Some notes:
- Elvis Costello produced the first Specials album.
- Chrissie Hynde was one of the female vocalists on The Specials’ first two albums.
- John Bradbury sold that insane 14” x 10” snare drum to The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst. It’s the same snare that can be heard all through Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography.
- I just realised that, in Rat Race (2001), the whole bit with the Barbie Museum is funny because Jon Lovitz’s character is Jewish.
Two thumbs and required to join (and use) Foursquare for a Social Computing course he’s taking at university?
This guy.
And, of course, our participation mark for the course is based solely on how often we use each of these social networks.
I’m not looking forward to this.
Osfoora, I want to like you. I want you to fill the Tweetie 2-shaped hole on my iPhone. I really do.
However, until you get the little things like the spelling of Instapaper right, it’ll be Twitterrific for me. I mean, come on. You wrote the code to make your app integrate with Instapaper, but you didn’t take the time to see which letters are in its name? The fuck is that about?
What you can see here is that, for this theme, the geolocation data has actually been put on a pin on a map …
This part of the WWDC keynote didn’t get enough attention. At first, I thought it was just an iPhone 4 feature. Then I tried it on my 3GS. Sure enough, after I recorded a video the little location indicator appeared up on the right-hand side of the status bar.
In iOS 4, videos have geolocation data.
It’s not Exif metadata, but still. I can see on a map the exact stretch of beach where I took that great video of me and my friends throwing the frisbee around on our weekend trip, and we can find our way back there again some time. Or whatever. Cue Scott Forstall crazy eyes.
Woody Allen — The Vodka Ad, from “Woody Allen: Standup Comic”
I can only assume it’s related, however tangentially.
Oh man, this looks cool. I wrote a big thing about how I organise my tabs and windows now and how Tab Candy looks like it fixes the problems I have, but I managed to cut it way down:
Tab Candy is Exposé and Spaces for your web browser. If you like Exposé and Spaces in Mac OS X (which I most certainly do), you’ll like Tab Candy.
The one downside to Tab Candy? Firefox. Not a fan.
I wonder how much of this could be done with a Safari extension. And by “I wonder how much of this could be done with,” I mean “I’d love this right now as.”
Remember that kids’ slapping game where you have to slap the other kid’s hand? There’s an electronic version of it.
For what it’s worth, I seem to remember that, at my school, there was a slightly more violent version of Slaps called Knuckles in which, instead of slapping the other person’s hands in a left/right motion, you hit the other person’s top knuckles with your middle knuckles in an up/down motion.
Oh, and when you lost a round, you had to clench your fist, put your hand down on a desk (so your first two sets of knuckles were on the desk), and the winner would flick a coin (50c, ideally) at your knuckles as hard as they could.
So, school. That was fun.
(Does anyone else remember that game, or was it a sadistic invention of the ratbags at my school?)
The Bad Plus — “Heart of Glass”
Far out — haven’t listened to The Bad Plus in aaaages. I just pulled out an old Dave King interview in a 2004 Modern Drummer (yeah, I subscribed to Modern Drummer back in the day) from right around the time that I started getting serious about figuring out this jazz stuff, and in there is a list of Dave King’s favourite albums. By now, six years later, it turns out that I own most of the albums on the list. It’s nice how things work themselves out like that.
Anyway, The Bad Plus. Right outta my set-up-my-drums-just-like-my-idols period (see this from last week).
Impressive. It looks like they’re having issues with logging in through Twitter at the moment, but the cover and some of the default sections look pretty good.
If Flipboard does this right, they could be onto something — Wired was certainly successful, but there hasn’t been an app crowned as the magazine-reading app for the iPad. If the demo video is any indication, Flipboard is looking good so far.
(Also, in the demo, Adam types using his thumbs on an iPad that’s in portrait mode. I feel like a total spaz when I do that. My hands are big enough (ladies), but I feel like a total dork. I may as well be saying “hurp durp durp” while I do it, it feels that lame.)
The lady from xkcdexplainedexplained has started writing her own webcomic! It’s called Little Hipsters, and I like it so far. Something something holding a mirror up to hipster culture.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) — End Credits
So many things to enjoy here, from the tribute to the song to the fact that Owen Wilson is there with the boom mic. Because of that, to me, it’s more like a curtain call from a stage show than a regular end credits scene.
An Interview w/ Bill Murray →
Christ, I really enjoyed this.
One bit that I found really funny, on Garfield (2004):
Murray: I had these agents at the time, and I said, “What do they give you to do one of these things?” And they said, “Oh, they give you $50,000.” So I said, “Okay, well, I don’t even leave the fuckin’ driveway for that kind of money.”
Fierman: And it’s not like you’re helping out an indie director by playing Garfield.
Murray: Exactly. He’s in 3,000 newspapers every day; he’s not hurtin’.
Read it. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.
Selling Mac Apps
Hey you guys, can I ask you a question? I promise, this isn’t a bit.
Is it just me, or is it really hard to sell Mac apps? It seems as though, in order to really do a proper job selling Macintosh software, you have to set up your own online store, and then you have to write the code in your app and server-side to deal with licenses and serial numbers and stuff. After that, you (optionally) write code to prevent your application from being pirated. Once you’ve done all of that, then you can work on your software, the thing you’re actually selling.
That’s the process that thousands of Mac developers have to go through. Think about how much we’re collectively re-inventing the wheel here — thousands of people are solving the same problem over and over, yet each is starting from scratch to do the whole thing themselves. It’s as if every architect felt the need to design an entry-exit device vis-à-vis a house and/or home, and each one of them took the time to invent the door. Y’know who’s kinda got this shit down pat by now? The door people. Why do software developers keep doing this to themselves? How is this not a colossal waste of time?
These guys, they’ve already figured out.
If I had to pick the single biggest thing that Apple has done with the iPhone, one of my frontrunners would have to be that they’ve made the process of writing, selling and distributing software super-easy. As an iOS developer, you don’t have to worry about implementing your own secure credit card payment system or anti-piracy measures to stop people stealing your app. That stuff’s all taken care of by Apple, giving you more time to work on that insanely great app.
Maybe there’s an opportunity for something like that in the Mac space — a product that, out-of-the-box, gives developers some space in an online store and a framework that lets them quickly and easily implement the licensing and serial number logic with just a couple of delegate methods. Think Sparkle meets Shopify.
I think this could be a thing. Do you?
I don’t even know where to begin with this picture.
From Zardoz (1974), starring Sean Connery. Inexplicable trailer here.
Kathryn Calder — Castor and Pollux
wiki:
[Calder] is the niece of fellow The New Pornographers member Carl Newman. Calder explained in a 2007 interview: “My mom was adopted as a baby and about ten years ago she found her birth family and Carl is in her birth family. At that time I was a teenager and playing in a band and didn’t really know I had that family … so that’s how I met Carl.”
You know, that old story.
Related: when I went to buy this song from iTunes, the whole album had zero popularity. I buy this song and check the album a couple of hours later — its popularity bar goes from zero to full. So, the question is,
Scott Jackson: Trailblazer and Trendsetter, OR
Kathryn Calder: so unknown in Australia that one person buying one of her songs on iTunes makes a massive impact on her sales stats?
Either way, I like the song. Because I’m a wuss who’s a sucker for wussy indie girl-rock.
