Month: June 2017

Jay-Z calls out Apple Music on his new album

Business Insider:

In the song “Smile,” Jay raps about his beef with Apple and the streaming music industry as a whole:

“F— a slice of the apple pie, want my own cake / Chargin’ my own fate / Respect Jimmy Iovine / But he gotta respect the Elohim as a whole new regime / And n—– playin’ for power, huh / So our music is ours”

But Tidal has struggled to grow its business and faced numerous setbacks over the past couple of years, and Apple was rumored to be eyeing a takeover last fall.

John Gruber on the iPhone introduction:

The iPhone’s potential was obviously deep, but it was so deep as to be unfathomable at the time. The original iPhone didn’t even shoot video; today the iPhone and iPhone-like Android phones have largely killed the point-and-shoot camera industry. It has obviated portable music players, audio recorders, paper maps, GPS devices, flashlights, walkie-talkies, music radio (with streaming music), talk radio (with podcasts), and more. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft wouldn’t even make sense pre-iPhone. Social media is mobile-first, and in some cases mobile-only. More people read Daring Fireball on iPhones than on desktop computers.

In just a handful of years, Nokia and BlackBerry, both seemingly impregnable in 2006, were utterly obliterated. The makers of ever-more-computer-like gadgets were simply unable to compete with ever-more-gadget-like computers.

Ten years in and the full potential of the iPhone still hasn’t been fully tapped. No product in the computing age compares to the iPhone in terms of societal or financial impact. Few products in the history of the world compare. We may never see anything like it again — from Apple or from anyone else.

A “Perfect” looking back piece on the iPhone introduction from John Gruber. Encapsulating the “Where were you when the iPhone was introduced” moment, the “Holy shit!” experience when holding it in your hands for the first time and its remarkable effect on the industry. Here’s to another ten years.

“Getting Things Done”

Matt Gemmell on the recent “iPad replacing laptop” discussions:

In terms of the tasks I need my computing device for, I do some dorky technical stuff, and I use automation utilities, and some scripting, and I also produce actual work. Plus I do all the usual web browsing and email and social media. The iPad isn’t a laptop replacement, because it’s not a laptop. I wasn’t looking for one. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone under twenty years of age with a laptop, either. But the iPad has replaced my MacBook. That’s a fact.

No-one’s saying that it either can or can’t replace yours, or whether you’d want it to. Except the pundits and journalists who can’t seem to let go of the idea that it’s an either-or situation, where we need to have a winner and a loser. I’m not sure what they’re afraid of.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are just getting things done.

Matt, as per usual with the frank, spot on view.

Inside story of the iconic iOS rubber band effect that launched the iPhone

An except from Leander Kahn’s book on Apple interface designer, Bas Ording recalling the rubber band effect:

The first thing Jobs says is that the conversation is super-secret, and must not be repeated to anyone. Ording promises not to.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, Bas, we’re going to do a phone,’” Ording told Cult of Mac, recalling that momentous call from long ago. “‘It’s not going to have any buttons and things on it, it’s just a screen. Can you build a demo that you can scroll through a list of names, so you could choose someone to call?’ That was the assignment I got, like pretty much directly from Steve.”

However, as he worked on his scrolling list, Ording noticed that when he got to the bottom or the top of the list it just stopped. He’d pull the list down but it would just sit there. It looked like it had crashed. Every time he saw it, it bugged him, but he didn’t know how to fix it.

He tried adding some space at the top. When he got to the top of the list, the small space would appear. But that didn’t solve the problem — it just repeated it.

The space just sat there, unmoving.

Ording figured the space would need to move with the user’s finger to show that it was still responsive. But that didn’t feel right, so Ording tried making it move more slowly than the user’s finger, just as an experiment. The effect was to make it feel elastic.

“I’m like, ‘Ooh this is kind of fun,’ and then, ‘Oh wait, now it needs to move back,’” Ording said.

When he made it snap back, it acted like a rubber band — it moved down, but then bounced back to its correct position.

Fascinating excerpt into a feature we use every day and take for granted which shows the delight in the details of design.