Link Posts
If anyone is going to list out the similarities between a brand new Mac and an old one, you know it’s going to be Stephen Hackett:
Apple’s new Mac Pro looks like a stunning machine. Small and quiet, yet insanely powerful, the new computer makes every other desktop for sale today look and feel ancient. However, when I think about the new Mac Pro, I can’t help but think of one of my favorite Macs in recent history: the Power Mac G4 Cube.
A photo of the new Mac Pro sitting next to the previous Mac Pro at the Macworld lab. I knew the new Mac Pro was smaller, but seeing it in context like that… wow.
Ben Brooks, in our latest review on The Sweet Setup:
We slogged through seventeen different PDF apps to try and find the one PDF app that would change your life — well, at least change your iPad usage. And the best PDF app for managing, editing, and reading PDFs on your iPad is PDF Expert 5 by Readdle. PDF Expert is delightful and easy to use, it offers the fastest PDF reading experience, it works with many syncing services, and it has the most robust toolset available on the iPad.
PDF Expert is a truly fantastic app, and is a great example of how the iPad can take certain tasks which can be cumbersome or complicated on a Mac and make them easier on a touchscreen device. For example, want to merge two PDF documents into one? Just tap, hold, move, and drop — it takes 3 seconds.
First off, this is cool and clever. Secondly, and maybe I’m getting cynical in my old age, but the first thing this made me wonder was was how long it will be until we have auto-playing audio and video ads embedded in our print magazines.
John Dickerson:
We all know how to spot the obsessives. They’re blocking views at concerts as they hold up their phone to capture distant singing blobs of blurry light onstage. They text and drive, putting other people at risk, or they’re the ones at dinner who photograph every course change.
These people are a chore.
I can’t remember where I stole this phrase from, but I very much like the idea of “work-life boundaries” rather than “work-life balance”. Because it’s all life, isn’t it? The same could go for “connected-disconnected boundaries” instead of balance. Checking Twitter at the stop light doesn’t mean you’re too connected, it means you have unhealthy boundaries.
It’s one of the reasons I like Day One. Because with Day One I can toss photos and text tidbits in there, as well as long-form stuff — it’s great for capturing the moment, as Dickerson is talking about, without broadcasting to a social network. And, finding stuff in Day One is far easier than finding something in my Twitter or Instagram archives.
Rob McGinley Myers also has some excellent thoughts on Apple’s latest ad, Misunderstood.
During lunch, I showed the commercial to my wife, Anna. Our first reactions were both along the lines of: Gosh, I don’t want to let my kids grow up to be reclusive teenagers addicted to their phones like that.
But, as Rob points out, what if the teenager in the commercial was instead walking around with a DSLR or reading a novel or writing/drawing in a journal?
The iPhone can be any of those things and more, so why do we look at someone face down in their phone differently than someone immersed in a book? Because if they’re anything like me, they’re not reading on their iPhone, they’re checking Twitter or something.
That’s the double-edged sword of the iPhone that Meyers brings up, and also I think that’s the turn Apple is playing with its commercial: We are moved by the kid who is actually creating something for his family (and not playing Candy Crush). But also, as parents, we feel that we’re not alone in the “kids and technology” battle — other families with iPhones and iPads are facing the exact same scenarios, questions, and concerns that we are…
The commercial gives us hope that our kids — who are growing up in “an iPhone generation” — will use their devices to make something that’s awesome and beautiful instead of getting even more hooked on Candy Crush and Instagram than we, their parents, already are.
Some truly great picks this year. Congrats to VSCO Cam on getting runner up as best iPhone app of the year. And it’s great to see Oceanhorn, Kingdom Rush, and Super Stickman Golf highlighted in games; IFTTT, OmniFocus 2, Vesper, Launch Center Pro, and Editorial in productivity apps; Basil in cookbooks; and The Loop Magazine in Newsstand.
Ben Thompson has a great take on why Apple’s new holiday iPhone ad, Misunderstood, is so great:
What make this ad so powerful is that it is so, so real. Oh sure, the perfection of the recording and the happy coincidence of the grandparents having an AppleTV is perhaps not so plausible, but the idea of a teenage son being disconnected, yet ultimately, deep down inside, still caring, will touch the soul of parents — and young adults — in a way few ads ever will.
Kyle is a fantastic photographer. He and nine other mobile photographers went to Israel for a week to document their travels for the Israel Ministry of Tourism and the non-profit called Stand With Us. His interview here on the VSCO Journal has some great photos from the trip and some behind-the-scenes info about the trip. You can see more of Kyle’s Israel photos on his Grid page.
I talk a lot about how much I like my fancy-pants mirrorless camera, and here guys like Kyle are taking incredible shots with their iPhones. Proof that tools and rules, in and of themselves, do not an artist make.
Alexis Madrigal:
The Stream represents the triumph of reverse-chronology, where importance—above-the-foldness—is based exclusively on nowness. […] And now the Internet’s media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more. […]
And now, who can keep up?
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David Smith:
I think the App Store is arriving at a place where Apple faces a pronounced decision point.
The App Store currently contains over a million apps, each of which has been reviewed by Apple at least once. Apple has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy to make the App Store what it is today. The road to get here hasn’t always been easy but I think Apple has done a commendable job to bring the Store thus far. The challenge they now face is that to continue to maintain high standards will require exponentially more and more effort.
I think apps like Diet Coda, Editorial, 1Password, Fantastical, OmniFocus, Day One, et al. are some of the quintessential examples of apps that really push the boundaries of what iOS devices can be capable of doing.
Naturally Apple cannot get every app and every developer to “play nice” and stop gaming the system, but if they can keep the App Store in a place where the aforementioned powerful and thoughtful apps are able to thrive then it will encourage other developers to build their app at the same caliber.
However, when an app like Tiny Tower gets picked as the (2011) Game of the Year, that doesn’t spark confidence.
Right now Apple mostly promotes apps that fit in with the latest design trends, use the latest APIs, and/or are popular with mainstream media. Yes, of course we want our apps to stay up-to-date with the latest designs and APIs, but a bland app can do that just as well as a forward-thinking app.
And so where is the incentive for a developer to spend the additional thousands of hours it takes to build a powerful, thoughtful, delightful app? And, on the other side of that coin, what is Apple doing to educate its user-base that these apps are worth their “whopping” $3 price tag?
This week’s Sweet Setup Interview is with my pal, Matthew Panzarino. Matthew writes mostly about Apple and Twitter as one of TechChrunch’s Senior Editors. And did you know he uses “almost no productivity software”?
Ben Bajarin:
A computing device should be defined by its possibilities. […]
The iPad has fundamentally altered the landscape for personal computing to one that brings more attainable possibilities of computing to the mass market. We will look back in 20 years and fully realize how central the iPad has been to the history of computing.