Albert Einstein said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
One of the best ways to explain something to someone is through metaphor and analogy.
Horace Dediu, as usual, nails Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference:

The path to realizing this is to imagine the world as the “D” in WWDC see it. Developers don’t just build. Using an analogy of building or construction, they are architects and designers as well as contractors and craftsmen and artists as well as builders. And not of just of houses but of cities and communities. They see and think through tools and techniques for building and innovations in building materials. Innovations which allow them to imagine first and, later, to build new cities in ways that were never before possible.

We were therefore witnesses to an event which was, in essence, a cement conference. A new building material was introduced along with the methods for using it and the tools for shaping it. Perhaps some observers expected to see skyscrapers and interstate highways presented, and thus were disappointed. But they should not have had such expectations. A cement conference is esoteric. It’s about the rudiments which, when combined with imagination, ingenuity and a lot of work, generate livable spaces.
Outsiders seemed disappointed with last week’s WWDC. No new toys, nothing shiny to take pictures of and post on their websites, but every insider (including a coworker of mine) who went was super-excited with all the announcements.
Such is life, though. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve explained something (like a Kickstarter project) I’ve envisioned and it’s fallen on deaf ears. Most people have shitty imaginations. Only once you’ve executed your vision do they jump on the bandwagon (to be fair to my imaginary skeptic, most people never execute, they just love to talk).
It’s no different with what Apple announced at WWDC. The hundreds of new features and tools in iOS and OS X open up countless new ways of doing things we’ve never been able to do before on these platforms, but most people will not “get it” until developers start building new things.

—Shonda Rhimes

Let me understand something.
If the one major downside to the Samsung Chromebook 2 is the fact that it’s “too slow to really get anything done,” how the fuck does it get a 7.6 score?!
That’s like dropping a four cylinder, 92-horsepower engine into a Ferrari 458 Italia and saying it’s “too slow to really race against other sports cars,” but still giving it a 7.6 score of of 10.
I don’t get it (and this isn’t the first time The Verge has posted wack reviews).

Influencer: Nest Thermostat, introduced in 2011

Influenced: Honeywell Thermostat, introduced 10 June 2014

via Instagram

When iOS 8 hits, the notification center is going to be the most important screen in your iPhone. Think about it: Notifications already are the way you know about everything that happens without having to fire up an app. A notification lets you know you have a new email, a new text message, a new Snapchat. (Hi, Tony. Looking good.) But with iOS 8 they become interactive. They’re not just simple announcements–or even calls to action–anymore. They are actions in and of themselves. Entirely new windows onto our data. It’s nearly impossible to overstate how much this will change the way you use your phone.

— Mat Honan, Wired

I’m very cautious with notifications. They can be dangerous and annoying as shit.

Right now on my iPhone running iOS 7 I’ve turned off almost all notifications for email and text messages. I don’t get interrupted with message panels and windows whenever something new pops onto my phone. I find doing this helps me act less like a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Some people might view my OS customizations as making my iPhone less smart. I’m fine with that if it means making me less distracted.

I’ll keep an open mind with notifications in iOS 8 when I see how they work differently.

All these assholes calling for the death of skeuomorphism and praising flat design can continue on with their pointless quest because skeuomorphism isn’t going anywhere. It’s thriving in the supposedly flat iOS 7 (and 8) and in OS X Yosemite.
The truth is we still need and like visual cues telling us certain things are clickable and other things are not. That certain things are (virtually) closer to us, and others are (virtually) farther away.
Below are Mavericks icons (left) and Yosemite icons (right):


Sure, iOS 1 through 6 might have looked a bit like a whore with the amount of skeuomorphism she wore, but she’s still wearing it in iOS 7 & 8, just this time she’s applying it sparingly. She’s started letting her natural beauty shine through in iOS 7.
*[*I say IOS 7 & 8 are “supposely flat” because they are. There are still shadows when you go back and forth between interface panes in Mail, Music and many other apps and system-level panes can be pulled in from the top and bottom of the screen, blurring the content underneath them like translucent, frosted glass. So I repeat: skeuomorphism is doing fine.]

It wasn’t touted onstage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havoc for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.
—Russell Brandom, The Verge

Dan Seifert at The Verge reviews the Samsung Gear 2:

The Gear 2 is greatly improved, but it’s still not great. I was able to use it for about 2 1/2 days before it needed to be plugged in, and it still requires a clunky, easy-to-lose clip-on adapter for charging. A smartwatch that can be charged on the weekend and last through to the next weekend would be ideal, but the Gear 2 is not there yet. The Pebble can very nearly manage this, but we’ve yet to see what the coming Android Wear watches will offer in terms of battery life.
Cons listed: “Interface is still clunky; Battery life isn’t great; Only works with Samsung devices”
So the Samsung Gear went from really shitty to kinda shitty.
Sounds awesome. Where do I get one?

Sure, we’ve got the iPhone’s Siri, and the Food and Drug Administration just approved a prosthetic arm controlled by signals from the brain — but where are our smooth-gliding flying machines, our Landspeeders (“Star Wars”) and airborne DeLoreans (“Back to the Future”)?

You may think that the absence of such cars speaks to a failure of engineering or distorted incentives in the marketplace. But the humbling truth is that we don’t have these vehicles because we still don’t know, even in principle, how to directly manipulate gravity. Indeed, the cars missing from our skies should serve to remind us that, to a degree rarely appreciated, we have surprisingly poor control over most of nature’s fundamental forces.
—Adam Frank, The New York Times

Without a doubt, Apple has copied certain features from its rivals as well. The difference is that Apple seems biased to design based on its own intent first, and copy second; its rivals tend to copy first.
—John R. Moran, Design Is About Intent
Moran’s whole post is great, but that quote above especially caught my eye.

The Hill now reports that Comcast is “waging a campaign of shock and awe for its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable by fielding one of the biggest lobbying teams ever seen in Washington,” as the cable giant “has added seven lobbying firms to its roster since first proposing the deal earlier this year, and it is adopting a posture of overwhelming force to try to win approval from federal regulators.”
—Brad Reed, BGR
Democracy in action! Fuck yeah!

The Glut Life shows us how to make the infamous Brass Monkey:

STEP 1:

Ok now what you’re going to want to do is drink the 40oz till the top of the label. This was by far the worst step making this drink. I swear have no idea how I used to drink OE all the time back when I was younger. The shit taste like homeless.
Although I had many a 40 ounce of Old English back in high school and college, I’ve never had a Brass Monkey. The only Brass Monkey I knew was the one by the Beastie Boys.

Over at McSweeney’s, Mike Lacher gives us Client Feedback On the Creation of Earth:

9 – Re: “mankind.” Interesting take on the brief here. Big pain point is that mankind is coming across as largely made in your image. As you hopefully recall from the deck, our users are a diverse group (slide twenty-seven) and we definitely want to make them feel represented (slide twenty-eight). Afraid that if our users see fleshy bipedal mammals positioned as “ruling over” the ground and sea (if we’re having sea), they might feel alienated and again less willing to convert into brand evangelists. Let’s fast-track an alt version with mankind removed. Doable?
This is a brilliant piece but almost too real for me.
It makes me sad when I think back to how many client projects included real emails like this fake one.
Clients can sometimes suck ass.