Shawn Blanc

Jerry Seinfeld talked to Steve Inskeep about coffee and his awesome internet show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which is one of my favorite things ever:

After a lifetime in formal show business, I kind of had a theory that if you remove the structures of show business — the studio, the makeup, the microphone, the can we get you something to drink, the chair that you’re screwed into — if you remove that, you’ll get a different tone, a different dialogue. I wanted to get the dialogue that when you’re standing on the sidewalk and you’re kicking the curb and you’re with a friend and neither of you really wants to go home and you’re just standing there talking. That conversation, I thought, that’s a ‘talk show’ that I’d like to try and see if I can get that in a bottle.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Feed Wrangler is a brand new RSS service from my pal, David Smith. It’s $19/year and comes with a free universal iOS app. An OS X client is on the way and a full-featured API will be opened up in the next few weeks to allow 3rd-party devs to build their own Feed Wrangler apps.

I’ve been using the beta version of Feed Wrangler for the past month, and I love the underpinning functionality and goals for Feed Wrangler.

Federico Viticci wrote a review, and I agree with every word. Especially this bit:

Of all the Google Reader alternatives I’ve been trying, Feed Wrangler struck me as the one with a clear vision, some unique features, a reliable engine, and a simple business model…

It’s difficult moving from Google Reader’s familiar service and (unofficial) 3rd-party apps and going to a completely new service that’s less familiar, less mature, and a little bit rough around the edges. But Feed Wrangler’s Read Later integration and the Smart Stream versatility are exactly the sort of forward-thinking innovation I hope we’re going to see more of in a post-Google Reader world.

Rumor is, iOS 7 is getting a noteworthy design overhaul. And 9to5 Mac says it’s going to look “very, very flat”.

[T]he interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeuomorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of “flatness” approaching recent releases of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Metro” UI.

When I think of some of the apps on my iPhone that have a “flat” design feel to them — apps without gloss, shine, or heavy skeuomorphism — I think of Twitterrific, Letterpress, and Day One. I consider these to be some of the most well-designed apps on the iPhone. If that’s the direction iOS 7 is going then I welcome the change.

A more “flat” design aesthetic doesn’t mean having to give up playfulness, whimsy, and personality.

Arrive in the office, make a cup of coffee, open up your email, and turn up your favorite song. We know how it goes.

Check out Steven Jengo’s new single, Summer of 2042.

Fresh tunes with a softly different touch; with that kind of familiar sound, simple and melodic, deep and lazy, freshly brewed for your listening pleasure.

Take care when driving at high volume. Find more at jengo.com.

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My thanks to Steven Jengo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Trevor McKendrick:

I released my first app one year ago yesterday. It started as a small side project with the explicit goal of paying my rent.

As of yesterday it’s done $73,034 in net revenue, after Apple’s cut.

I’m a sucker for stories like this. Especially ones where the focus is on success through shipping and iterating — something I could use a reminder about every now and then.

(Via John Moltz and Harry Marks.)

A excellent guest post on 512 Pixels by Matt Alexander. Reminds me of a piece I wrote last year before heading out to Macworld.

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.