512 Pixels

This is some great solution-finding from a goverment group I didn’t think was in to that sort of thing.

Congrats, Jim and Peter. The site looks awesome.

On the taptaptap Twitter account:

To all of you asking if we plan to make Camera+ for Android, we’ll consider it when Google stops being evil. In other words, slim chance.

Boom.

Kevin Lipe:

This is an idea I’ve had (and researched pretty thoroughly) since freshman year in the dorm: the ultimate tool for writing text. A “real” computer is overkill, and an iOS device, with its color LCD screen and multitude of apps, isn’t ideally suited to be a tool for writing text. What is needed is something closer to the Kindle: a (mostly) single-purpose, self-contained device with an always-on wireless connection (whether that’s through 3G like Whispernet or through WiFi) in which every facet of the design of the hardware and software is geared toward one thing: being an efficient tool for translating ideas into words. Essentially this device would be the translation of an application like Byword or TextMate into hardware.

I know iOS (and OS X Lion) can offer a full-screen writing environment, but just past that layer is a world of possible distractions.

I was invited co-guest with Dave Caolo on this week’s Bro Show. We chatted about Steve Jobs’ resignation, iTunes Match and the HP Touchpad.

Oh, and Dave had to leave halfway through the show. What a slacker.

My first batch is pre-ordered.

Brett Terpstra:

Your documents are cross-platform by nature. You can edit them in any text-capable application on any operating system. Transporting files requires no zipping or archiving, and the filesize is as small as it can possibly get.

That’s the main reason I use Markdown for as much as I possibly can. My life is a stack of plain text files, and I want them to last as long as possible.

Alan Deutschman for Newsweek:

In the 14 years since Jobs regained control of his company in the summer of 1997 after a long, bitter exile, Apple shares have increased a stunning 110-fold. Having surpassed rival Microsoft a year ago, Apple’s $350 billion in market capitalization places it behind only ExxonMobil as the most valuable company in the world. Apple has made money so quickly and so prodigiously that it holds an outrageous $76 billion in cash and investments—an awesome sum thought to be parked in an obscure subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, located across the California border in Reno because the state of Nevada doesn’t have corporate or capital-gains taxes.

Joshua Schnell of Macgasm, discussing his struggle with Google Ad revenue falling off after a server move:

After four months of trying to wrap my head around the case of the missing ad-revenue I realized something, I probably rely more on Google than I do Apple for my daily business. Sure, Apple provides me with the news we cover on Macgasm, but Google makes the coverage possible with Google Reader. Our email … hosted at Google. Our analytics … provided by Google. Our ad-revnue … primarily courtesy of Google. My main IM client of choice for the website … Google Talk. Our number one source of traffic … Google.

[…]

I may have built a house on the Internet, but it’s certainly Google’s world I’m living in. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was concerned about the future of publishing online.

I’ve felt for sometime that online journalism can’t be supported just by advertisements.¹

Niche journalism probably feels this squeeze more than newspapers who have an online presence, since the pool of readers and advertisers is smaller. With Google controlling so much of the online advertising world, this problem isn’t going to get much better for sites like Macgasm any time soon, I fear.

I really hate mankind.

I hate mankind.

James Shelley:

But as counter-cultural as it may be, I have serious misgivings about the pursuit of happiness. There is a massive, irreconcilable clash between our modern obsession with happiness and the lives of our cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa — people who would have never inspired us had they simply taken the path of least resistance in order to achieve their own happiness. No, these individuals followed a trajectory set by a pursuit of meaning, justice and purpose. Values set their respective frameworks for making decisions (and significant sacrifices) in life.

Jonah Lehrer, on Steve Jobs’ use of anger as a leadership tool:

At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.

But maybe this is a big mistake. Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.

There are lots of things to think about between these two posts.