Kevin Tofel over at GigaOm wonders if it matters that Window Phone has over 100,000 apps.
The answer: It doesn’t.
It might help to think of the smartphone market as a poker game. When the iPhone launched 5 years ago, there was no blind needed to play the game. Apple had created a new game, they were making up the new rules of what a smartphone was and anyone could play. RIM jumped in with the Storm, Palm with the Pre and Google with Android.
Fast forward to 2009. RIM has folded, Palm and Google are still playing but Apple has changed the blind. Now in order to play you need 100,000 applications for your mobile OS. Google and Palm still have a lot of catching up to do, but they’ve both convinced the house to let them continue to play as they hustle to hit the six-figure mark for apps (spoiler: Google doesn’t hit it until 2010).
2010. Microsoft shows up late to the game with Windows Phone. Everyone is expecting them to show up hungover and in last night’s tux, but they’re looking surprisingly crisp. Like Google in 2009, they don’t have the required 100,000 apps, but they have a ton of cash, so they’re allowed to play.
2011. HP (Palm) folds.
Fast forward to now. 2012. Apple still has the biggest pile of chips and a ton of applications (I don’t know who has the most now). Both Google and Microsoft have the money and the apps. But there’s a problem. Now it’s no longer enough to just have a mobile OS, a lot cash and over 100,000 apps. Now the smartphone game is being played on television and the viewing audience gets to vote on who gets to stay, American Idol style.
And no one is voting for Windows Phone.

Update your RSS Readers.
Jonah Lehrer just announced he’s taking his blog, Frontal Cortex, from Wired over to The New Yorker.
I’ve been following Jonah’s brain musing for a while now. He’s a great read.
I’ve also started reading his new book, Imagine. It’s along the lines of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (FYI – if you use these links I get a small kickback from Amazon).

via Motoriginal

From MG Siegler:

Google will announce the next version of their OS before 10% of their users are on the last version. Think about how insane that is for a second.

Hmmm. Thought about it.
Pretty insane.

Last month Time Warner’s CEO admitted he didn’t know what Airplay was.
Now this month, DirecTV chairman Michael White says Apple TV won’t obsolete their technology.
I wouldn’t bet against Apple, just saying.

This post over at Print Magazine’s Imprint blog is full of great advice on dealing with yourself and your clients.
There’s dozens of quote-worthy parts, like this one:

It’s frustrating when feedback makes no sense. But you have to take the high road. The double-standard of designer-client relationships is that your clients get to be emotional, irrational, and reactive, but you don’t. You get to absorb all of that energy and gently guide the process. That doesn’t mean you don’t push back at times, it just means that you do so respectfully, carefully, and calmly.

Emotional maturity is one of the top 3 skills you need as a designer (talent and strong work ethic are the other two). As I get older and get better at handling my emotions with clients, I notice this as one of the main areas younger, junior designers need work with.
You should read the whole post, but even if you don’t, jump around until see a section header that catches your eye.

A few of my shots from the past month or so here in LA.

While I’m still in my honeymoon phase with Reggie Watts, Gizmodo just posted a great piece on the gadgets he uses.
Reggie says:

I like simple, well-made, well-designed things. That’s the thing that makes me happiest. Then the thing that makes me least happy is something that is not designed well. It could be anything, like a parking garage or a really small drinking fountain, because it’s like why go through the effort and not do it right? It’s really annoying.

And this nugget stood out for me:

While Reggie is very clearly a gadget guy, his music is about the music, not the gadgets. “I’ve just always been fascinated by using technology as a tool to enhance creativity,” he says, “Not to replace it, but to enhance it.” You can hear it when he plays. The musical worlds he creates aren’t about how fast he can push a toggle or twist a dial; if it doesn’t serve to make it better, more beautiful, funnier, or more powerful, he doesn’t use it. He keeps his music as tight as he keeps his kit.

Sounds like Reggie believes computers are like a bicycle for our minds.

Daily Exhaust hit 10,000 unique visitors this month.
I’d like to continue this trajectory.

Quote from Reggie Watts.

Ok, I know I’ve been sleeping on this, but Reggie Watts is off the hook.
I should have watched his performances when I first hear about them.

John Gruber pulled, “We’re going to double down on secrecy on products.” as one of the key quotes from Tim Cook’s appearance at the D10 Conference.

I picked a different one.

When pressed about Apple TV, Cook responds: “We’re not a hobby kind of company, as you know.” Boom.

Apple ain’t going to mess around with Apple TV (in it’s current black box incarnation) unless they can ‘make a dent’ in the television universe.

We’ve all had a gut feeling about Apple TV, whether you read Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs where Jobs claims he’s finally cracked it (‘it’ being television) or you’re just connecting the dots from the iPod to iTunes to iPhone to the expansion of iTunes to movies, rentals and shows to iTV to iPad to Apple TV …

It only makes sense.

Over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson gives us a short philosophical history of personal music and explains how working with headphones hurts our productivity (via SlashDot):

To visit a modern office place is to walk into a room with a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and the vast majority thinks it makes us better at our jobs. In survey after survey, we report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

From my experience, he’s absolutely right – at least as it pertains to any work involving critical or creative thinking.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I find it helpful to have music or a podcast on when I’m doing any sort of production-level work. This kind of work doesn’t require heavy mental lifting.