A great interview with Seth Godin by GiANT Impact:

Via someone I follow on Twitter, I can’t remember!

Steve Jobs killed the music business, according to Jon Bon Jovi:

“Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album,” he said. “And the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it… I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

Easy there Jon, it’s sounding like the grumpy-old-man-phase is starting with you. I find Jovi’s choice of words interesting. He didn’t say Jobs killed music, he said he killed the music business.
By the looks of the comments on that article, it looks as though the kids are alright, Jon.
If we can leave ComplainerVille for a moment and visit CanDoVille, we find Jack White setting up mobile record store at South By Southwest:

Third Man Records’ latest innovation is not another new-fangled type of vinyl like the Triple Decker Record. Instead, it’s the Third Man Rolling Record Store, a mobile record shop which can travel around the country, equipped with for-sale vinyl, a turntable, microphone, and a state-of-the-art sound system for a live music experience at shows and festival. The fully converted delivery ‘record truck’ intends to resemble the look and feel of the label’s Nashville location, and is set to roll into this year’s SXSW on March 16th. Among its offerings are a full menu of Third Man merchandise along with performances, guest DJs, giveaways and ultra-limited records, entirely exclusive to the Rolling Record Store.

I’m the first to admit we’ve lost some things in the world of digital media – fidelity, physicality, album art – but I wouldn’t say the situation is dire. Are kids still discovering music? Absolutely. Is it how Bon Jovi discovered it? No.

The Telegraph: Why is there no looting in Japan? :

This is quite unusual among human cultures, and it’s unlikely it would be the case in Britain. During the 2007 floods in the West Country abandoned cars were broken into and free packs of bottled water were stolen. There was looting in Chile after the earthquake last year – so much so that troops were sent in; in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina saw looting on a shocking scale.

Why do some cultures react to disaster by reverting to everyone for himself, but others – especially the Japanese – display altruism even in adversity?

From The Register:

Apple’s iOS mobile operating system runs web applications at significantly slower speeds when they’re launched from the iPhone or iPad home screen as opposed to in the Apple Safari browser, and at the same time, the operating system hampers the performance of these apps in other ways, according to tests from multiple developers and The Register.

Yesterday I came across a new Kickstarter project for a virtual letterpress application for the iPad.
Hmm.
I temporarily reserved judgement and played the ‘pitch’ video. What I found out was the team behind the project is spending a lot of time creating a beautifully detailed and ‘realistic’ application that lets anyone “create authentic-looking letterpress designs and prints.” The application recreates the whole letterpress process – from setting type to inking type, to rolling a paper-covered drum.
While I love seeing creative people creating great products, is this the best use of multitouch tablets? Recreating all the things we knew and loved in our analogue world (but didn’t realize at the time)?
What’s next, bringing back the rotary phone dial?
I’m confident to say this is just a phase in the trajectory of computer interfaces. It’s inevitable the touch screens of tomorrow will be more responsive and reactive to the user, that is until we no longer have visible interfaces. We’re seeing this happen right now with Microsoft’s Kinect and the subsequent hacks people have made for it.
The lesson here is to find new ways to solve problems, don’t port old processes into new paradigms.

Live the Sheen Dream

via TUAW

RIM’s Jeff McDowell reacting to HP’s Jon Oakes claim that RIM is copying HP with their Playbook tablet (via LatopMag):

I feel that we set out from the ground up to define a Human Experience that we felt would delight our customers, and we landed in a place that may look like other competitive devices. But there was no intention and no preconceived notion that this is what we want to end up looking like. In fact, I think QNX had that design lined up before we even started working with them.

You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel, and when you’re trying to come up with the best coefficient to drag ratio, there’s one optimized shape that gets the best wind resistance, right? Well, when you’re trying to optimize Human Experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs.

I always love when car analogies end up in tech stories and I can understand McDowell’s point of view.
There’s always going to be overlap in user interfaces on computers. It happened when Steve Jobs created the Macintosh after seeing Xerox PARC’s work on the GUI, then the same thing happened when Microsoft released Windows 95, an OS heavily influenced by the Mac OS.
But as with any creative endeavor there’s a line between inspiration and duplication.

Some products in this world are revealed only after they’re finished. After every last touch has been made. Cars, books, movies and Apple products come to mind.
I treat this site more like a building being built. I’m not testing it behind some hidden subdomain on my server – I’m doing it right out in the open for everyone to see. There’s probably going to be minutes/hours/days during the year this site will look crazy, horrible or beautiful.
There’s something about the live-ness of an incomplete site that motivates me to continue to work on it, to look at it objectively and acknowledge good looking parts and crappy looking parts. I’m also a firm believer in just getting something up, then fix it.
So as they said, “We Apologize for Our Appearance.”
The scaffolding will be up, DIVs will be exposed, chunks of code will be spilled on the sidewalk … so watch your step.

TechCrunch: Android In-App Payments Coming Soon — Were Delayed Because Developers Were Busy
I don’t buy that excuse.
This comment by “MegaBert” sums it up nicely:

Google has conditioned its entire end user base that anything on the internet is free: email, Office-like applications, maps, operating systems, storage for video and photo– basically anything with a Google logo. Aside from any technical problems, this makes it difficult to sell apps or content on Android.

There might be an app for everything, but there’s also a theorem for everything, like the infinite monkey theorem:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Via Electronista:

Acer is hoping to preserve its netbook sales by counting on other companies failing first, the company’s Taiwan president Scott Lin said on Monday. As competitors drop out this year, its netbook shipments might actually go up and fill the vacuum. Lin argued to Digitimes that the netbook market was stable at over 30 million this year and that any losses among others weren’t part of a downward trend.

Hope – The Business Plan of the Future.
That should work out well for them.

My brother was awesome and brought me back some Nicaraguan currency from his surfing expedition:

I love the colors and transparent watermark. Thanks bro!

via Good Old Valves