Linked List: January 4, 2013

Friday, 4 January 2013

Little Techie 

Five-year-old boy who designs and recreates iOS devices. So great.

Keeping Safari a Secret 

Speaking of new blogs, Don Melton — who started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple — has one:

I wasn’t worried about talk either. Forstall certainly trusted me — that’s one of the many things that made him a great boss. And I trusted my team — otherwise I wouldn’t have hired them. None of us nor any of the internal beta testers at Apple were going to snitch. There were too damn few beta testers, but they were above reproach.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

Might as well clear a few minutes from your schedule and catch up on the whole thing.

Learning by Shipping 

Steven Sinofsky has a new blog:

Learning by Shipping picks up where these blogs leave off. The title comes from something impressed upon me early in my career, which is that learning as an engineer comes from the process of starting, then finishing, and iterating on products–getting products to market and putting the broad feedback loop to work. The teams and processes used to create products are critically important and fun to talk about relative to shipping and learning as we search for the best approaches to use at a given time.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Scott Forstall to start one.

The ‘Whoa’ Business Model 

Neven Mrgan:

I wonder if there’s a business to be gotten into where one shows movies the way everyone wants to see them: just the movies, from the very first second you start watching. It’s a naive thought; I understand that. But I can’t forget that when those lights went down, when that screen went up, and when that twangy riff kicked in, there were audible gasps and cheers in the audience, and someone behind me yelled out “whoa, awesome!”

‘He Now Praises the iPad’ 

Paul Kafasis, on an unusual Android bug:

For almost three months, Google’s Android project has had a very peculiar bug open in its tracker. The bug’s name alone commands attention:

Google Now, if asked “What is a Giraffe?”, finishes the description with “he now praises the iPad”.

So weird.