John Siracusa:

But tickets selling out in less than 2 minutes does not reward anyone’s dedication. We were all online at 10 a.m. PDT sharp, all ready to purchase, all equally dedicated. It was a de facto lottery, with an extra layer of pointless stress added on top.

Daniel Jalkut:

As the sheer number of Apple developers increases, the capacity of WWDC remains the same. The goals of the conference both for Apple and for developers are increasingly unmet as the number of developers who would like to be educated, indoctrinated, and communed with far outweighs the number of developers who actually can be.

Yesterday, Marco announced that he sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. It must have been a really tough choice, but I think Marco made the right move. Congrats to him and the team at Betaworks.

And speaking of apps that keep on getting better and better, Greg Pierce shipped Drafts 3.0 yesterday. And as Federico Viticci will demonstrate, the improvements to the workflows and pre-defined actions means you can easily get lost into a black hole of nerdery.

When Horizon 1.0 shipped just a few months ago, what set it apart as a calendar app is that it pulls in the weather forecast of the location of your upcoming events. It also gives you an inline forecast view for the upcoming 2 weeks.

Today, version 2.0 was released and it adds natural language parsing, an updated icon, and some other nips and tucks.

There are some extremely great calendar apps for the iPhone (Fantastical, Agenda). If you’re a calendar nerd, or just curious, Horizon is certainly worth checking out.

WWDC tickets sold out in under 2 minutes.

I’ve heard many suggestions for how Apple could solve this problem: find a larger venue, raise the price of the tickets, have two WWDCs back to back, split off the Mac and iOS tracks to be in different venues, or split off the gaming-centric tracks to be in a different venue.

Apple knows demand for WWDC attendance is high, and they knew they were going to sell out in a matter of minutes. Yet they still haven’t yet changed anything related to the supply and demand. For whatever reason, Apple still considers the location, capacity, and structure of WWDC to be the best choice. And so it’s the way it is and that’s that.

The way they draw a line in the sand regarding software and hardware features — waiting to add or change something until they’ve found the ideal solution — is the same way they feel about developer conferences.

I went to the first-ever Circles Conference last year and enjoyed it tremendously. If you’re in the creative industry at all, I highly recommend this event. Since this is only the second year it’s still a small and intimate event, but the speaker lineup is like wow.

Early bird pricing ends this coming Tuesday. And right now they’re giving away an event pass and hotel stay. I wish I could go again this year, but I my wife’s and my second kid is due just days before the conference.

My pal, Stephen Hackett, is on vacation with his family. And so I offered to take his place on this week’s episode of The 512 Podcast. Myke and I mostly hypothesized about what we think we’ll see and what we hope to see from Apple this year.

“Even Ben Franklin looks pissed.” — J. Hoefler

A new game from Ryan Cash and company (the same guys who made Checkmark). Circles is a bit like Simon, in that it’s a memory game, but you earn coins and you can use those to buy weapons which you can use to mess up your opponent’s gameplay. The design of the app is great — I love the clean and open feel of the graphics. And Built by Snowman is donating a portion of the proceeds to Alzheimer’s research for as long as the app is available for sale.

Just $2 in the App Store.

June 10 – 14; tickets go on sale tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 10:00 am PDT. How fast will they sell out this year?

Matt Alexander:

On-demand digital programming is the future. And original programming will have to exist within that environment. Simply put, the only company truly succeeding and acting aggressively upon this reality is Netflix.

Some great advice from my friend, Randy Murray. When I first took this site full time, Randy called me up to give me some advice about working from home and it has stuck with me.

Being your own boss and working out of your own home has a lot of advantages (you can set your own schedule, you can take breaks in the middle of the day, you can take a day off when there is nothing to do). But that it also has a lot of challenges (it can be distracting, it can be hard to keep work and personal time separated, it can be easy to work way too much).

Randy’s advice to me was to take advantage of the advantages as much as I could because the challenges would be unrelenting. Because what’s the point of working in an environment like that, with all its difficulties and challenges, if you’re not also going to enjoy its benefits?

Some of these designs look like what you’d find inside a Feltron Annual Report. In the movie, I remember all the computer interface designs as also seeming quite functional and not over-the-top designed beyond any real-life usability. One of the UX details that stood out to me was when Vika needs to send a file to her correspondant who is on the TET. Vika taps and drags the file from one window and drops it onto the video chat she’s having with the TET — a similar movement to when we move icons around on our iOS Home screens.