Apple's Pessimism Problem→

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Marco on the pessimism that has been surrounding Apple for a couple years now:

A year later, when Apple did release a model named “iPhone 5” that was far better than the 4S and had an external redesign, the inertia of Apple pessimism was so strong and the press had become such petulant children about Apple products that they shat all over it even though it was a huge update that gave them everything they asked for, plus more.

Now, Apple pessimism is even stronger. No matter what they release and no matter how well it sells, they won’t win over the press, the pundits, the stock market, or the rhetoric. Not this year. They could release a revolutionary 60-inch 4K TV for $99 with built-in nanobots to assemble and dispense free smartwatches, and people would complain that it should cost $49 and the nanobots aren’t open enough.

Apple does indeed have a problem here. I still think they should have named what we now know as the iPhone 5 as simply "the new iPhone".

A $5 app isn't expensive→

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I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate near term and in the long term—when they scoff at the thought of spending money in the App Store. Here’s how customers who spend lavishly on iOS hardware punish themselves by skimping on apps.

Lex Friedman makes the case for paying good money for your great apps. If you are one who balks at an app that costs more than a buck or two, you need to go read this.

Heck, read it anyway.

¶ Three Years

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It is a little hard to imagine that in a short three years how much the iPad has changed the world. It almost feels like it has been around much longer than three years.

I remember not knowing exactly why I needed wanted an iPad, but venturing out to look at one anyway. Of course, I ended up buying one. And I remember finding that oversized iPhone to be magical.

In these past three years I have owned four — count ‘em, four — iPads. The original, the iPad 2, The New iPad (or iPad 3 in regular person speak), and the best of them all so far — the iPad mini.

I still think that not even Apple knew exactly what the iPad would become when they launched it. And the truth is, it becomes whatever app you are currently running. It can be a book, an instrument, a race car, a movie studio (or movie theater), or be the future of communication drawn into the present.

The truly great thing is the amount of creativity the iPad can unleash in a person as the barrier to interact with a computer is broken down to simply directly touching the thing you are creating.

With each iteration of the iPad, my favorite has been the concentration of it to the lighter, more portable iPad mini. And I can’t help but feel that if we have come this far in three short years, how much further will we be in three more?

iOS 7 Settings→

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Louie Mantia imagines what iOS 7 may look like from the Settings app. I love his use of Avenir, a font that I have absolutely fallen in love with. I use it in any app I can (e.g., Day One and Twitterrific 5).

Louie makes a lot of other smart decisions, and I think I would love it if iOS got a bit of a makeoverin this style.

Some related reading would be Chairman Gruber's little birdies.

techese 4.0

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If you checked out the site in the past 24 hours, you may have noticed that things seem a little different. It’s a subtle visual change, as the general design stayed fairly similar, but this is definitely a brand new techese.

Without further ado, welcome to techese 4.0. This is the first real visual refresh since November 2011.

But it is so much more than a visual refresh. There are plenty of functional updates as techese has been updated from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6.

Here are a few of the changes you’ll enjoy:

  • Responsive design for mobile devices (!!!)
  • Linked List items will now use Daring Fireball style title links. These are signified with an → to the right of the title. (I’m not updating the back catalog, so this is from now on).
  • Simple liking of a post is now available using the little heart below each post.
  • Images now use a lightbox if you want to see them larger.

And a couple things to note:

  • Permalinks are found below every post by clicking the date.
  • The RSS feed has changed to http://techese.net/articles?format=rss, which I have done a 301 redirect for. In my testing, things like the soon-to-perish Google Reader made the switch just fine, but you may want to update the address anyway.

That’s all I have for now. Enjoy the update.