Metric
Metric. Tonight at the Greek Theatre. Can’t wait.
Who Knew
From GigaOm:
Startups that really make a commitment to design and Human Experience are emerging as the web and mobile’s most successful companies, like Instagram and Pinterest. Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of social digital magazine Flipboard, explains to us in this video interview clip that he’s seen a resurgence of startups like Path that are putting design first and foremost and he thinks a strong commitment to design will separate the pioneers from the followers.
Design is important. Who knew?
Two-In-One
The Bobine is a great example of something my mentor in design school used to always say: The solution to the problem lies in the problem itself.
In this case the problem is the USB cable for the iPhone makes the iPhone lie flat on the table. Instead of buying a separate stand/dock for it, just make the cord function as the stand too.
via Co.Design
The Grip Is Being Loosened
I’ve fallen behind on some links. This one is from last month, from Electronista:
Time Warner Cable is “hard at work at a cloud-based [TV] guide experience,’ but willing to allow third parties to create interfaces for it, says president and COO Rob Marcus. The executive revealed the information at an investor conference in New York earlier today. The catch, Marcus elaborates, is that Time Warner isn’t willing to forsake the “customer relationship,” meaning that it wants people to know TV is being delivered through TWC instead of a device maker or any other company.
The television door is getting pried open. It’s only a matter of time. Comcast? Time Warner? You’re interfaces suck really, really bad. I don’t think Apple should be the only one allowed to try and fix things. I’d love to see multiple solutions.
Because it’s clear fixing the Human Experience of cable television is not a high priority to cable television companies.
WD-40
The Home button on my iPhone 4 has been getting progressively less responsive over the last 2 months. It was at the point where I was having to press it 7-10 times for it to register a click… that is, until a co-worker reminded me of one of Khoi Vinh’s posts from January 2012.
Khoi’s solution? Spray a little WD-40 on the Home button, and press it a series of times to get the liquid to work itself into the device. I did it over the weekend and my Home button feels brand new.
Tip: I sprayed it on the tip of my finger so I wouldn’t accidentally drown my iPhone in too much of the chemical.
Speculation: Occasionally I have to remove lint that accumulates in the dock connector opening on the bottom of my iPhone. I wonder if lint and debris are also what cause Home buttons to get less responsive over time by covering up the contact point between the Home button and the surface underneath it.
Warning: Like Khoi, I have no idea of the long-term damage this can do to your iPhone.
“Streaming”
My parents and I just finished watching John Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly in The Rumble 2012. What should have been a great television experience ended up being a horrible television experience because of an unreliable video stream (Update: If you don’t believe me, check out #rumblefail on Twitter).
We watched it on their Samsung plasma screen TV which was connected via an HDMI cable to a brand new, WiFi-enabled HP laptop. Despite the fact that my parents’ cable modem averages 29 MBps, my father and I had to reload the web page playing the (Flash) video at least a dozen times.
On one hand, it’s great that the debate was available on the web for anyone to watch (granted you had $4.95). What’s unfortunate is how hard it was to watch it at home on a television. Even though the television is Internet-connected, there was no way to watch the debate natively through any of the ‘apps’ on the TV’s software.
The other options were to watch it via Boxee or Apple TV, and my parents have neither (note to self: get parents Apple TV for Christmas).
I’m happy my father and I were technically savvy enough to get everything set up to watch (and know what to do when things went wrong), but this experience proves how far we still need to go to make it simple for the average person to access the Internet through their television.
On a positive note, in between the stuttering video stream, the debate was great. Stewart, as I expected, demonstrated he’s still at the top of his game when it comes to clearly articulating his sharp thinking while simultaneously using the term “Bullshit Mountain” through the debate.
In A Long While
via Instagram
You’ll Never Be the Same Again
One Simple Thing
It’s hard to have a favorite Steve Jobs speech or quote when there’s so many great ones.
A bicycle for our minds. Values. We won’t ship junk. Giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell. His commencement address at Stanford in 2005.
In the last few years though, his vision of the world has become something of a daily matra for me (hat tip Craig Hooper):
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
I expect I’ll be learning from Jobs for many years to come.
Magic Man
Promila Shastri on Steve Jobs:
Steve Jobs was, not surprisingly, a complicated man, both great and awful, capable of incomparable vision and shocking lapses in judgement, who saw some things with singular clarity and others with no benefit whatsoever of wisdom. To have been his mother or wife or daughter, I’ll bet, was not much fun. But for the rest of us, Steve Jobs was nothing, if not fun.
As is expected from Promila, a beautifully concise remembrance.
