512 Pixels

Shawn Blanc has updated his guide to getting the most out of your creative work with new chapters, interviews and more. If you didn’t purchase out the initial version last year, it’s definitely time to check it out. And if you did, the new version is free, because Shawn is awesome.

Jason Snell:

On Thursday, fall will come early for hundreds of thousands of Mac users when Apple releases its first public beta of OS X Yosemite. The public-beta program, announced during Apple’s annual developer conference in June, lets regular users download and test pre-release versions of OS X. Apple says the first million users to sign up at the OS X Beta Program website will be able to test Yosemite before the OS is released to the general public in the fall.

Users can sign up over on Apple’s website.

This marks the first public beta of OS X since Kodiak way back in 2000. In that public beta, OS X’s Aqua interfaces receieved a fair amount of work. I’m really curious to see how much Yosemite will be influenced by having a million people (plus an untold number of registered Mac developers) running it for months prior to its official release this fall.

Even if the public beta doesn’t influence the final OS all that much, Dan Moren is right: this is a new chapter in Apple history. The OS X Public Beta was a necessity to help developers and users better prepare for the transition from OS 9 to OS X. A big shift like that is clearly not the case here; this is Apple being more open than ever. I like it.

Joel Mathis at Macworld:

Even in an era when critics complain the company has lost a step, Apple’s profits keep climbing. The company released its fiscal third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, reporting revenue of $37.4 billion and a net profit of $7.7 billion.

Those numbers were up from the third quarter of 2013, when Apple tallied $35.3 billion in revenue and $6.9 billion in net profit.

That’s 35.2 million iPhones, 13.27 million iPads, 4.41 million Macs and 2.96 million iPods compared to 31.24 million iPhones, 14.62 million iPads, 3.75 million Macs, and 4.57 million iPods last year.

Apple’s new ad has someone in my life grinning from ear to ear.

Holy moly, this is a great website.

Well, this should be an interesting read.

Brett Terpstra has written one of the most amazing things I’ve read online in a long, long time. Happy birthday, bud.

A grim — but necessary — procedure had been put in place if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were to become stranded on the moon.

The fact that man has walked on the moon never ceases to fill me with wonder. The fact that we did it with 1950s and 60s tech is even more amazing.

I joined Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Peter Cohen on the latest episode of Moisés Chiullan’s Thank You For Calling podcast to talk about customer service in the IT world.

Yesterday marked the end of The Prompt:

The young men (and Stephen) of The Prompt gather one last time and discuss Overcast and IBM.

Be sure to listen to every last second of the file, becuase there’s a great surprise at the end.

Over 57 episodes, Federico, Myke and I generated just shy 3 GB of MP3 files that would take someone 3 days, 47 minutes and 35 seconds to listen to. I couldn’t be prouder of our work on 5by5, and couldn’t be more excited about the future. Stay subscribed to the feed; we’ll be back with something new soon.

Well, there’s this:

We’re delighted to announce that we never let you upload anything to our wonderful, hyper-connected service for curating your precious moments. We could not be happier that you could never use this. Today, we’re curating our pivot to provide for peak sunset value. The Prompt has ended, and we’d hate to have to provide a way for you to download things from this service. Just thinking about all that work seems tiring. Remember us fondly, with all the other cursed services.

The last episode of The Prompt will be out tonight, but stay subscribed to the feed. We’ve got some goodies coming your way.