R.L. Stine on cell phones “ruining” movies (via parislemon):

You know, cell phones have ruined everything. They’ve ruined every plot, seriously. You used to have this plot where the girl is getting these frightening phone calls and she’s trying to figure out who’s calling her. You can’t do that story anymore [because the name is] right there on the phone.

This is bullshit.

The Departed is a great example where the entire plot exists because of cellphones.

Talk about tension.

via Twitter

We don’t have to pour molten hot lead into copper matrices to make letters. We don’t have to typeset one page at a time, and we don’t have to make paper to print it all on. When an idea is ready to be published, we don’t even have to ship physical copies of that idea.

Once our brains put an idea into a computer, that idea can be on another computer in an instant. The bottleneck in this network of brains, then, is between the brain and the computer.

This is where design comes in. The clear presentation of the subtext of information (this is more important than that; that is related to this) through shapes, lines, colors, and spaces between pieces of information, strengthens the connection between brain and computer where language isn’t enough.

—David Kadavy, Design Connects Brains

One reason we easily dismiss the astonishing things computers can do is that we know that they don’t carry around a narrative, a play by play, the noise in their head that’s actually (in our view) ‘intelligence.’

It turns out, though, that the narrative is a bug, not a feature. That narrative doesn’t help us perform better, it actually makes us less intelligent. Any athlete or world-class performer (in debate, dance or dungeonmastering) will tell you that they do their best work when they are so engaged that the narrative disappears.

—Seth Godin

John Gruber on the WWDC15 announcement:

I usually don’t play the “let’s read into the design of the Apple event announcement” game, but damned if the center of this doesn’t look like an Apple TV. And the slogan — “The Epicenter of Change” — would fit with an expanded HomeKit role for Apple TV.

June 8-12, San Francisco.

Formula E is an interesting beast.

So what does it sound like when vehicles have no exhaust:

There’s even a live DJ during each race — or “EJ,” as he’s called — who pumps music into speakers around the venue to help make up for the lack of engine noise.

And:

While the racing has been great, the most common complaint about Formula E was lodged well before the series even debuted: its sound, or the perceived lack of it. Traditional race fans love (or love to hate) the sound of combustion engines, and a series that lacks the rumbles and roars usually found in other motorsports is fighting an uphill battle.

“There’s always going to be standard combustion [engine] series out there, and we’re not trying to get rid of them,” Bird says. “There’s no reason why a fan can’t appreciate and love the so-called ‘normal’ concept of racing but at the same time appreciate and love what we’re doing here with our machines.”

But let’s be clear: these cars aren’t silent. The electric motors produce a sound that is somewhere between that of a giant RC car and something out of The Jetsons. They might be whisper-quiet from few hundred yards away, but they register about 80 decibels when they zip by. That’s plenty of noise to get your heart pounding.

I get sad thinking about combustion engines going away, but like most things, we adapt quickly to the new and forget about the old: cigarettes in bars, new operating systems, pagers.

Chart via NetMarketShare via CNet

Only a nerd would get excited about a collection of useful .htaccess snippets, all in one place, on GitHub.

Rene Richie has some great insights on Apple Watch.

First the problem with ‘day-of’ reaction pieces:

Demo areas aren’t real life. The product you’re experiencing isn’t yours. It isn’t connected to your accounts, it doesn’t have your data, and it isn’t set up to your personal tastes. You’re also surrounded by people and noise, you have limited time, and you want to try out as many features as you can. It’s tough to keep the context in mind, to set your expectations accordingly, and to try and extrapolate a product’s demo to its real-life usage. It’s what leads to day-of reaction stories that are sometimes very different to week-in review pieces to months-in review pieces.

And on how Apple Watch fits into the hierarchy of devices (Mac > iPhone > Watch): Notifications and, to some extent Siri, not icons, are going to be the primary portal to apps and activities.

If deeper, longer-form interaction is needed, you’ll absolutely still be able to do it. You’ll be able to tap and spin and swipe and otherwise move through glances and apps and do almost anything you want to do. You’ll even be able to use handoff to continue an especially deep or time-consuming activity on your iPhone, the same way you can handoff from your iPhone to your Mac today.

That’s the advantage of Apple staging convenience and complexity. You can do more with an iPhone than ever before, but you still can’t do everything you can do on Mac, and some things you certainly can’t do as efficiently. You can do a lot of very important things, however, and do them even more conveniently. And that means you don’t have to go running back to your Mac as much as once did.

With the Apple Watch you’ll also be able to do a lot, but not everything you can do with the iPhone. You’ll be able to do some very important things, however, and even some unique things, even more conveniently. And that’ll mean you won’t have to go reaching for your iPhone as much as you do now.

The iPhone is a finer-grained convenience than the Mac/MacBook (for certain things) and the Watch is a finer-grained convenience than the iPhone (for certain things).

Patek Philippe Chairman Thierry Stern on the Apple Watch:

“When you are buy a Patek Philippe, you buy a timeless piece of art. It would be as if you told people to no longer buy paintings but TV screens projecting the image of a painting.”

Stern also said he believed many consumers would prefer wearing a traditional watch with a suit or a black tie, rather than a smartwatch. He clearly doesn’t get it.

We don’t know yet if the Apple Watch will be a success, but don’t come crying when Apple starts drinking your milkshake, Thierry.

via DrewBot

Google wants to get more involved with its app marketplace, Play:

Google Play, Google’s marketplace for Android applications which now reaches a billion people in over 190 countries, has historically differentiated itself from rival Apple by allowing developers to immediately publish their mobile applications without a lengthy review process. However, Google has today disclosed that, beginning a couple of months ago, it began having an internal team of reviewers analyze apps for policy violations prior to publication. And going forward, human reviewers will continue to go hands-on with apps before they go live on Google Play.

Additionally, Google announced the rollout of a new age-based ratings system for games and apps on Google Play, which will utilize the scales provided by a given region’s official ratings authority, like the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) here in the U.S.

I thought open was better? Open always wins?

Why is Google gettng involved? It couldn’t have anything to do with quality control. Nah.

I mean, it’s not like Android has problems with shitty scam apps or anything.

Great answer to a Quora question: What was it like to deliver a presentation to Steve Jobs?

We were in a meeting one time, and Steve commented on how much he hated the ‘wart’ that was the external iSight camera. I said, “I can make it internal.” Steve asked how long it would take to have a prototype ready. My team worked on it (with many other teams both software and hardware), and we developed a prototype. We had the demo set up and ready to go for the next day. The only ‘glitch’ we had not anticipated was one of the software guys upgraded the OS on the machine AFTER we had run through the demo and felt it was ready. So the next day when we showed it to Steve, there was a color shift in the video we had not seen the day before. He asked why, and the software engineer spoke up and said he had updated the OS and it probably changed the gamma settings. Steve I think was more amused, and just said, “Get things right, and show it to me again.”

Another time, I was presenting a feature for Motion I came up with. Real-time, green-screen, high-definition chroma-keying in software. Steve asked me in the presentation if another company could come up with this feature. I said, “Well, since I thought of it, I imagine someone else could come up with the idea, but it is rather unlikely that they could solve it the same way I did.” (By the way, the ‘peanut gallery’ of VPs and Directors standing behind Steve tried to tell me how to answer Steve’s question. The problem was, half of them were nodding yes, and the other half were shaking their heads no.) Steve decided that since it was hard to duplicate, that instead of going for a patent on it, we were going to keep it a trade secret. And as far as I know, no one has been able to duplicate the real-time, green-screen, high-definition chroma-keying feature in software… (the key being real-time).

I find these glimpses inside Apple fascinating.

Images taken from 7dayshop
via Subtraction