This week, on the podcast:
Myke, Federico and Stephen cover Jony Ive, Project Titan and iOS extensions.
Also: Memphis’ winter weather and my failed attempt at a Copland joke.
This episode was made possible by:
Tim Higgins at Bloomberg:
Dan Akerson, retired chief executive officer of General Motors Co., said Apple Inc. should steer clear of the business of making cars, though a push into automobile electronics would be a better move for the iPhone maker.
[…]
“I think somebody is kind of trying to cough up a hairball here,” Akerson said in a telephone interview. “If I were an Apple shareholder, I wouldn’t be very happy. I would be highly suspect of the long-term prospect of getting into a low-margin, heavy-manufacturing” business.
Dan Provost:
To date, we (Tom and Dan, aka Studio Neat) have launched and successfully funded five Kickstarter projects, raising nearly half a million dollars in total. We were one of the first product design projects on the site, with the Glif way back in 2010, and we’ve continued to use the platform to launch new products, most recently just a few months ago. It’s pretty clear to us that Kickstarter is not a bubble, nor a flash in the pan, but a sustainable platform that is here to stay. As such, we wanted to unload all of the knowledge we have accrued in running those five projects in one mega-post, with the hope of it being helpful to future and/or aspiring Kickstarters.
Today marks the reboot of Myke’s long-running interview show. Instead of the hour-long 1-1 format the show has had for years, this episode marks the start of a serialized approach.
“Behind the App” takes a look at the App Store and how it has changed nearly everything in the consumer electronic space. Myke recorded hours and hours of interviews with developers, telling the story of the iPhone, the history of iOS app development and how to make a living writing code.
The Verge’s John Lagomarsino has written a manifesto about podcast listening speeds, of all things:
Radio — like film, music, TV, theater, and dance — is a temporal art. It relies on the passage of time to play with anticipation, tension, and release. A good radio producer knows how long a thought will linger in a listener’s consciousness, and either grants her that time, or purposely denies it. A conversation between two hosts is riddled with pregnant pauses and interruptions designed to head off miscommunications. We’re used to these patterns, and a good podcast is paced to play into them. Why, then, should we mess with that balance in the name of efficiency?
Federico Viticci:
Version 3.7 of Dropbox, available now on the App Store, adds an action extension that lets you copy any file that can be shared with iOS’ native share menu directly to your Dropbox account. The extension is fairly basic: you can save to your root Dropbox folder and navigate sub-folders; when uploading, a modal dialog will show a progress bar, which will be automatically dismissed when the upload is done.
The Onion’s take on Project Titan is pretty great.
On Saturday, one of the most iconic images of all time turned 25 years old.
On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of the solar system, capturing Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Earth — which showed up as the “pale blue dot” in the brown band on the right side of the photo.
The photo — taken 3,720 million miles away from Earth — puts us in our place in a way that is beautiful and haunting. All of our knowledge, all of our passion, all of our shit, all of our everything is just a few pixels across.
Let’s face it, brainstorming and sketching sucks!
You rather go straight to coding or building.
But, hold on gun slinger…
All great products start with a sketch. Even the fastest cars and sleekest phones started out as a sketch.
If your idea is the seed, the sketching is the water that will bring it to life.
With Loose Leaf you can now easily sketch your ideas and flush out the key concepts so you can start building your products.
Yesterday afternoon, the Apple-centric corner of the Internet freaked out over a report from The Wall Street Journal that said Cupertino has “several hundred” people working on an electric car project named “Project Titan:”
Mr. Cook approved the car project almost a year ago and assigned veteran product design Vice President Steve Zadesky to lead the group, the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Zadesky is a former Ford engineer who helped lead the Apple teams that created the iPod and iPhone.
“Apple’s making a car.”
*Oh look, Finder’s crashed.*
— Stephen Hackett (@ismh) February 13, 2015
I rest my case.
Yikes.