Andrew Kim wrote an excellent review of Braun’s beautiful, 51-year-old “Phonosuper”:
This is it, the SK55 is my all time favorite product and there’s nothing in the world more important for me to share on this website than this. The Braun SK55, or the SK4 to be more specific, is in my opinion, the most important product in Braun’s history and therefore the most important product to the design of electronics today.
Now, take my comparison here with a grain of salt because I’m not actually on Facebook, but the new Twitter profile page design sure looks a bit Facebook-y to me. But who says that’s a bad thing?
For example, the new design has been rolled out on the U.S. Department of the Interiror’s Twitter page, and it looks absolutely fantastic.
The profile page design sure has changed from what it was 5 years ago.
See also: “Most People”
Justin Williams, a skilled and long-time iOS developer, and now the man behind Glassboard, went to Build last week:
Build allowed me three days to immerse myself in technologies that I know almost nothing about. I came away impressed with it too. For all its past faults, the New Microsoft is doing things that are on the cutting edge of technology.
Justin’s overview of Build is pretty encouraging. For me, being someone who is almost exclusively immersed in iOS and OS X stuff, I love to hear about what’s awesome on other platforms and technologies.
Moreover, it’s encouraging because cloud sync has become so vital for our multi-device lifestyles. And from what little I’ve heard from guys like Justin and Brent Simmons, Windows Azure is a pretty good cloud syncing platform to build on for those who need something more robust than iCloud but who can’t or don’t want to roll their own server.
Seth Godin:
Search is what we call the action of knowing what you want and questing until you ultimately find it. […] Discovery, on the other hand, is what happens when the universe (or an organization, or a friend) helps you encounter something you didn’t even know you were looking for.
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My thanks to Scanbot for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
Simon Parkin, writing for The New Yorker, about :
One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’ ” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”
So great.
Tuns out, the “Air Vent” icon was designed by Norm Cox over 30 years ago during his days at Xerox PARC:
I designed that symbol many years ago as a “container” for contextual menu choices. It would be somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button.
(Via Michael Mulvey.)
Speaking of The Sweet Setup, we’ve got some near-term sponsorship openings that I’d love to see filled, including this week’s spot.
The way sponsorships work on TSS is as a whole package bundle that includes a sponsored blog post with a big image, an exclusive ad in our weekly email newsletter, a few thank-you tweets from our Twitter account, and a one-month run of two banner ads served up in our sidebar.
If you’re interested in booking a spot, shoot me an email: [email protected]
This week’s interview on The Sweet Setup is with the one and only, Katie Floyd, co-host of the Mac Power Users podcast (among other awesomeness):
I’m Katie Floyd. I’ve been a Mac user since 1984 when my dad brought home the original 128k Mac, and I never looked back.
On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I discuss building a platform and an audience to share the things we have to say but how those platforms can turn on us and stifle our creativity and inspiration. Or: How do we keep out of the echo chamber in order to consistently create work we’re proud of and that has value and meaning?
Brought to you by:
Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like.
The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.
Today marks the 3-year anniversary of my first day as a full-time employee here at shawnblanc.net HQ. Thank you so much to all of you dear readers and members who swing by and support this site with your time, attention, and hard-earned cash.
Speaking of amazing apps that shipped yesterday, Fantastical 2 for the iPad is here. I’ve been using it for the last couple months and, of course, it’s great.
And in my time using and testing Fantastical for iPad, I realized a few things.
For one, I noticed how little I actually use a calendar on my iPad. I use to think I never used a calendar app on my iPad because there weren’t any options that I really liked (though, honestly, I do think the pre-iOS 7 iPad calendar app was pretty great). However, even with Fantastical available to me on the iPad, I just rarely ever opened it. But for people who’ve been running the iPhone version of Fantastical on their iPad at 2x, they’ll be extremely happy with the native iPad app.
Which leads me to my second realization. Using the iPad version put some context into just what an amazing app Fantastical for iPhone is. With all the extra space of the iPad’s screen, the app isn’t necessarily better than it’s iPhone sibling. And the fact that an app which has a primary function of displaying and making discoverable as much relevant information as possible, would do as good a job of that on the iPhone as it does on the iPad, is a testament to the former’s design quality.
Needless to say, if you’re in want of a great calendar app on the iPad, Fantastical is a great choice.