December 2011
17 posts
“But there was something special about ‘w’ for me. In those days of shared...”
– Andre Torrez: notes on “i miss w”
This reminds me of a simple app I wrote when I worked for Apple. It was 2003-2004, the heyday of post-iPod but pre-music store iTunes, and the local subnet at 1 Infinite Loop was rife with hundreds of employee iTunes shares. I had my own, of course,...
“We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it!...”
– Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr)
The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of...
“The trouble usually arises when, under the guise of efficiency, people stop...”
– BRYCE DOT VC: Early Warning Signs of Startup Trouble
In my experience, this is a very real problem. Culture and communication are difficult to retrofit into an organization once it’s grown to a certain size but most growing companies don’t take it seriously enough until it’s too...
“It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told...”
– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy
“It was never the object of [patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling...”
– Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley, 1883 (via Jens Alfke)
A Drive to Revive the Best Twitter App Ever →
I normally try to steer clear of blatant self promotion around here, but this Gizmodo post Matt Buchanan wrote about Birdfeed, the Twitter client Neven Mrgan and I built, really makes me happy. I like to think of Birdfeed as the Velvet Underground of Twitter clients: it wasn’t a huge success outside of a devoted cult, but you can see its influence on a lot of iOS software today (I’m...
“On page 331 of the printed version (in chapter 25), Isaacson quotes Steve Jobs...”
– tumblqbrady: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, A Review (via jeeves)
“First, there must be an assembly technology so that standard parts can be...”
– Tim Burks: Finding the Software Industrial Revolution
I’ve never been a fan of attempts to transform software engineering into an industrial process, but it’s fascinating to read about the industrial metaphors that led Objective-C creator Brad Cox to champion dynamic minimalism at a...