Geoff Teehan interviews Sketch founder Pieter Omvlee and asks him if he’s ever been tempted to take on outside investment:

No. I’ve never been tempted. We are self-sufficient and profitable. If I were to take on an investment it would mean handing over a sizable portion of the company to an outside investor who would understandably expect a large return on their investment, maybe via avenues I might not agree an in the broader best interest of Sketch. I want to keep growing the company in a way that I see fit, and I don’t want to have the added pressure from someone who might expect more from it than I may even myself. Plus, with that money, I’d probably be expected to grow at a rate that I might not agree is best in the longer term. Similarly, I don’t want to be forced to hire so many people that we’re not profitable, and then only to be forced to take on more funding. We would probably quickly be expected to go from 6 developers to 20 or 30 — and that’s something that I don’t think is wise at this point in time. So in short I don’t currently see the benefits of taking outside funding.

This is great if Sketch can maintain independence, but there’s also a lot to be gained by taking on outside investors. Money doesn’t solve all problems, but with the right leadership and processes in place, you have the potential to make a lot more progress, and make it more quickly.

As Goeff reminds us in his interview, Sketch is eating into Adobe’s lunch and now Adobe has released a Sketch competitor called Comet. Time will tell if Comet gets traction in the marketplace, but Adobe can put hundreds of developers on Comet to make Sketch go away.

To build world class design software with a current team of 6 developers (!) seems untenable, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Techcrunch: Over 200,000 People Have Signed A Petition To Stop Apple From Killing The iPhone’s Headphone Jack

Good luck with that.

The 3.5 MM stero headphone jacket derived from the 6.35 MM phone jacket from the 19th century. So Apple is retiring a headphone jacket that’s over 100 years old.

I’m not sure I see the problem.

This appears to be the mantra of the entire computer industry from this year’s CES.

Exhibit A: HP’s EliteBook Folio G1 (via Ars Technica):

Exhibit B: Lenovo’s Yoga 900S laptops (via Twitter):

Shame? None.

Seriously, Apple’s way can’t be the only way to do shit. These companies are just straight up lazy.

The salary of the man who has designed every Apple product from the iMac to the Apple Watch has never been disclosed to the SEC or the press. The last time he filed an SEC Form 4 — required whenever there’s a material change in an insider’s position — was July 2009.

According to Apple, Ive is exempt from SEC rules because he’s not what the commission calls a “Section 16” employee. Despite his title — chief design officer — the company does not classify him as a director or officer of the company.

Woah.

Via Daring Fireball

Bobby Emamian with good advice when designing for Apple Watch:

For all of its sleek design and media hype, the first incarnation of the Apple Watch is simply less impressive than many of us might have hoped. Although watchOS 2 shows promise for the future by offering increased power, functionality, and options, the current version on the market imposes many constraints. In our time exploring the watch, we uncovered four limitations every app designer and developer should know about. Being aware of these limitations — and how to work around them — is critical when beginning a foray into designing the next great watch app.

As designers we should already know how important it is to embrace limitations, but it’s always good to be reminded. 

Meagan Fisher on the difference between marketing design and product design:

The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love.

Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures, and display fonts made no sense in this new context.

That’s because the product isn’t about us, and it isn’t about telling our story. Product design is about getting out of the way so people can do their job. The visual design is there to create a pleasant atmosphere for people to work in, and to help support the user experience. Learning to take “us” out of the equation took some work after years of creating gorgeous imagery and content for the sales-driven side of businesses.

‘Getting out of the way’ is a skill all designers should learn to use (when appropriate).

Kickstarter hires investigative journalist to dig into one of its biggest failures:

In November, the company behind Europe’s biggest ever Kickstarter project told its backers it was shutting down. The Torquing Group had raised more than £2.3 million ($3.6 million) to fund its palm-sized Zano drone, but after delivering only around 600 of the 15,363 units paid for, the company went into liquidation. Now, with frustrated backers still smarting from their loss, Kickstarter wants to find out what went wrong. The company has hired technology journalist Mark Harris “to write a story about the collapse of the Zano drone project on Kickstarter.”

As it was reported recently, about 9 percent of Kickstarter projects fail, but when they do fail, they fail BIG, it seems.

Last week Dropbox announced is was shutting down two of it’s services, Mailbox and Carousel.

There’s been some bitching and moaning about these moves, but it doesn’t bother me. I use Carousel almost daily, mainly to back up my photos to my Dropbox account (For a few years now I’ve been paying $99/year for 1 terabyte of storage).

When I have to hunt for a photo, I find the timeline scrubber navigation super-useful. Carousel should have been kept as a feature within the Dropbox app from the beginning. I hope this is on their to-do list for the next big update to the iOS app.

As for Mailbox, I’ve heard good things about it, but I don’t see it contributing to Dropbox’s business goals so having it go away makes sense. As Golden Krishna pointed out on Twitter, Mailbox introduced us to the UI paradigm of swiping left and right, which is now a part of the native Mail app on iOS 9 (and 8?).

Oh this is tasty:

On Monday, the Cowboys’ communication service to their Microsoft surface tablets wasn’t working properly. With their primary source of playbook information temporarily down, they used the next best thing and relied on printed versions of their playbook. Tangible copies can’t fail, right? They don’t, but even the printers weren’t working correctly for the visiting Cowboys.

