In my time working there, I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine - admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad).

A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

This article provides information for both the novice and the more experienced iTunes user to help you understand how to best catalog and organize your content in iTunes, enrich it with album art, and then build playlists that reflect your own needs and interests and then transfer that information to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV to get the most enjoyment out of your music and video content.

Here are the dictation commands that have worked for me with Siri.

Git has plenty of great features. Using all of them can be difficult if you only

This is why we can't have nice things.

The father turned to Steve as he passed close by and asked, "Excuse me, sir, would you mind taking our photo?"

Steve paused for a moment as an iPhone was extended to him, realizing that they didn't seem to know who he was. With a hint of enthusiasm, he said "Sure!" as he took the iPhone into his hands.

If you think people who use Apple products are prisoners, you’re essentially accusing them of being too stupid to make their own decisions. At least Stallman explicitly calls them fools! Raymond, with his pretty-window-treatment metaphor, apparently thinks Apple users are style-obsessed fetishists, too dim to make the right purchasing decisions. Which, oddly enough, is the same stance that Microsoft has been known to take.

Typography of Apple Inc. refers to Apple Inc.’s use of typefaces in marketing, operating systems, and industrial design. Apple has used three corporate fonts throughout its history: Motter Tektura, Apple Garamond and Adobe Myriad.

According to David Pogue, Apple says they’ve rewritten the app to accommodate changes on the technological landscape. What could these changes possibly be? Could it be that Apple has a very clear and well-rendered vision of the future of video? Could it be that the Apple sees a future where source material is assembled in real time by an engine that works on the viewer side rather than the author side? Where editing is something that happens in process of distribution, and not (as it has always been) well before? Think of this new vision of video as the HTML5 to Flash. Where elements are lightweight and rendered on the fly, rather than pre-baked and packaged into chunky deliverables. I firmly believe that this is Apple’s vision of the future of video and media, and that Final Cut Pro X is a new, bold (ill-timed and hastily executed) flagship to support this vision.

While I’m dispensing simple TextExpander snippets, I might as well make available my set of Mac keyboard symbol snippets. If you ever have to write down instructions on how to use a Mac, these make it easy to describe keyboard shortcuts. They’re distinctly faster than scrolling through the Character Viewer.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.

The review system is not for leaving bug or support related questions, for example, ‘How do I add a favourite?’ or ‘Your app just crashes’. Users are much better off emailing the developer in question so they can help resolve the problem. By all means if they don’t respond, tell people in reviews. All too often I see support issues in the review system. Developers have no way whatsoever to respond to these, both sides loose out when support problems end up as 1 star reviews. Dev’s get a bad rep & have no idea how to reproduce the problem and the user still has no way to resolve the issue.

Speaking just for myself, the next Bon Jovi concert I’ll consider attending now will be one with a completely different set list of tracks that I like as much as the ones you released 20 years ago. All you have to do is start recording them, and I promise that my wife or I will purchase them. So will the rest of your fans. Until that happens, and other musicians start churning out great music by the album rather than the song, the industry’s going to be in trouble. And if it keeps blaming the system rather than itself, it will deserve its fate.

If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company--one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what's most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old

So, here’s my guess at Apple’s iPad plans for 2011:<br />
An iPad 2, fairly soon. Say, a March announcement, shipping in the first week of April. Faster, more RAM, maybe more storage, thinner and lighter, a front-facing camera.1 Running iOS 4.3.<br />
iOS 5, announced at a developer event in March, shipping in June.<br />
iPad 3, shipping in September, announced at the annual iPod event. Running iOS 5.1, same as the next-generation iPod Touch.

Although we recently took a look at some major players in the word-processing world and marveled at their fancy features, if you’re into having a minimalistic work environment and making the best of what you’ve already got, then it will interest you to know that TextEdit, OSX’s native text editing application, is a lot more powerful than you might have given it credit for.

via Rands: Like his column, it’s clear Cringley has layered a generous amount of fiction on the stories surrounding the defining moments of the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe, but it’s a delicious fiction. Who cares whether Bill Gates was arrested for reckless driving? It’s a set of compelling stories about the earliest days of our industry, complete with nerd heroes, egotistical, coke snorting jerks, and the continual expectation an amazing new product was always just about to be released.

