Linked List: July 30, 2015

Thursday, 30 July 2015

Designers Tackle George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words 

John Brownlee, writing for Fast Company:

Have you ever wondered how famed Mac designer Susan Kare might go about designing a pair of pixel art tits, or how ornery ad legend Milton Glaser might handle a design brief that simply read “cocksucker?” Now you can find out, thanks to a new booster pack for the popular party game Cards Against Humanity, featuring original designs by Glaser, Kare, Debbie Milman, Paula Scher, Erik Spiekermann, and 25 more world famous designers.

Ordered.

An Apple Scale? 

Abdel Ibrahim makes the case for Apple to make a “smart scale”:

Over the past two years, we’ve seen Apple talk about Health over and over again. The conversation started with the Health app on iPhone and then got amplified with the introduction of the Apple Watch. Both of these products do a great job of capturing information. The only problem is that I have to rely on third-party hardware to tell me what that information means. If Apple is all about providing an ecosystem of great hardware, software, and services, then making a scale that can give me an output of all sorts of body-related information seems like a logical move.

My first thought when I read this was, Meh, who cares? But my second thought was that maybe something like this would be the modern-day equivalent of products like Wi-Fi base stations. If you think about it, Airport base stations are a weird product for Apple — small potatoes. But sometimes it makes sense for Apple to make small potato products that will help make Apple’s flagship products “just work”.

That said, I don’t think Apple would actually make a scale — that’s what HealthKit is for.

Windows 10 Solitaire Requires a Subscription to Remove Ads 

Andy Chalk, PC Gamer:

Windows 10 — which is out now, by the way — comes, as it used to in the pre-Win8 days, with Solitaire preinstalled. The Microsoft Solitaire Collection, in fact, which bundles the classic Klondike with other familiar variants like Freecell and Spider Solitaire, tracks stats and logs achievements, and will even have leaderboards at some point. It also has ads.

You can make the ads go away, but, as you may have guessed, it’ll cost you, and not just once: The Microsoft Solitaire Collection Premium Edition is effectively a subscription service that goes for $1.50 a month, or $10 for a year. The Premium version of the game does away with ads, and also offers more coins for completing “Daily Challenges,” and a boost when you play TriPeaks or Pyramid.

Classy. Real classy.

Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997 

This exchange from a Q&A session Steve Jobs held at WWDC 1997 is a classic. You’ve probably seen it before. But it’s one of those clips that never gets old, and is always worth revisiting. Jobs’s whole response is gold, and, in hindsight, he lays out that the sort of thinking that has guided Apple in the 18 years since. Consider this bit:

“Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because at least some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes, we’ll fix them! I think what we need to do is support that team.”

The way to build a great anything — a product, a company, a book, a blog, an app, a service, a movie, anything — is not to obsess over not making mistakes. That leads to paralysis. Try to avoid mistakes, sure. But recognize that you’ll inevitably make some, and create a culture and work ethic where mistakes get identified and fixed.

Update: Elon Musk: “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

John Paczkowski: Apple Will Debut New Apple TV in September 

John Paczkowski, writing for BuzzFeed:

Sources familiar with Apple’s plans tell BuzzFeed News that the company intends to announce its next-generation Apple TV in September, at the same event at which it typically unveils its new iPhones. The device itself is pretty much as we described it to you in March, sources say, but “more polished” after some additional tweaks. Expect a refreshed and slimmer chassis and new innards; Apple’s A8 system on chip; a new remote that sources say has been “drastically improved” by a touch-pad input; an increase in on-board storage; and an improved operating system that will support Siri voice control. Crucially, the new Apple TV will debut alongside a long-awaited App Store and the software development kit developers need to populate it.

But, Paczkowski reports, it will not appear alongside Apple’s purported subscription TV content service:

While that service is most certainly in the offing, sources tell BuzzFeed News that Apple does not currently plan to announce it alongside the new Apple TV. “Late this year — maybe, but more likely next year,” said one, seconding a June report by Recode.

One of the theories bandied about when WWDC came and went without any Apple TV announcements — no new hardware, no SDK — was that Apple didn’t want to announce the new Apple TV until the subscription TV service was ready, too. According to Paczkowski, though, that’s exactly what they’re going to do in September. My guess: Apple held it back for September to have something significantly “new” to announce alongside the new iPhones. Last year, that was Apple Watch; this year, it’s Apple TV.

Apple Rents First Office Space in Frisco 

Cory Weinberg, writing for the San Francisco Business Times:

Apple Inc. reached an agreement to rent about 76,000 square feet of office space in the South of Market neighborhood’s 235 Second St., several real estate sources in San Francisco and Silicon Valley said.

The potential sublease is a modest amount of space for a company with the world’s largest market capitalization ($705 billion) that is constructing a 2.8 million-square-foot “Spaceship” campus in Cupertino. But this would signify Apple’s first push into San Francisco — piling onto the herd of Silicon Valley companies that have wanted a taste of the city.

I lost a nice hat in this building back in 2006, when CNet was a company that mattered.