With the summer heat beating down upon them, Federico and Myke support Stephen during his time of confession, have a memorial service for their very first iPhones, discuss RSS, fashion and more.
Also: a Keyboard Maestro/AppleScript tip towards the end. You can get the episode here, or subscribe via iTunes.
A great concept by Teehan+Lax Labs, based on UICollectionView and built with custom designs and code to handle a “scrubbing” metaphor instead of regular scrolling. I don’t think that it would work for me (I need to see multiple upcoming events, and that’s why I love Fantastical for iPhone so much), but I’m all for unique reimaginations of the decade-old digital calendar.
You can download the Upcoming source code here.
Ahead of the App Store’s fifth anniversary on July 10, Apple has sent tech reports a celebrative poster with a timeline of the App Store from 2008 to 2013. The Financial Times’ Tim Bradshaw received a copy and posted a photo (via MacRumors).
Two things stand out to me: Apple’s focus on third-party apps and games in the poster, and how much quicker downloads have been growing in the past year. It’s also nice to see the original Instagram icon in there.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple will post an interactive “5 Years of App Store” page as they did with iTunes (when they also sent celebrative items to the press).
Moviefone:
“Some see what’s possible, others change what’s possible” are the words sprawled across this exclusive poster for “Jobs,” which features a nearly unrecognizable Ashton Kutcher.
Kutcher is utterly transformed into late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in the colorful new poster (below). Sporting Jobs’s signature round-framed glasses and beard, the actor certainly looks the role.
The movie’s poster focuses, unsurprisingly, on Kutcher, whose resemblance to Steve Jobs is almost uncanny in some shots (shown so far). But as I (briefly) argued last week on The Prompt, I worry that, with such a strong visual resemblance, Kutcher’s voice will break the illusion.
So ‘Oh Hai’ was the eventual outcome. It makes use of iOS face detection and to address our bugbear, we removed the need to interact directly the photo by including two sliders (one for eyes and the other for the mouth). These enable fine adjustments to be made with a complete and uninterrupted view of the results. The final working version was technically finished after more or less three days of work.
A simple, fun app by ustwo. I tested it over the weekend, and it does exactly one thing, quite well, with a straightforward design. The iOS face detection technology behind it is smart and accurate. Free on the App Store.
The public unveiling of each new version of Mac OS X has brought a new default desktop picture, and a new hunt to find a full-res copy of that wallpaper before the official release. The introduction of OS X Mavericks was no different, only this time instead of a space-themed galaxy or nebula, Apple decided to bring Mac’s default look and feel back to earth.
Thomas Brand takes a look back at Apple’s history with Mac OS and OS X default desktop pictures.
Matt Alexander has a good piece on the hypocrisy behind some people’s reactions to iOS 7:
One of the most trite and oft-spoken philosophies in the technology world — originating from hockey’s Wayne Gretzky and popularized in our community by Steve Jobs in 2007 — is that companies ought not to skate to wear the puck is, but where it will be. That is what both Apple and Microsoft have sought to do in recent weeks.
We responded, however, with premature dismissals and cries that our technology is changing.
It’s embarrassing.
And Harry Marks has some solid counterarguments, but especially this bit:
Apple may or may not pay attention to the complaining about the icons in the beta. It may or may not read all the scathing editorials about how Helvetica Nueue Light was the wrong font choice because something something zzzzzz…sorry, I dozed off for a second. What it will do is make iOS better. It will change the way we use our phones and tablets whether we like it or not.
So, you can either upload your alternate stock icon designs to Dribbble, or you can adapt your app to better suit the coming change. Which will it be?
If you’ve ever wondered how the world started using the word “tweet”, read Craig’s post for a great piece of Internet history.
Shawn Blanc:
Anyone who has been subscribing to RSS feeds for longer than a few months will know your subscription list regularly needs pruning and adjusting. Well, I want my RSS reader to help me with that task. Smart Streams can help by making it easier to wrangle my feeds based on more than just which website they came from. I expect in the long run that they will prove very accommodating and useful as my interests change and as my attention ebbs and flows.
A good overview of Feed Wrangler’s best feature. I’ve been using Feed Wrangler since April and I’m very happy with it.
