Thoughts and links from Tim Mussche
My head feels like a jukebox. At random times, a word or a sound that I hear triggers a song that starts playing in my head. Moreover, most days there's a song in my head when I wake up. Sometimes I know what triggered it, sometimes it's random. I decided to start sharing these songs. The time is now.
This morning the vibration pattern of an incoming notification on my wife's smartwatch reminded me of the intro of this song. It's been in my head since.
"Women can be superheroes on roller skates!" --Serenity Caldwell
In 2012, I read about the first Úll conference on Daring Fireball. It sounded like a great place to be. The following years I always said to myself that I should go, but I never got around to it. And I always regretted it afterwards, when i saw the tweets and photos of people who went.
So this year, as soon as the 2015 edition was (pre-)announced, I bought a ticket. I tried to convince a few colleagues to come along, but they all chose to go to NSConference. Them being developers, their choice made sense, since NSConf is a bit more technical than Úll. In hindsight I'm very glad that I went without 'real life' friends. It 'forced' me to introduce myself to people i didn't know a lot more and make new friends. Being an introvert, it's a challenge I got to get over, but it was very rewarding!
What makes Úll so great? The venue this year was amazing: a very nice hotel with a magnificent lake view. The talks and special features were funny, eye opening, motivating and insightful. The weather was, well, Irish, but so were the whiskey and Guinness! And of course, there was Gruber bot. But the main aspect that makes Úll fantastic are the people. Everyone I talked to was very warm and open and had interesting things to tell. Rands said it best in his after dinner video: "These are my people!".
Group photo by Ben Rice McCarthy
A lot of great photos were made at Úll this year. I'll try to collect them in this post. If you know of a collection not yet in this list, please let me know!
Thanks to Tommy Weir for his help with this post's title!
iOS shows percentages related to battery usage in 2 different places. You can show (if enabled in settings) the percentage of battery power left in the upper right corner, next to the battery icon, something that has been in iOS since the early years.
Since iOS 8, you can also see which apps are causing the largest battery drain during the last 24 hours or 7 days.
I had never thought about it, but this is causing some confusion, as observed by Matt Henderson. In the images above, Tweetbot is not responsible for draining 21 percentage points of the 64 percentage points my battery is already. Instead, Tweetbot caused 21% of the total battery drainage over the last 24 hours. I suppose this number is directly calculated by dividing the battery drainage caused by Tweetbot in the last 24 hours (in some physical unit I don't know because I don't know or remember enough about electricity) by the total amount of battery drainage (in the same unit) in the last 24 hours. I suspect the same goes for the percentages in the "Last 7 Days" overview.
These two percentage numbers (21% for Tweetbot and 34% next to the battery indicator) are not directly related, but it's easy to see that one could think that. Can we come up with a better, less confusing way of showing the same information?
Tomas Verschoren suggests in a tweet to show the actual percentage points of drainage relative to the percentage number next to the battery indicator in the iOS status bar. Something like this:
Image/drawing by @tverschoren
While having the advantage of being visually much more clear, it has the disadvantage that it is related to the variable time passed since the last (full) charge. If your phone is (almost) fully charged, all these percentages will be tiny and won't give any useful information. Furthermore how do you calculate the 7 day overview in this way?
I believe that the percentages iOS is showing right now in the 24 hours and 7 days overviews are the right numbers to show, but maybe Apple could show them in a more intuitive / less confusing UI. Perhaps a good UI/UX expert has some interesting insights about this?
(Updated with a third example.)
One thing i like about Apple is it's attention to detail. I know it's a cliché, but sometimes those little things can be so delightful. Here are two examples i encountered this week thanks to @gruber and @inferis.
In the introduction video of the new retina iMac there is a scene where an "exploded" iMac is shown. Impressive CGI indeed, but that's not the point.
image by Matthew Palmer
As Matthew Palmer notes:
But look behind the exploded iMac. Behind the new 'TCON' there's a girl holding her father's hand. Not brought to the centre of the frame, not inflated to be the story of the video, just a consequence of this device being in their home. That's incredible storytelling.
The other example is Apple's implementation of the 'open book' emoji. Turns out, if you magnify it enough, you can read the text of the "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad.
via @stroughtonsmith, image by @bradchoate
Things like that just make my day.
UPDATE 2014-10-19 19:40
A third example just popped up on twitter. During thursday's keynote there was a demo of a video montage software. During the demo, iOS autocorrected "Utah road trip" to "It's road trip", generating lot's of laughs and snarky tweets. Apparently, in the video of the keynote that Apple posted afterwards, the segment is slightly altered.
Attention to details, in every case.
(Photo: Peter Hapak, via Daring Fireball)
As I read the news about Robin Williams this morning I decided to re-listen to the 2010 interview with him on WTF with Marc Maron on the way to work. In the interview, which Maron reposted today with an extra intro and outro, Williams talks openly about his addictions. Especially the last 10 minutes or so of the interview, where Williams shares his thoughts about suicide (it's almost a comedy bit), are very moving in light of what happened today.
As a tribute I will be re-watching One Hour Photo and Insomnia soon. Both films show his more serious/tragic side. I recommend them a lot.
Robin Williams, rest in peace man!
Being in the app-industry, I come across my share of recruiters. Not one of them has been able to provide some added value to me or the company I work for. And even worse, some of them keep calling/emailing, even after you have politely let them know that you aren't interested.
In a recent post, Marco Arment replies to a particular recruiter's email:
I responded to the Senior Recruiter with my requirements — $10 million a year (plus medical) and relocation of the company to New York — but disclosed that I am probably not qualified for this position since I do not have any experience in Agile.
Read the entire post, it's funny/painful. I agree with his conclusion:
Robert Half Technology does everything that gives tech recruiters a bad name, and everything that makes looking for a tech job so incredibly difficult when you’re young and inexperienced. They do the entire industry a great disservice. Nobody who works there should be proud of what their company does, or be under the illusion that they’re helping anyone.
I've been toying with the idea of having my own blog for some time now. Until now I had a few ideas for a first post, but nothing jumped out. That changed yesterday when I had a conversation with a few colleagues.
We started talking about Marco's most recent app, Overcast, and sharing our favorite podcasts. I learned about some new podcasts I hadn't heard about and certainly will try out. It gave me the idea of sharing my favorite podcasts as a first post on this blog. Of course i'm not the first with that idea, but I always enjoy these kinds of posts.
These are podcasts I listen to every week/episode (almost) as soon as they come out.
I don't listen to every episode of these shows, only when they have interesting (to me) guests or subjects.
Marco Arment going into details about the Overcast development.
The Nitin Ganatra Trilogy: a former Apple employee talking about the development of the first iPhone software and his other roles at Apple.
Release Notes: a weekly conversation about the business of Mac and iOS indie software development. The recent episode with Jared Sinclair of Unread fame where he talks about his past year as an indie iOS developer gives a good idea about the financials in the App Store.
Other Apple/tech shows like CMD+Space, Iterate, The New Disruptors, Pragmatic, Storming Mortal, Systematic, Unprofessional, ...
Some TV and movies podcasts: Review, The TV Show, Not Playing, The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, ...
If you enjoy these shows or have other recommendations, please let me know on twitter!
