important product to the design of electronics today.

Andrew Kim Reviews the Braun SK55

Now, take my comparison here with a grain of salt because I’m not actually on Facebook, but the new Twitter profile page design sure looks a bit Facebook-y to me. But who says that’s a bad thing?

For example, the new design has been rolled out on the U.S. Department of the Interiror’s Twitter page, and it looks absolutely fantastic.

The profile page design sure has changed from what it was 5 years ago.

The New Twitter Profile Page Design

Justin Williams, a skilled and long-time iOS developer, and now the man behind Glassboard, went to Build last week:

Build allowed me three days to immerse myself in technologies that I know almost nothing about. I came away impressed with it too. For all its past faults, the New Microsoft is doing things that are on the cutting edge of technology.

Justin’s overview of Build is pretty encouraging. For me, being someone who is almost exclusively immersed in iOS and OS X stuff, I love to hear about what’s awesome on other platforms and technologies.

Moreover, it’s encouraging because cloud sync has become so vital for our multi-device lifestyles. And from what little I’ve heard from guys like Justin and Brent Simmons, Windows Azure is a pretty good cloud syncing platform to build on for those who need something more robust than iCloud but who can’t or don’t want to roll their own server.

An iOS Developer Walks Into a Microsoft Conference

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My thanks to Scanbot for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Sponsor: Scanbot for iPhone and Android – PDF Scanner

Simon Parkin, writing for The New Yorker, about :

One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’ ” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”

The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires

Speaking of The Sweet Setup, we’ve got some near-term sponsorship openings that I’d love to see filled, including this week’s spot.

The way sponsorships work on TSS is as a whole package bundle that includes a sponsored blog post with a big image, an exclusive ad in our weekly email newsletter, a few thank-you tweets from our Twitter account, and a one-month run of two banner ads served up in our sidebar.

If you’re interested in booking a spot, shoot me an email: [email protected]

Sponsorship Availability at The Sweet Setup

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I discuss building a platform and an audience to share the things we have to say but how those platforms can turn on us and stifle our creativity and inspiration. Or: How do we keep out of the echo chamber in order to consistently create work we’re proud of and that has value and meaning?

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Platform Juxtaposition