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Late To Link
“I’d rather be late to link and right than early to link and wrong.“ — John Gruber
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The Auto Update Dilemma
By now you’ve probably heard that iOS 7 will allow apps to auto update. In theory it sounds like a great addition but here’s an example of where it might backfire. Imagine if you rely on this app for work and you use iCloud. If iOS 7 automatically updates to this broken version, you’re out of luck. In an ideal world, developers wouldn’t ship with bugs that cripple their apps but we all know it happens to the best of them.
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The Free Experience
There’s been a lot of talk about free services lately in the wake of Google shuttering Reader, most of it negative. The rally cry is one of pay for everything lest ye lose it. Sounds dire right? It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and shun all free services but is that right? Is free always bad? If a stranger approached you on the street and offered you a free ice cream cone, you’d be skeptical.
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Why I’m excited for Control Center in iOS 7
Sick of all the discussion around iOS 7 icons or the “flat” design? So am I! Don’t worry, I won’t bring those things up again, I want to focus on a tiny little corner of iOS 7 that I see changing my day to day routine. As far back as I can remember, nerds have been begging Apple for toggles and widgets. As an Android convert, toggles were one of the things I missed the most.
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I do not think it means what you think it means.
Someone linked this article on Twitter and the title sucked me in: Apple fail should be a lesson to Microsoft. OMG that sound serious! I wonder what he’s talking about? The Retina iPad, for example, violated Apple’s design creed: products should get thinner and lighter — aka, cooler. Not thicker and heavier. But Apple fixed this quickly (six month later) with the iPad Mini trifecta: thinner, lighter, cheaper. And the iPad, reinvented as the Mini, has been a runaway success.
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iPhone 6
They could release a revolutionary 60-inch 4K TV for $99 with built-in nanobots to assemble and dispense free smartwatches, and people would complain that it should cost $49 and the nanobots aren’t open enough. Marco Arment
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Keeping a spark file
I like this idea by Steven Johnson on keeping a spark file for all the little things that come up in life. The problem with hunches is that it’s incredibly easy to forget them, precisely because they’re not fully-baked ideas. You’re reading an article, and a little spark of an idea pops into your head, but by the time you’ve finished the article, you’re checking your email, or responding to some urgent request from your colleague, and the next thing you know, you’ve forgotten the hunch for good.
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The Making of Medium
Teehan+Lax have a great behind the scenes look at their part in designing Medium. They consisted of questions like: Who is this page for? What problem does this page solve for the user? How do we know they need it? What is the primary action we want users to take on this page? What might prompt a user to take this action? How will we know that this page is doing what we want it to do?
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How Far is it to Mars?
Everyone is linking to this today and for good reason, it’s fun! How Far is it to Mars? It’s amazing what can be accomplished with Javascript and CSS these days.
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An interesting take on acquisitions
Jake Lodwick at Pandodaily Bit by bit, the youthful energy that created so much value was siphoned off. Whereas we’d once been free to work on whatever seemed interesting, we now found ourselves in vaguely defined middle-management roles, sitting through pointless meetings where older doofuses who didn’t understand the Web challenged our intuitions and trivialized our ambitions. It’s always interesting to peek behind the curtain of startups and their acquisitions. Obviously I’m not in a place where I can agree or disagree with what he has to say but he makes a compelling argument.
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