This morning, I saw Basic Apple Guy’s recent post about Apple Stores popping up in Apple Maps, and I was reminded that we have some fancy Apple Maps features here in Memphis, too.
I present to you downtown Memphis, looking east from the Mississippi River:
Yes, we have a Bass Pro inside a pyramid. No, it doesn’t look like Apple’s rendering of it:
Ramesses now stands at the University of Memphis, but that’s a story for another time.
You know how people say there is an XKCD for everything? Number 281 has always been funny to me, given FedEx’s huge presence here:
Now the joke is on me, thanks to an ice storm that rolled through two weeks ago:
For the second year in a row, Casey Liss joined us for the Podcastathon. He just published an amazing piece about the show and his time at St. Jude:
This was my fourth time in Memphis; it’s staring to feel — to a degree — like a home away from home. Having been on campus several times now, not a ton about St. Jude surprises me. I’ve known for many years that St. Jude is dedicated wholly and completely to curing childhood cancer. ALSAC — St. Jude’s fundraising arm — is dedicated wholly and completely to funding that mission.
A while back, my buddy Mark Bramhill — yes that Mark Bramhill — was in town for work. The episode of BirdNote he was working on is now live:
Twice every day, a rapt audience gathers at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee to see six local celebrities: five ducks and the hotel’s head Duckmaster, Kenon Walker, who leads them in “The Duck March.” With John Philip Sousa music playing, the ducks march across a red carpet through the hotel’s lobby to a fountain. The ducks swim about the fountain until the afternoon, when the Duckmaster marches them back to their palace on the roof. People travel from all over to see this surreal local tradition.
Over the past couple years, Apple’s been rolling out its “Detailed City Experience” in Maps to cities across the world and finally, at long last, those improved maps and better landmarks have come to my hometown of Boston, as first noted by Frank McShan on Twitter.
These are really nice looking. The closest thing I’ve seen here in Memphis is the Bass Pro location inside the Pyramid, and it really doesn’t come close to these new Maps illustrations:
This update is great, but I would love it if the example screenshots would include the Grizzlies winning a game:
As seen on MacRumors:
And on 9to5Mac:
Richard Fausset, writing at The New York Times:
Keedran Franklin, a community organizer and social justice activist, runs a South Memphis food truck these days called " The Check-in." The idea, he said, is not only to feed the people of Memphis, but also to ask them how they are getting by, emotionally and spiritually, in one of the poorest large American cities, and one of the most dangerous.
“It’s a combustion chamber of trauma — that’s what Memphis is,” said Mr. Franklin, 36. “We push it down and push it down, until it explodes. That’s what happened with Tyre.”
It has been a weird couple of months here in Memphis:
Joe Sills tells the story of the massive transition the weirdest building in Memphis has undergone in the last few years.
Earlier this week, news broke that the Memphis Apple Store is moving to a new space around the corner from its current location, and will be one of the company’s first stores to sport a new design. Here’s what the store will look like:
Image credit: The Commercial Appeal
In a video hosted on the City of Germantown website, (skip to 1:30:00) plans for the store are shared. The new storefront will use ground-roof glass panels, surrounded by matte granite, with no visible supports or joints.
Seems like our Apple Store — which was the 20th opened — is about get a big upgrade:
Rick Millitello, who presented the plan to the design commission on behalf of Apple, said the store will be one of the first to feature Apple’s new store design.
“Our project is the next generation of retail store that we’re rolling out, and that’s the design concept that we have – and we’re really excited because this is going to be one of the first, if it’s approved, that we build,” Millitello told the commission. “So we’re really excited to expand in Germantown and we’re excited to see the result of all the work that we’ve put in to develop this design.”
The New York Times has discovered that there’s more to my city than Elvis posters.