Shawn Blanc

What a great answer from Jason Santa Maria about childhood and creativity:

I’m sure that I’m romanticizing it as I’m getting older, but when you’re a kid, everything seems possible. When you think about doing something, the time between thinking about doing it and actually doing it is usually very brief. You say, “Hey, what if I do that?” and then you’re doing it. As an adult, you think, “I want to do this thing,” or, “I want to make something.” Then you start gathering resources and devising a plan, but then you get tired because you’re old and want to lay down.

Craig Mod’s beautiful ode to the FitBit:

Hard to the west of Palo Alto are mountains. One day I climbed them and that night—Lord help me—I looked at my Fitbit. It was 9 p.m. and the device told me I was at 96 flights of stairs.

There was no question in my mind; I had to even the number out. The only problem: Palo Alto is flat.

Thinking fast—there was no time to spare, as the count would reset at midnight—I dashed to the only set of steps I could think of: the Mexican restaurant Reposado.

“We’ve got a little more to show you.”

iPad mini? 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro? New iMacs? Yes? No? Maybe so.

Seth Godin:

Decide what you’re going to do next, and then do it. Make good decisions about what’s next and you thrive.

Innovation drives the connection economy, not low cost.

See also Michael Lopp’s article, Someone is Coming to Eat You.:

One of my favorite Apple product announcements happened on September 7, 2005. In an Apple music event announcement, Steve Jobs got on stage, gave the usual state of the business update, and then he did something I’d never seen before. He killed a wildly successful product.

The Endeavor’s 12-mile trek through the streets of LA must have been equal parts amazing and absurd.

(“Mommy! Mommy! A space shuttle just drove past our house!”

“Haven’t I told you to stop telling lies?” *)

Again from the Department of Concepts and Mockups So Cool They’ll Probably Never Actually Happen, here’s one regarding the iPhone 5’s Multitasking Tray.

The Multitasking / Utility tray is already for “power users” so why not make it even more powerful? I would love — love — to see quicker access to certain settings (like bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and brightness) just a double-click and double-swipe away.

I wear a wristwatch for a very peculiar reason: as an excuse not to pull my iPhone out of my pocket. Without my watch on, when I want to know what time it is, I pull out my iPhone and the next thing I know I’ve read 10 tweets and deleted 4 emails and liked an Instagram post.

For me a “smartwatch” is a device that walks a fine line between useful enough to circumvent a few more scenarios in which I don’t have to reference my iPhone, and so useful that now I’m always checking my watch and my iPhone.

Lennart Ziburski’s concept for a smartwatch seems to walk that line well. I will say something about his concept that I learned when watching the aforelinked interview with Matt Rogers, and it’s that LCD screens don’t come in circles.

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

* * *

Sifter is a simple project management tool for small teams. It frees you up to focus on shipping better software instead of checking in on team members.

It’s perfect for serving as your team’s central location for capturing and managing all of a project’s issues, questions, bugs and new features. No more swimming through emails or multiple applications to check on the status of an issue. Sifter’s powerful search and filtering make sure you can easily find what you need.

Also, by keeping things obsessively simple, Sifter helps ensure that even the least technical team members feel welcome and comfortable participating so that they can be actively involved in both development and testing without any training.

The result is increased participation working hand-in-hand with a focus on accountability to ensure projects get delivered on time and that nothing slips through the cracks.

Signup for your free trial.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

In Episode 21 of the Foundation interview series, Kevin Rose interviewed Matt Rogers, cofounder of Nest. Matt is super likable and he shares several interesting stories and details about Nest as a company and as a product. Matt also tells some stories about his time at Apple as a part of the original iPhone team including some R&D tidbits I’d never heard about before.

And speaking of funny videos, I laughed out loud at this video of the Dark Knight using Apple’s new Maps to get around Gotham.

This new iPhone app for searching your Pinboard bookmarks has but one primary feature: speed.

Federico Viticci has a brief review, of course, and his sentiments mimic mine. It’d be great if you could edit existing bookmarks, view the popular list, etc., but perhaps that will come at a later time. Pinbook has the core functionality of a Pinboard app — find a bookmark, view a bookmark, add a bookmark, remove a bookmark — down cold.

I’ve been seeing these weird glitchy lines on my iPhone 5 keyboard when entering my password into the App Store app. On Twitter I asked if anyone else was seeing it, and I got back a good deal of replies that many of you are as well. And apparently we’re not the only ones. Matthew Panzarino points out that it appears to be software related.

Someone backed a green Dodge Intrepid into the local Apple store last night and stole a bunch of Apple gear.

There is a feature of Photo Stream on iOS 6 that I didn’t know about. And it’s extremely similar to yesterday’s aforelinked app, Photoset.

Photo Stream allows you to create your own online galleries. I knew you could share streams with other iPhone users, but didn’t realize that the stream could also be turned into a web site.

Moreover, Apple’s Photo Stream sharing feature has solutions to all my aforementioned quibbles with Photoset. You can select multiple images at a time from the Camera Roll, you can edit a stream after it’s been published, and you can delete the stream.

However, in a twist of irony, I find Apple’s photo stream sharing to be more feature rich while I find Photoset to be more “fun” and better designed. Usually it’s the other way around when comparing a 3rd-party app to something Apple built.