At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
On the eighth annual World Autism Awareness Day, Apple has highlighted a small number of iOS apps designed to assist autistic individuals. These range from learning life skills to text-to-speech apps for those who have difficulty speaking.
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I haven’t yet been able to crack why some OS X users continue to have connection issues with Yosemite. In successive updates, Apple has apparently solved frequent disconnect issues for some users, but they persist.
However, in this column I walk through a mystery sent by a colleague that, in the process of working out, will provide a lot of insight for those of you troubled by the heartbreak of inconsistent conditions that ruin streaming.
Wi-fi, to me, has gone from a magical thing that just worked to a mysterious voodoo thing that I don't know how to fix.
Stop going it alone. Work with others. Instead of reproducing what someone else did, include it. Even if it's harder. We are a social species. We need to collaborate to give our lives meaning.
In 2011, a friend described to me seeing a Force Touch trackpad prototype in an Apple lab. Keep in mind when thinking about Apple roadmaps.
— Neven Mrgan (@mrgan) April 2, 2015
I wish the industry didn't believe "front-end developer" was synonymous with "junior developer".
— Laurie Voss (@seldo) April 1, 2015
Probably my favorite radar ever: rdar://11788891 pic.twitter.com/OGg89aUO8M
— Michael Jurewitz (@Jury) April 1, 2015In early 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: It didn’t say what he would be doing. So intense is Apple’s secrecy that all Lynch knew was his vague title, vice president of technology, and that he’d be working on something completely new. It was odd that Apple even offered him a job. During his eight years at Adobe, most recently as chief technology officer, he was best known as the only person dumb enough to publicly fight Steve Jobs over the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash videos. When Lynch announced his move, the reaction was immediate: They want this guy? Apple blogger John Gruber called Lynch “a bozo, a bad hire.”
Lynch had a lot to prove—and, apparently, a lot to do. When he showed up at 1 Infinite Loop on his first day, he was instructed to skip the usual new-employee orientation. His boss at the time, hardware czar Bob Mansfield, said to head straight to the design studio and get to work. He could learn about his 401(k) later.
As soon as he walked into the studio, he found out the project he’d been hired to run was already on deadline. In fact, it was behind schedule. There was a design review in two days, he was told, with the Apple brass. Lynch had better be ready.
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We need to wake up a little more to the depth and implications of the necessary move to adopt digital processes within every day life.
That’s why even as Apple brings these visions to life, it is also ensuring its identity is linked up with a series of value statements.
The groups have been sent questionnaires requesting information about agreements between the labels and Apple ahead of the planned summer launch of the company’s own music streaming service, putting it into competition with the likes of Spotify, Deezer and Google.
Such questionnaires are often triggered by a formal complaint to the commission, the EU’s top competition authority. The information gathering is the first step in a probe and does not necessarily mean Brussels will launch a formal antitrust investigation.
I think anyone would would want to be remembered as who they were, not how they left us.
The latest betas of OS X and iOS add support for a single new emoji symbol: Raised Hand with Part Between Middle and Ring Finger.
Previously:
For April Fool’s I like to remind everyone that the coding effort expended on Google pranks would have kept Google Reader alive indefinitely
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) April 1, 2015Thanks for reading.