The Panic Status Board by Cabel, Steve and Neven. WebKit-powered via AJAX and various APIs, displayed full-screen in Chrome running on a Samsung professional display. Fantastic.
Even if Firefox, IE, and Opera halted development today and added no new features, Apple and others on the WebKit team would be working their butts off to make the web richer — because they want it for themselves.
— Neven Mrgan, The WebKit monopoly. (via WebKitBits)
Big news overnight is the launch of Square, a mobile app supporting multiple devices that enables anyone to take credit card transactions without the hassle of merchant accounts or complicated fee structures. It’s the brainchild of Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey and with the likes of Buzz Andersen involved, it’s going to be huge. Impeccable website design by Bobby Andersen.
As pointed out in the notes by Max Wheeler and Lachlan Hardy, part of the solution is a physical card reader mechanism that sends magnetic data from a credit card to a supported device through its audio input jack, generating the power to do so from the swiping motion. Clever.
SongParts
A new venture from You Look Nice Today: buy just the best parts of songs for a fraction of the US$0.99 pricetag. Gold. And taking submissions now. (via Adam Lisagor)
I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all?
— Y Combinator’s Paul Graham eloquently explains the dichotomy between the manager’s and the maker’s schedules. We mostly have the ringers on our phones turned off for this reason — that frequent din is a subconscious disruption to designers and developers alike; handling client communications on our own terms helps us focus on the work for more extended periods. (via John Gruber)
Cook is Spock: low-key, cerebral, methodical. He’s the Apollonian counterpart to Kirk, the Dionysian hothead. Kirk is impulsive—but nobody would deny that he, not Spock, should be captain of the ship.
— Newsweek’s Dan Lyons draws a Trek analogy for the relationship between Apple’s COO Tim Cook and erstwhile CEO Steve Jobs. (via John Gruber)
You need to prepare for the huge amount of time it’s going to take after you launch to make your app succeed. Of course you need to believe it’s going to kick ass, but make sure you’ve got a plan for making that happen. It might take several years of work to really make your web app a success, so be prepared.
— Ryan Carson, Launch a Business, not a Side Project. (via David Kaneda)
“Subprime” by Beeple. The lo-fi art direction is fantastic.
I am thinking of a system where potentially successful apps are identified in a way that is independent of sales volume and recommendations.
— My colleague Karl von Randow, author of Mobile Fotos and other apps, suggests a possible approach to identifying iPhone apps that are on the verge of hitting the big time, and promoting them alongside Apple’s top app lists. The current app store model is largely a closed loop, with top listed apps benefitting from their own celebrity, and new apps relying on massive groundswell — via networks like Twitter — to gain traction. I like the idea of this, and the potential for more revenue to developers (and Apple) is win-win.
