January 2011
9 posts
3 tags
In response to a journalist’s inquiry about the kind of consumer and market research Apple conducted to direct the iPad’s development:
“None,” Mr. Jobs replied. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
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James Shelley on typography & writing:
Beautiful typography and pixel-perfect layout without meaningful discourse is like owning a gorgeous mansion with a broken furnace — it’s nice to look at, but it’s unpleasant to stay.
Conversely, the words of the greatest sages lose none of their searing wisdom when stored in a humble text file. Great writing, even when presented in 10 point...
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AirPlay for Third Party Apps is the Big News,...
From Ars Technica:
New APIs in iOS 4.3 will allow developers to extend AirPlay support to their own apps.
Forget the ‘hotspot’ hooplah — this is the best new feature to come from the new 4.3 iOS beta. I’ve been wondering about this ever since AirPlay was first announced, and no one seems to have had a straight answer about the AirPlay API’s existence. Now we...
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Penguin Books, the Early Days
“Paperback books did not exist before the launch of Penguins on Tuesday 30 1935. But what publishers all too often got wrong was the balance of price, convenience of format and excellence of scholarship, the essential elements required of cheap pocket editions ever since the printer and publisher Aldus Manutius pioneered the genre in Venice at the start of the sixteenth century. Penguin...
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Can’t remember the last time I actually watched the DVD extras/features. Neither can Khoi Vinh:
In an age where entertainment journalism is so popular and when everyone is interested in the backstory of practically every movie, regardless of how good the movie itself is, it’s interesting to me that extras can be regarded as so inessential. But they really are, and user experience...
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Etymotic's Latest
I’ve used my pair of in-ear canal Etymotic ER-4s since 2004, and they’ve provided stellar sound (for a guy that knows little about acoustics) and amazing[ly dangerous] isolation. They demoed a new product — back to their ear plug roots — at this year’s CES. Engadget’s scoop on the EB1 and EB15 Electronic Blast PLG Earplugs:
The analog earpieces are powered...
“Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds...”
– Lev Grossman’s profile on Mark Zuckerberg for Time
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Amazon’s Kindle-content-everywhere strategy is equal to Netflix’s Watch Instantly-content-everywhere strategy. Right?