At the 1997 Macworld Expo (when I was 9 years old) Jobs announced Apple’s plan to partner with Microsoft to ‘get Apple healthy.’ Here is an excerpt:

If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m...

I think you’ve misunderstood the meaning of “fuck that shit.”

When I was 3 it meant, “Fuck that shit, I can’t wait to get chocolate all over my face.”

When I was 13 it meant, “Fuck that shit, I’m not going to bed, I’m staying up to watch the WWF pay-per-view.”

When I was 23 it meant, “Fuck that shit, I’m not wasting my time with imbeciles so I’m getting a new job.”

And when I have kids, it will mean, “Fuck that shit, e-mail can wait; so, which one of you gremlins wants ice-cream?”

“Fuck that shit” is a way of resetting your perspective. Imagine you could be doing anything right now, absolutely anything, then with measured steps quickly calculate how you can make that happen while constantly weighing up the pros and cons. At first, it’s overwhelming; but over time it becomes natural, it becomes the only way you think about everything.

Yesterday, I read about Any.DO’s to-do list app that somehow reached 100,000 users in it’s first 24 hours on the Apple App Store. You can read about it here. Naturally, I tried to download the app, and this is what I found:

AnyDo — also a to-do list app — by an Indonesian company called OxidizePixel has the same name as the very popular Any.DO. It also has a very similar UI to the distinctly designed Clear, also a to-do list app.

What’s going on here? This is misleading and unfair. I’m surprised apple aren’t tighter on this sort of deceptiveness.

I think Google+ is an effort that does not deserve the engineering minds at Google. This is mostly a personal bias. I see Google as solving legitimately difficult technological problems, not doing stupid things like cloning Facebook. Google, in my opinion, lost sight of what was important when they went down this rabbit hole.

SPENCER TIPPING on why he left Google

Google has embarked on a journey, they have committed to an idea they believe is right for them. And like Mr. Tipping, when the time comes they too will hand in their notice.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

As a designer primarily involved in creating experiences that exist in the form of pixels, this topic has forever interested me.

I’ve never been able to come up with a precise answer, I have however accumulated an interesting list of assumptions which could have informed the decisions of computer manufactures to opt for a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio, or PAR.

When computers first gained popularity as a consumer device, they were designed to be used with standard television sets. These sets varied in size and specification. It seems logical that computer manufactures wanted to focus on the computer first, before the display. People already had television sets in their houses, so why not use those? A typically smart move, by smart tech companies trying to establish an MVP as soon as possible.

Fast forward a few years and computers were selling like hot cakes, people were using them and people...

Two years ago, during the summer of 2010, two close friends and I set off on an expedition across the American railroads. Three weeks in and we were as far from the west coast as we were from the east… we had reached the belly of the beast.

Granby, Colorado. I remember it vividly, the rolling green hills, the silence, the freshness of the air –something one takes for granted in Ireland– and of course, the hospitality; it was the closest thing to home I’d felt in weeks.

We spent one night in Granby. Here we were in a remote town, with nothing better to do other than to experience it. Everything we saw was new. Like most things new, we had seen this stuff before, but never in this arrangement. There’s something about the virginity of a new place or experience that I’ve always found enthralling. It’s instantly nostalgic, instantly poignant.

Maybe this is what they call Wanderlust...

Okay, so each time I type Zuckerberg on OS X I’m prompted to correct it. The suggested spelling is ‘Rubbernecker’, a word I never understood, so I decided to look it up. Wikipedia describes it as:

Rubbernecking describes the act of gawking at something of interest. It is often used to refer to drivers trying to view the carnage resulting from a traffic accident.

Poignant.

Here, I’ve made an artistic interpretation of Mark ‘Rubbernecker’ Zuckerberg as he reacts to the carnage caused by $FB’s dismal flotation.

I find it strange that the ‘Apple Fanboy’ term is still in use, particularly by those one would imagine should know better. It’s as if there is a psychological repression preventing purveyors of the term to recognize the pleasure of Apple products as possibly more than a fetish.

That’s all.

In 1960, Tom Monaghan and his brother, James, purchased DomiNick’s, a small pizza store in Ypsilanti, Michigan near Eastern Michigan University. The deal was secured by a US$75 down payment and the brothers borrowed $900 to pay for the store. Eight months later, James traded his half of the business to Tom for a used Volkswagen Beetle. As sole owner of the company, Monaghan renamed the business Domino’s Pizza, Inc. in 1965. In 1967, the first Domino’s Pizza franchise store opened in Ypsilanti. The company logo was originally planned to add a new dot with the addition of every new store, but this idea quickly faded as Domino’s experienced rapid growth. The three dots represent the stores that were open at the time (1969). By 1978, the franchise opened its 200th store.

There’s a film in there.

Dustin just highlighted an important part of Facebook’s IPO registration statement. I’ve changed one word.

We believe that mobile usage of Instagram is critical to maintaining user growth and engagement over the long term, and we are actively seeking to grow mobile usage, although such usage does not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue.

Instagram is fun and the acquisition is brilliant for them. Yet I feel Facebook are compounding rather than solving the problem of revenue here.