The toilets in my apartment spontaneously overflowed, and then I got an iPhone. That’s the short version of the story, but really, the long version is funnier.

After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.

“I think that ‘Designed by Apple in California’ is the most brilliant thing to ever appear on a package,” I wrote on the application-site that was mentioned in yesterday’s post on sites that landed jobs at 37signals. SvN reader Michael P. Mills asked:

Notational Velocity ALT is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and some interface modifications. It is a work in progress. I’m not listing it as a beta, as that would imply that it was on its way to being its own product. It’s an experiment, and I hope you enjoy it!

For Mac & iPhone users to make lists and stay organized. TaskPaper is a simple to-do list that’s surprisingly adept. Unlike standard organizers, TaskPaper gets out of your way so that you can get things done. Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or iPhone OS 3.1

Transform your notes into a simple task management system. NoteTask presents your text as tasks, completed tasks, and sections.

I'm really starting to look forward to autumn, especially as those nights start to draw in. Now you may think I've gone a wee bit mad but just stop and think for a moment about all the fab opportunities it presents for indulging in a bit of comfort food!

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.

You can calibrate your iBook, PowerBook, MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro computer's lithium ion battery for best performance.

Leeks and onions are interchangeable in so many ways, yet they require very different treatment in the kitchen. All the caramelised edges and amber sweetness we revere in a cooked onion are exactly the opposite of what we want in a leek. The crisp, occasional charring of the outer edges that brings a smoky sugariness to onion soup and onion tart don't work with the onion's long green-and-white sister. Even a hint of golden brown in a leek is unwelcome and can introduce a bitter note into our cooking.

It used to take 28 seconds for my 13-inch MacBook Pro to load the folders on my desktop after I logged in. Now it takes five seconds.

It happens to all of us eventually (except for the Mac collectors). At some point, we decide that it's time to take that old Mac that we've just replaced and try to get a few bucks out of it. Some of us donate our machines to schools or other worthwhile organizations, and if we have really old equipment, we may just recycle it. In any case, there are some things you'll want to do to prepare the Mac for sale or recycling.

The best way to write, preview, and publish your blog.

Recently I was looking for a lightweight image editor. After auditioning great candidates like Acorn and Pixelmator, I realized that Apple’s own Preview offers nearly everything I need. Here’s why and how I’m using Apple’s built-in PDF file viewer.

Do you know any hidden or little-known nice feature of Mac OS X? It doesn't matter what it is—maybe just a short terminal command. Share your experiences on hidden OS X features here.

Here’s the good news: setting up a new Mac still gives me a pretty awesome feeling. The fully charged computer, the sound of the boot, the Welcome sequence with that song, the way that fades as you fill out the forms… It all still works its magic.

Ready to create your own iPhone app? This book walks you through the entire iPhone app development process, from start to finish. You'll learn how to download the tools, build the app, get it through Apple's approval process, and then market and maintain the finished product. All you need to get started is a familiarity with object-oriented programming. With "iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual", you'll get lots of illustrations, step-by-step tutorials, and real-world examples. Author and Mac guru Craig Hockenberry is your ideal guide because he's been there, having created the wildly popular Twitterific iPhone app that lets you manage your tweets and Twitter account right on your iPhone screen. Craig's goal is to make you a successful iPhone App developer, whether you're a student or an experienced programmer. He pursues this goal with clarity and a terrific sense of humor.

Opacity is an easy to use program for drawing graphics for the screen. It's great for making resolution independent images and icons for applications and the web.

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love.

The complete interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 Conference.

One hotly anticipated feature rolling out in next week's iOS 4.1 update is the new HDR (high dynamic range) option in the iPhone's built-in Camera app. The results are subtly improved and realistic looking photos, as opposed to the fake, over-processed look that is often the hallmark of HDR.

As it has in previous years, Apple has quickly followed up a major iOS release with a point-one release that promises not only to fix outstanding bugs, but also to bring new and wondrous features to the company’s mobile operating system. And this time around, those enhancements are hardly inconsequential: among other things they include a brand new social network (Apple’s second to debut in the last week), slick new camera functionality, and a handful of smaller tweaks that you might not have noticed.

Ping for music is interesting, but I, for one, would be more interested in Ping for apps. But don’t forget movies, TV shows, and podcasts, too. Why aren’t these things part of Ping? I suspect it’s simply that they’re not part of Ping yet. Start with one thing and expand from there — that’s how Apple rolls.

