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Solid gold. Jason Santa Maria recalls his journey into design in his interview on The Great Discontent: From the beginning, whenever I was in a position to tutor or mentor someone, I was always up for it. I want to leave a mark in a way that helps other people to be better and if […]

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James Duncan Davidson: The light did its thing a few times. For a little bit, it looked like the sunset was going to get lost in clouds rolling in from the west. But then we got a reprieve and sunset kicked in in a wonderful way. We all picked a bit of a different thing […]

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Tent.io is a decentralized Twitter-esque social networking "protocol". Tent.is is for those of us that would like to use Tent.io but don’t feel like managing our own server. I have no idea where this is going to go, but I signed up anyway to poke around. This is an interesting time in the social web.

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More exploring is sorely needed.

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Simplenote for iOS, an app I use every single day, is now iPhone 5 ready. Grab it!

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Alexandar Safonov’s bull shark photos are awesome. All of his work is.

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Matt Van Hoven: Bottom line, flat structures create confusion about where power lies, because eventually someone has to be in charge – whether because a client demands it or a job won’t get done unless someone takes charge. Van Hoven leaves off an important point; it really depends on the type of start-up whether or […]

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Scott McNulty flies across country using the new Passbook app in iOS 6: It seems to me that Passbook is a clever idea, but honestly having my eTicket with the QR code emailed to me (or just using the one displayed in the United app) would have been simpler. Once you get the ticket into […]

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This was eluded to in Kara Swisher’s aforelinked piece but it wasn’t spelled out quite as well as this, by Nicolas Carlson at Business Insider: Mayer’s rule: If a new product can’t be shipped in six months, and if it doesn’t have a realistic shot of reaching 100 million users or generate $100 million toward […]

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Tapbots is on App.net. If Tweetbot worked with ADN it’d, quite simply, change everything for ADN. /via Steve Streza on Twitter (which says something, I think).

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Tim Cook: We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up. […]

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Ben Brooks: I haven’t noticed the lack of simultaneous data, as I figured I would rarely notice it. I have yet to not have LTE coverage in the areas I have roamed around in. The family plan thing was a piece of cake. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.

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Tom Mylan for Gilt Taste: In the game of food dork one-upsmanship, the rarer you order your steak, the more of a real gastronome you are—it means you like your meat good and a little dangerous, like it was meant to be. That is why I like to order my steak "still mooing with the […]

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Giancarlo Ditrapano in an interview with Casey Neistat (aforementioned) regarding advertising on his very popular YouTube channel: In April, YouTube began allowing all of its the users the option of earning ad revenue from their uploads, a seemingly ideal situation for a guy like Neistat, who self-finances the vast majority of his films and has […]

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If you use Instagram and you updated to iOS 6 or bought an iPhone 5; you may now update. Seeing the first few comments in addition to the likes on a photo in Instagram is actually a palpable upgrade in experience. Addendum: Something I didn’t notice, because I literally have never used this feature, is […]

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People make budgets for everything. Vacations, new cars, gas, a new home, gym memberships, etc. Some even budget in a morning coffee from their favorite barista everyday before work. Why is it, then, that some still have an issue with paying for an album on iTunes? Most applications on the App Store are only a […]

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Marissa Mayer held a company-wide meeting today at Yahoo. The purpose of the meeting was stated, in a memo to the company, as being "radically transparent" about the plans to turn Yahoo around. It turns out much of the meeting was rather nebulous and more broad than specific or transparent. Perhaps that is because Yahoo […]

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From the backyard. I’m looking forward to shooting a lot more this fall with the iPhone 5.

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Chris Dixon has a good post about the shift from sales-driven software efforts to product-driven software efforts. Thus enterprise software went from being about sales (one-to-one) to being about marketing (one-to-many). Marketing requires crafting a compelling message, figuring out the right channels and then optimizing. But the most effective marketing isa compelling product that can […]

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Kontra: Mapping is indeed one of the hardest of mobile services, involving physical terrestrial and aerial surveying, data acquisition, correction, tile making and layer upon layer of contextual info married to underlying data, all optimized to serve often under trying network conditions. Unfortunately, like dialect recognition or speech synthesis (think Siri), mapping is one of […]

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You’ll have to forgive me for wanting to quote Brandice’s entire post about the iPhone 5 since I totally agree with everything she says but I’ll do my best to take out a few key snippets: I read comments online about how it’s so light it almost feels too insubstantial or breakable. I think it […]

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Chad Williams has a great list of features in iOS 6 that are new that you may not have heard about: The auto-dim feature got significantly improved in iOS 6. The best improvement is brightness adjustment in the lock screen. Before, in a dark room, I would be blasted with the iPad or iPhone’s default […]

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Glenn Fleishman for TidBITS on how to turn on Messages for your phone number on your Mac: The Messages app in Mountain Lion can now send and receive iMessages using an iPhone’s number as the identifier with a combination of iOS 6 and the recent OS X 10.8.2 update. Good tip. /via James Duncan Davidson.

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Dustin Curtis: The results are pretty amazing – the iPhone takes worse photos but it certainly stacks up against a $4,000 professional camera. And, although the photos from the iPhone are significantly noisier, it has fantastic automatic metering. The best camera is the one you have with you.

