Staircase
That is one beautiful staircase.
“While ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed so easily compromised, so easily just squished.”
Lately, when I’ve been needing inspiration, I’ve watched this.
Kevin Fox on the huge changes Apple might unveil at WWDC
Nice run down of suggestions for what might be coming out at next week’s WWDC.
I think I’ll hold back on guessing too much into what iCloud, iOS 5, and Lion will involve, but I’m damn excited about the possibilities.
We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.
- Jonathan Ive
Sitting across the table from Steve [Jobs] was Lee Clow, past and current leader of Apple’s agency. Lee crumpled up 4-5 pieces of paper and tossed one to Steve. “This is a good ad,” said Lee, as Steve easily caught it.
Then, all at once, Lee tossed the remaining pile of crumpled balls of paper to Steve and he caught none of them. “That’s a bad ad,” said Lee.
Simplicity
(via marco)
MobileMe Mail Beta, a Visual Walkthrough
When MobileMe launched two years ago we saw a major improvement from Apple’s original service “.Mac.” MobileMe came with the use of the cloud and “push” technology and a brand new set of desktop-class web applications (or Me.com). Me.com allowed anyone to access their email, contacts,…
Looking beautiful.
Just released some new icons (pixel-perfect rather than vector) over on the GoSquared blog, Liquidicity. Enjoy!
Apple Get It
There’s an Apple Store under the Louvre in Paris. People go to the world famous museum of art to admire masterpieces. On their way out, they pass a couple of stores, but one shines brighter than all else, much like the Mona Lisa in the Salle des Etats. The Apple Store.
People see the Apple logo and know what’s inside. They know it’ll be just like the store they went in last month in London, or New York, or Munich. They know there will be benches of beautiful, easy to use computers. People know they can wander in and use a computer without being pestered by a salesperson. People know they can sign in to their Facebook and chat to their friends about what they’ve just seen in the Louvre.
People know they can see an Apple logo, and feel at home.
I don’t think there is any other brand in the world that has it so damn spot on.
Apple get people. Not geeks. Real, normal people.
After today.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the next generation of children will never need to learn how to use a mouse and cursor.
“Apple, at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
iTunes in the Cloud
So the rumours are circulating once again that iTunes may be making its way into the cloud.
I believe the recent purchase of Lala, by Apple was purely a talent acquisition - I doubt that much, if any, of Lala’s technology will directly be used within a cloud based iTunes service.
The rumours are suggesting, though, that iTunes will copy your entire music collection to the “cloud” with the next update and allow you to listen to it from anywhere in the world on an iPhone or iTunes connected device. I reckon that’s only partially likely. I thought about this concept a few years ago while I was still in school - I owned a Mac and a PC and wished there was a better way to keep my two music libraries in sync.
It wouldn’t make sense for every iTunes user to upload their entire music collection to the cloud with the new update. Instead. Apart from likely taking 10s of GBs of bandwidth and countless days for the user to complete, it would make far more sense for Apple to keep just one version of every song on their servers. If a song already exists on Apple’s servers, other users can just play their own instance of that one file. Having thousands, if not millions of copies of each song on their servers would be complete idiocy.
And seeing as a large fraction of the content in everyone’s music libraries is already for sale in the iTunes Store, for most people, especially after a few months into the existence of the service, uploading of music would become a nonissue.
It seems Apple’s business is gradually moving into the cloud, and with the impending release of a new version of iLife I wouldn’t be surprised to see iPhoto and the rest moving their content into the cloud.
Photo syncing between the iPhone and Mac (iTunes) seems an afterthought at best - using an app that was originally designed for Music organisation to sort and sync photos for your iPhone in a pane that only exists when the device is physically plugged in doesn’t make much sense.
With the impending release of another product line on top of the Mac and iPhone (iSlate / iTablet / iPad / iRocketShip), keeping your original files on your Mac’s hard drive seems to be becoming ever less effective. Mainly because the Mac is growing less central to our lives. What’s with us all the time? iPhone. What’s going to be with us while we’re out, on the train, or at the office? iSlate. What’s going to be at home to return to? Mac. Everything, though, will be connected to the web and always have access to our media and most important files when we need them from the Cloud.
I wouldn’t be too shocked if Mobile Me this year becomes a free (or considerably cheaper) service with far tighter integration with the iLife suite and replaces our hard drive as the central place to store all our Photos, Music, and Videos. Perhaps it’s too early to presume, but I have a feeling that’s what Apple’s intending to do very soon. And the iSlate announcement would coincide with this shift very nicely.
On the other hand I could just be talking out of my ass and our entire life in digital media will never make it’s way into Apple’s controlling hands.
