Link Posts
Bradford Shellhammer, writing for Dwell, was at the 60s 606 is 50 exhibition and got to chat with Dieter Rams and Mark Adams for about half an hour. I love this parting shot from Dieter Rams to end the interview:
Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.
The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.
A huge thanks to Clean Cut Code for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote CalendarBar.
CalendarBar is a minimalistic and attractive app that lives in your Mac’s Menu Bar. If you click on the icon or launch it via a keyboard shortcut you’re instantly presented with a well-styled list of all your upcoming events. You can set it to show you events just for today or all the way through for the next month. CalendarBar integrates with all your iCal calendars (and therefore shows MobileMe or any CalDAV server you are syncing to), as well as Google Calendar and even Facebook.
CalendarBar is just $5 in the Mac App Store.
Another action-packed episode of The B&B Podcast! Ben and I talk about Twitter and the new xAuth and OAuth rules, as well as weather apps, and steak tacos. Also, we went ahead and kept the conversation we had for the first 10 minutes of our Skype call instead of cutting that beginning part and starting the show when the intro begins. I like it.
You learn something new every day. (Via Sebastiaan.)
Kevin Kelly’s setup:
I am a really bad person and keep all of the following programs open all at once all the time: Lightroom, Photoshop, InDesign, Bridge, Word, and Powerpoint. Because I am lazy.
An honest and genuine blog post by Ben Pieratt, founder and CEO of Svpply. I think a lot of people in Ben’s situation (not as CEOs but as “accidentally” successful individuals) feel the same way.
That’s a lot.
I’ve been using Fantastical for a while now, and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s fantastic. Also, Federico Viticci has a nice review of it over on MacStories.
Devir Kahan points out the iPod app’s Album Art Swipe Trick:
You can actually just swipe anywhere on the album art from left to right to push the album art off the screen and slide back to the list view.
And since I’ve always considered the top left and right corners to be the least-accessible locations, Devir’s trick makes for a slightly easier way to get to the song list of the album you’re listening to if you want to change to a different track lickety split.
Update: Oisin Prendiville points out that you can double-tap on the album artwork to see the track list view.
I’m embarrassed to admit I only knew 2 of these tricks.
Stefanie Gordon gets a snapshot of the Space Shuttle Endeavour launching above the clouds and into outer space as her airplane passed by on its way to Palm Beach.
This is a killer deal for some killer apps, and it’s probably right up the alley for most shawnblanc.net readers. I’m buying it to finally get Keyboard Maestro and PathFinder. If you pick up the bundle with this link I’ll even get a couple bucks as a kick back.
Speaking of word-of-mouth app purchases, I picked up this golf game via Marco Arment’s recommendation and it’s a blast.
Brett Terpstra gives some semi-serious / semi-lighthearted suggestions for pricing your app in the App Store.
App pricing (and reviews and ratings) are important for those looking to buy your app who’ve never heard of it before. But I for one rarely buy an app I haven’t heard of. When I buy an app it is usually because someone told me about it.
The times I do buy an app that was previously unknown to me, it’s because I’m on a mission for a particular type of app. And when that’s the case, I usually gravitate to the apps that seem to be the right balance of 5-star reviews and slightly more expensive than the rest of their peers. But really what I look for in an app I’ve never bought is the design: does it look like an app that I’ll enjoy using, or does it look like I’ll shudder every time I open it?
But I can’t remember the last time I just perused the app store and bought something on a whim, regardless of if it was a utility app or a game.