Linked List: May 27, 2014

Tuesday, 27 May 2014

Brent Simmons:

As much as I love writing iOS apps — and I do — the Mac is my natural home. I think of myself as a Mac developer first. The last Mac app I wrote was NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 in early 2011. It’s been over three years. Definitely time to come home.

Vesper for Mac is entirely a UI job. The data layer and API and syncing code already builds for Macintosh. Now, of course, UI is no small thing, not at all — but the challenge isn’t UI plus other things. It’s just that.

Google Unveils Self-Driving Vehicles ★

“Really, they’re prototype vehicles,” says Chris Urmson, director of Google’s team.

You don’t say.

Joanna Stern: ‘Surface Pro 3: A Tablet That Desperately Wants to Be a Laptop’ ★

Joanna Stern, reviewing the Surface Pro 3 for the WSJ:

In fact, at its news conference, the head of the Surface team directly said that this device would meet my expectations of the laptop of the future. Sometimes real life can be stranger than dreams.

Yes, Microsoft is confident that — with a larger, higher-resolution 12-inch HD screen, new keyboard, improved kickstand and $799 starting price — its new Surface Pro 3 tablet can replace not my iPad, but my beloved 13-inch MacBook Air.

So I tested that claim. For the last week, my laptop has lived under my bed as I’ve spent my waking life with the Pro 3. On its third attempt, Microsoft has leapt forward in bringing the tablet and laptop together — and bringing the laptop into the future. But the Pro 3 also suffers from the Surface curse: You still make considerable compromises for getting everything in one package.

Debug 37: Simmons, Wiskus, Gruber, and Vesper Sync ★

Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and I were guests on the latest episode of Rene Ritchie and Guy English’s Debug podcast, talking about — what else? — Vesper 2.0 and Vesper Sync. If you want the long answer to the question, “Why did you roll your own sync service?”, this is the podcast for you.

Love that photo Rene took to illustrate the post.

Vesper 2.0 and Vesper Sync ★

Yours truly, writing at the Vesper blog:

Today we released Vesper 2.0, which introduces our new sync system, which we’re calling Vesper Sync.

We’ve tried to make it as easy and simple as possible to use. Here’s how it works. First, you create a Vesper Sync account using an email address and a password. Then, your Vesper data — the text of your notes, your image attachments, your tags, everything — syncs to our cloud service. Sign in using the same account on another device, and your Vesper data will appear on that device.

That’s it.

There is no charge. No subscription. You just create an account using your email address as your identity and it works.

It’s the weirdest thing, to spend eight months of intensive development, design, and testing to build something that (we hope) simply works almost invisibly. I’m really proud of this release.

Apple to Stream Next Week’s WWDC Keynote Live ★

Apple:

Watch streaming video from this special event and learn more about our exciting announcements.

I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

Massimo Vignelli Dies at 83 ★

Michael Bierut:

Finally, from Massimo I learned never to give up. He was able to bring enthusiasm, joy and intensity to the smallest design challenge. Even after fifty years, he could delight in designing something like a business card as if he had never done one before.

It was Massimo who taught me one of the simplest things in the world: that if you do good work, you get more good work to do, and conversely bad work brings more bad work. It sounds simple, but it’s remarkable, in a lifetime of pragmatics and compromises, how easy it is to forget: the only way to do good work is simply to do good work. Massimo did good work.

Jesper’s WWDC 2014 Predictions ★

Jesper:

OS X 10.10 introduced, and never once referred to as “OS ten ten ten”. Maybe as OS X Napa.

As an aside, please stop arguing that Apple “can’t” use 10.10 as a version number because that’d be the same thing as 10.1. Version numbers are not decimals — the periods simply act as separators between major and minor fields. They’re more like IP addresses, and I don’t see anyone arguing that 10.10.10.10 is “equivalent” to 1.1.1.1. Plus, it’s not like we haven’t been here before.

iOS-to-OS X AirDrop.

Some of the items on Jesper’s list sound more like wishes than predictions, but this one I really hope happens. It’s frustrating when you have something in front of you on your Mac that you want to send to your iPhone (or vice versa) and you have to do something silly like iMessage yourself to transfer it.

Update: A few good predictions from Rich Siegel.