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Speaking of Duncan… James Duncan Davidson on Maps in iOS 6: I might be in the minority here given the raised pitchforks in many quarters, but I like the new maps in iOS 6. Yes, a lot of people are running into holes in the data set. Others are finding that the queries that they […]

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Jean-Louis Gasse on Apple Maps: The ridicule that Apple has suffered following the introduction of the Maps application in iOS 6 is largely self-inflicted. The demo was flawless, 2D and 3D maps, turn-by-turn navigation, spectacular flyovers…but not a word from the stage about the app’s limitations, no self-deprecating wink, no admission that iOS Maps is an […]

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In September 2011 I jotted down a few guesses about what an iPhone 5 could be. What we ended up with was the iPhone 4s being announced. Well, I thought I’d look back at this list and see where my thoughts stack up now that we actually have the iPhone 5. How did I do? […]

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Today I’m receiving an iPhone 5 that is Verizon-ready. I’ll be upgrading from an iPhone 4 on AT&T. Below are my live notes, as they happen, during this experience. It should be fun! Notes, in order. (the page will refresh automatically when I publish new notes) [liveblog]

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I’ve been planning on figuring out a simple way to show the latest photo from my mobile photos category on the sidebar of my site for a while. Today I did a quick search for a plugin that would simply add a widget that I could drag/drop into place to do exactly that. I came […]

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Craig Mod, for Contents Issue No. 4: I received an email from the company sometime in March.We’re a publisher with four million fans on Facebook. We’d like to talk with you. Fascinatingly well-written story about a publisher that started with a Facebook fan page (rather than a website of their own) and quickly grew to […]

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Renie Richie’s iOS 6 review on iMore.com is more than thorough.

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Overall a good season in our small garden. We’re trying to keep it small so that it doesn’t get to be too much to maintain. Next year I plan on the garden yielding about double what it did this year without making it any larger than it is.

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I blame my mother for turning Eliza and I onto pre-dinner Manhattans.

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Dan Frakes and Serenity Caldwell at Macworld give a run-through of iOS 6 installation and what this latest release means for each device. Some features won’t be available to all iOS 6 devices. Naturally. Here is one example, though, that I lament. Flyover and turn-by-turn navigation features of the new Maps app are available on […]

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In case you don’t follow me on Twitter; (really, how can you live with yourself?) earlier today I tweeted a few notes about iOS 6 on my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. I’ve taken those tweets and put them below. iOS 6 note: The new Maps application is pretty fast even on the iPhone 4. […]

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Devour, a site I visit just about every day on my iPad, has an app to match.

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Speaking of Devour… Here is a video by filmaker Casey Neistat for The New York Times to help explain NYC’s recent ban on insanely large buckets of soda. /via Devour. PS. To Devour editor Larry Angel (if you’re reading this) – I’d love it if I didn’t have to hunt down the original URLs for […]

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Three cheers for Justin Williams’s collection of excellent Tweetbot filters to help silence check-ins, hashtag nonsense, old-style retweets, and even anything dealing with Internet Explorer. Some are fun, most are downright vital. You’ll need Tweetbot (you are using Tweetbot on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, right?) /via David Chartier.

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A quick way to handle loading retina images on retina-capable devices which degrades rather gracefully from easily one of the biggest contributors to the betterment of the Internet, Shaun Inman: One line of JavaScript and a few mod_rewrite rules and we have no fuss Automatic Conditional Retina Images. /via Chris Glass.

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Shep McAllister over on Lifehacker: But you could try voicing a contrary opinion in a meeting, or occasionally saying no when someone asks you for a favor. I go out of my way to be a nice guy but I’ve also never been accused of being quiet or of not voicing my opinion. Being nice […]

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Horace Dediu on the iPhone’s value to the market: Therefore, how to tell whether a product is over-serving a market is one of the most important and frequently asked questions I get asked. […] If you have to add features and drop prices at the same time then it’s likely that the market does not […]

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Like and comment on Instagram.

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This happened outside our home-pub this past June. Well, first the boy mosquito gets all dressed up and takes a bouquet of flowers to meet the girl mosquito. She, too, has gotten all dolled up. She wears pearls and lipstick. The happy couple flies away to a nice location to feed off someone who has […]

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I haven’t yet had time to implement using Dropbox as a photo management app yet (maybe next week) but I wanted to file this away for when I do; a way to use Hazel to save Photo Stream photos to Dropbox. Or, via AppleScript if you prefer. /via Stephen Hackett.

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What is Facebook’s mission? Mark Zuckerberg, in the company’s founder letter that was included in their S-1 filing with the SEC prior to going public a few weeks ago. There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society […]

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This is intriguing. Stephen Hacket took a que from Frederico Viticci on ditching iPhoto/Aperture and just using directories stored on Dropbox as a way to manage photos. After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over […]

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Interesting thoughts from Horace Dediu. Amazon will sell as many Kindles as they make, but the number they will make will not be the most they could make. His headline just says "Kindles" but should probably say "Kindle Fires". I think Amazon will sell a lot of Kindles and Kindle Paperwhites.

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