hisaac

Leca’s language is user interface design, and he communicates through software that seems inherently more comprehensible than what you’ve used before. Sparrow has caught on with more than 100,000 daily users because it’s simple, inspired, and most of all, practical. Sparrow for iPhone is no different, an inspired piece of software that’s near perfect.

This is the story of Sparrow.

Sparrow is one of my favorite pieces of software on the Mac (and now iPhone). A well written profile of the developer and the story behind the software.

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market. With Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone gaining market share, the Waterloo, Ontario, company finds itself in a battle for relevancy. The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end.

An excellent article outlining the rise and fall of one of RIM, makers of the venerable - and once highly sought after - BlackBerry.

Holy shit…

Neil Young being interviewed on stage at the All Things D Dive Into Media conference:

On the distribution side, Young isn’t particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists, he’s more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality:

“It doesn’t affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. […] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around. […] That’s the radio. If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

He gets it.

This is My Next has a great rundown of reactions to Steve Jobs’ death from various business and political leaders. I think this sums it up best:

…he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. -President Barack Obama

Name me another super nerd and business leader who would warrant a response from the President of the United States upon his death. There is no other.

It’s amazing to me; it was said that he continued working as CEO until he was physically unable, but I never realized it was quite literally true - he left just a little over one month ago.

I never knew Steve, but I will surely miss him. He quite literally changed the world.

I was recently in Vancouver Canada for a week, considering moving there, when my friend Ariel Hyatt said, “You have to meet this amazing guy Tom Williams. He got hired by Apple when he was only 14. I think the company had to, like, legally adopt him to do it. He’s a go-getter like you. Plus his wife, Jessie is an awesome country artist.”

A nice little story about a 14 year old Canadian being hired by Apple on almost no real basis.

As usual, Ars Technica is wonderful:

One by one, Android vendors have failed by selling tablets the same size as the iPad, for the same or higher price, but without an app store that could rival Apple’s.

“I don’t think this is really an iPad competitor,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg tells Ars. “This isn’t an iPad-killer. The Kindle Fire can be very successful without killing anything.”

Amazon gets it, why does no one else?

Wow… Truly an end of an era. Jobs helped usher Apple into a new league, it’s hard to believe someone else will now be at the helm.

Joe - a 60-year-old hospital cafeteria employee - uses a computer for the very first time in his life. It’s fascinating to see just how different his expectations of how the computer should work are from how it actually does. We take for granted how hard it can be to use a computer without any prior experience.

Apple’s laying the smack down on Lodsys! Good luck beating Apple’s legal team.

It’s nice to see Apple sticking up for developers, especially when it’s affecting mainly indie devs.