To make matters worse, Washington cannot access its devices, either, even though they’re still functional. As a rule, the team cannot use its sideline devices if its opponents have technical issues.

Microsoft paid the NFL $400 million just so they could cause them grief.

I think they have a hit on their hands with this Surface thingy of theirs.

Keep up the great work, guys.

Jack White’s Nashville-based label Third Man Records will release the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s blizzard-shrouded western The Hateful Eight on vinyl. The four-side, 28-song soundtrack includes new work from Italian composer Ennio Morricone, despite a spat in 2013 during which Morricone said he never wanted to work with Tarantino again. Tarantino has used Morricone’s music in several of his past films, but this is the first time Morricone has written compositions specifically for Tarantino.

—Jack White’s record label will release the Hateful Eight soundtrack on vinyl

Of course he’s releasing it on vinyl.

In response to all the tech reviewers asking if the iPad Pro can replace the MacBook Pro, Fraser Spiers cleverly goes flipmode:

Firstly, consider the hardware. The huge issue with the MacBook Pro is its form factor. The fact that the keyboard and screen are limited to being held in an L-shaped configuration seriously limits its flexibility. It is basically impossible to use a MacBook pro while standing up and downright dangerous to use when walking around. Your computing is limited to times when you are able to find somewhere to sit down.

Not that you would want to use a MacBook Pro while standing anyway. The sheer weight of these devices means that your shoulder is going to take a beating if you switch from iOS to OS X. The current 15″ MacBook Pro tips the scales at 4.49 pounds – or three iPad Pros – despite having a lower-resolution screen and one less hour of battery life.

This reminds me of people who travel from one part of the U.S. to another and are upset that the exact same food options are not available to them. Every city has its strengths and weaknesses.

The same goes for our devices. Expecting an iPad Pro to have identical features to a MacBook Pro is an exercise in futility.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t compare the two devices, I’m just saying don’t be surprised when you discover their differences.

Sounds like Apple might be killing off the 3.5 MM headphone jack on the iPhone 7:

Citing a reliable source, a report from Japanese blog Macotakara claims that Apple plans to remove the 3.5mm headphone port from the upcoming iPhone 7, helping to achieve a “more than 1mm” reduction in thickness compared to the iPhone 6s. While the screen shape and radius will remain similar, the device will once again become Apple’s thinnest iPhone ever, albeit with a new restriction: headphones will only be able to connect over Lightning or Bluetooth…

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did this. They have a long history of being the first to kill off things like the 3.5-inch floppy drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the original 30-pin USB cord for the iPod/iPhone (to name a few).

If Apple does decide to kill the headphone port, this will result in the collective tech press announcing Apple has gone too far and that this was a horribly dumb move that with come back to bite them in the ass. There will be a huge uproar, as if Apple decided to hire ISIS to run their human resources department.

Then, in the 3-9 months after Apple has introduced their new method for plugging in headphones, the other smartphone makers will get this path that Apple has taken the time and balls to wear down first.

And everyone will be ok.

Interesting observations from John Gruber on the iPad Pro and Pencil:

For capacitive (finger) touch, the iPad Pro samples at twice the rate of previous iPads — 120 times per second instead of 60. With the Pencil, though, the iPad Pro samples at 240 times per second. The way the Pencil works requires cooperation with the display, and so there’s no way this Pencil could be made to work with existing iPads. The Pencil is not iPad Pro-exclusive out of product marketing spite — it’s exclusive to the Pro because the two were engineered in coordination with each other. And if Apple had designed the Pencil differently, to allow it to work with existing iPads, there’s no way it could have had this level of accuracy, because the tip would have needed to be broader and capacitive. (The Pencil’s tip is not capacitive at all — it doesn’t register as a touch at all on any other iOS device.)

I think it’s quite possible the iPad ends up being a slow win for Apple unlike the quarter-after-quarter smash hit the iPhone is.

Nick Statt at the Verge on the Coolest Cooler Kickstarter disaster:

Coolest, the company behind a popular Kickstarter-funded cooler, is now selling its product for $499 on Amazon in an effort to raise enough money to continue producing new units. The news may frustrate Kickstarter backers, who were promised the product in February of this year. Coolest said today it now plans to deliver the last shipment of coolers to Kickstarter backers by April 2016.

In a video uploaded to YouTube, CEO Ryan Grepper said the Amazon sale is to “keep the lights on” and “make certain that every single backer’s Coolest can get made and shipped.” The problem lies in the cooler’s blending motor, which is made by a supplier that’s currently on strike, he said. Coolest has been unable to find a viable replacement.

As I’ve said before, making things at scale is not something you want to take lightly.

User interpol in the comments makes a great point:

Uhh, so $12,000,000 in funding — take off $1mil for Kickstarter fees — divided by 60,000 units is only $200 per unit.

This seems like a vastly underfunded project.

My two successful Kickstarter projects, Bicycles for Our Minds and Charms, Quivers, and Parades both involved two ingredients: paper and ink. Once your project involves electronics and moving parts it takes the complexity to a much higher level.

This doesn’t mean poster and book projects can’t be highly complex. Then can be.