It often starts with a spark — a fledgling curiosity that develops into a more dedicated interest and then slowly grows into an all-consuming passion for solving unique problems and forging long-lasting connections in an entirely new language.
For some app developers, this spark was ignited in school by an encouraging teacher or parent, while others came to coding later in life, driven by an innate desire to pull things apart and understand how they work.
Ahead of National STEAM Day on November 8, seven inspiring creators — from college roommates who bonded over their love of sneakers to a pair of engineers looking to help fellow moms find quality childcare — are sharing their unique journeys that led them to entrepreneurship through app development and the App Store. Below, they offer insights for those looking to take the leap into coding and underline the endless opportunities available for aspiring app developers at all stages of life.
“I don’t know anything about business,” Ive demurs, but he abhors the current fascination with disruption. “I’m not interested in breaking things,” he says. “We have made a virtue out of destroying everything of value,” he says. “It’s associated with being successful and selling a company for money. But it’s too easy—in three weeks we could break everything.”
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Ive is quick to look ahead. “Success is the enemy of curiosity,” he says. And for Ive, curiosity has taken on an almost moral or religious quality. “I am terrified and disgusted when people are absolutely without curiosity,” he says. “It’s at the root of so much social dysfunction and conflict…. Part of why I get so furious when people dismiss creativity is that [when] it’s an activity practiced in its most noble and collaborative form, it means a bunch of people who come together in an empathic and selfless way. What I have come to realize is that the process of creating with large groups of people is really hard and is also unbelievably powerful.”
Given the necessity of complex skills for survival throughout most of our history, it’s not surprising that we enjoy the feeling of doing practical, difficult tasks. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy,” Matthew Crawford writes in his 2009 ode to skilled handiwork, “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” There’s scientific support for these satisfactions as well. Self-determination theory, a well-cited psychological framework for understanding human motivation, identifies a feeling of “competence” as one of the three critical ingredients for generating high-quality motivation and engagement.
Returning to the context of our protesting Apple employees, we find our instinct for skilled effort once again impeded by modern obstacles. To be sure, knowledge work does often require high levels of education and skill, but in recent years we’ve increasingly drowned the application of such talents in a deluge of distraction. We can blame this, in part, on the rise of low-friction digital communication tools like e-mail and chat. Office collaboration now takes place largely through a frenzy of back-and-forth, ad-hoc messaging, punctuated by meetings.The satisfactions of skilled labor are unavoidably diluted when you can only dedicate partial attention to your efforts. Our ancestors were adapted to do hard things well. The modern office, by contrast, encourages a fragmented mediocrity.
Above all, what I am most surprised by in MacOS Ventura is that the maturity of this operating system has not stopped rethinking even basic elements like window management and printing. Neither improvement has gotten in my way or made me feel uncertain about how to use MacOS, either. That is a hard balance to strike and I think these are both successful examples of making big changes that do not break workflows in their quest for improvement.
Like pretty much every single filesystem-related weirdness we’ve been subject to throughout the history of macOS, it may look like an edge case to the Finder team at Apple, but it is a breaking issue for anyone using their otherwise perfectly good Mac for a perfectly normal thing that just works on every other operating system.
It’s a speed demon of a streaming box that ticks off all the crucial boxes if you want to enjoy the richest possible home theater experience. And the price is now more reasonable. It’s still more expensive than the budget Roku and Fire TV streaming sticks of the world, but that added cost frees you from ads plastered on the homescreen and comes with some reassurance that Apple isn’t as interested in tracking your viewing habits at every waking moment like some rivals. If you count yourself as an A/V nerd, I wouldn’t hesitate to spend the extra 20 bucks for the 128GB model that includes ethernet and Thread support. It will only help the Apple TV 4K last longer in your media cabinet.
Was the Apple TV 4K crying out for a hardware refresh? Definitely not. The outgoing version is an excellent performer that will continue to satisfy the needs of many customers for a long time yet. But the 2022 model adds some great hardware improvements that, along with the price cut, make it a no-brainer for anyone looking to get their first Apple TV or upgrade an aging Apple TV HD model.
All three apps help musicians create music in the studio or live onstage with their MacBook. They received improvements to stability and bug fixes, along with updates to unique features in each tool.
AVIF, or AV1 Image File Format, is a next-generation image format designed to produce high-quality images for the web with small file sizes.
Apple added support for AVIF files in Safari on macOS Ventura, and Pixelmator Pro can now open and edit these images.
It was already easy to track your time with Timery, but its developer, Joe Hribar, has gone to great lengths to make managing timers and monitoring them easier than ever. Timery is also a stellar example of the power of adapting an app to every Apple platform and implementing the latest technologies on each.
Subscription insights will help you see email clutter before it overloads your inbox, and a new Summary Timer helps take control over when your favorite subscriptions arrive in inboxes.
Perhaps my favorite new feature of the DuckDuckGo desktop browser is something the company calls “Duck Player.” It opens YouTube videos in a nice large distraction-free view, and while it still uses the YouTube player, most of the tracking and identification code is blocked. It strips out all the targeted ad code and cookies. You can still get ads, they just won’t be targeted at you based on your web use, but rather simply ads that paid to be on videos that match certain criteria. You know, the way advertising used to be on the web–ads pay to be on certain content, not to reach targeted individuals.
The move to thinking about “products” instead of “projects” should be welcomed when it comes to developer tooling. At a time when hiring and retaining talent—technical or otherwise—is one of the biggest concerns for organizations, paying attention to the needs of internal customers can only be a good thing.
Air New Zealand has become the latest airline to ban AirTags, though is seemingly not enforcing this restriction. The airline is interpreting the general restriction on lithium batteries in checked bags to also apply to AirTags. The airline isn’t technically wrong based on existing guidance, but this isn’t how the industry is overwhelmingly interpreting the current rules.
If you’ve been reading some parts of the internet lately, you might’ve seen a brouhaha over the quote-unquote “fact” that Pantone has “copyrighted colors.” They’re forcing Adobe to pay them oodles of money for color swatches, and Adobe said “no you.” Now users have to pay $15 a month just to use COLORS? Madame is outraged!
Well, it’s more complicated than that. The reality is that the world of color is difficult, even for those of us that see and feel it every day. Many working designers don’t know all the fiendish intricacies surrounding the tools of their trade. Your real questions are “how does this affect me” and “what can I do about it?” Or maybe you’re used to picking colors from all those swatch books in Photoshop and wondered why it’s such a big deal that they went away.
Staff across divisions, the sources said, have been told the company won't be onboarding new hires for a number of months, possibly through the end of the company's fiscal year, which is September 2023.
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Officially, Apple has said it's taking a cautious approach to onboarding new recruits.
The unionized Towson Apple Store in Maryland today filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board after its employees were excluded from some benefits that Apple recently introduced for non-union workers, reports Bloomberg.
Glasgow staff had said a priority would be to push for a pay rise from their £12 an hour income should union recognition be achieved.
In response, Apple said it is one of the highest paying retailers in Scotland.
Chinese authorities have announced a seven-day coronavirus lockdown in the area around the world’s largest iPhone factory, stoking concern that production will be severely curtailed ahead of the Christmas period.
I've learnt programming when I was young because this is something that has an obvious answer: either something works, or it doesn't, and no amount of arguing can make change black to white or vice-versa. This is also why I enjoyed doing mathematics.
(Of course, I was naive. And I was wrong.)
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Thanks for reading.