With iOS 4′s launch only days away, we thought it would be interesting to provide a complete walkthrough of the new operating system. iOS 4.1 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPod touch 2G, and iPod touch 3G users. It will also come standard on Apple’s newly announced 4th generation iPod touch.

Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today’s freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. All elements are hand-crafted in Apple Keynote, and organized in nested groups for easier manipulation and customization. The templates can be used in Keynote 09 and 08 and are designed by Amir Khella.

This is what iTunes looked like before the update and directly after (no changes made to the interface after 10 was installed.)

Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. The app combines directions generated by a routing service (in this case, the Google Maps API) with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, and Yoko Ono, among others.

Please either add the ability to retain fonts (and all their settings) when importing Keynote, Pages, and Numbers documents from computer to iPad, or else please create a simple font management tool for the iPad that allows us to import a reasonable subset of our fonts to the device.

From Apple’s point of view, iPhone OS and web technologies share equal footing. When you visit their developer site, the Safari Dev Center is prominently displayed. The iPhone gets all the press, but when you click on Safari Dev Center, there’s a ton of great information that explains how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on an iPhone.

Add an event in just two quick taps. See how full your week or day is at a glance. It works with the built-in iPhone calendar but it’s faster.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 8 is the leading photo-editing software for Mac, combining power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos. Make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in creative ways, and easily manage all your photos. Works great with iPhoto!

Disc Cover is a slick and intuitive Mac OS X software for creating CD/DVD labels, cover art and more. A variety of professionally made designs give you a quick start. This program imports data and images from iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, iDVD and many other sources. You can easily experiment with styles and graphic tools. Disc Cover will serve to bring you more and more design ideas.

Last month I compiled an overview of why software designers were turning to Apple's presentation software, Keynote, to design application interfaces. Several of you asked for more so... here's additional reasons to design in Keynote and lots of tips for getting the most out of it.

Recently, an increasing number of designers (myself included) are turning to Apple's presentation making software, Keynote, to design and prototype software applications. Here's a few reasons why and some tips learned along the way.

Once you use Apple’s Keynote for wireframing, you’ll roundhouse kick your other wireframe tools in the face.

AppleScript is a powerful scripting language that comes built-in to OS X. The principal use for AppleScript is the automation of tasks that are normally repetitious and time consuming. For instance, as a freelancer, I hate creating invoices every week for my various clients. To solve this problem I wrote an AppleScript that reads the hours that I log into iCal, creates an invoice in Microsoft Excel based on those hours, and emails the invoices to my clients. All with the click of a button!

TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.

Turn Apple’s Mail into a powerful email organization system

Mail Act-On fills in crucial gaps in Mail’s feature set, making it a must-have plug-in for anyone who deals with copious emails.

The less people are required to learn programming in order to be creative with computers, the more creative work you get. http://j.mp/csBNoP
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/19291759796

If there's one thing we never tire of, it's exploiting hidden features within an operating system. Today, we take a look at the Mac's Option key (also known as Alt), and all the hidden goodness that comes with it.

All the iOS icons required: "Let’s say you’re working on an icon for an iOS app. The app is universal, so it should run on all iPhones (and iPod touches), and on the iPad. As a designer, you’re used to drawing icons at various sizes; this is a big part of what “icon design” is (as opposed to other types of illustration)."

"Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be."

This cluttered, ad-heavy, paginated article is exactly why we need Safari Reader, Readability, Instapaper et al: http://j.mp/bmKhDE

Apple has made some puzzling decisions over the last few years that leave one wondering if they really care about typography as much as they did in the 1980s when the Mac launched the desktop publishing revolution. As recently as 2005, Steve Jobs made typography a central theme of his commencement address to Stanford grads, but his actions as the almighty head of Apple haven’t followed suit.

Apple has a typography desk. It is not exactly crowded with developers vying for every square centimetre, but it really exists. Have you ever heard of it? Could you tell me who runs it? Can you point to any publicly available resources about it?

A handy list of available Safari extensions to tide you over until Apple opens their gallery.

So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.

Creating a beautiful display and patting yourself on the back for having good typography is disingenuous, I think. It’s a little like saying a high-definition television set makes for better television shows; an absurd claim at best.

RT @viticci Apple Getting Ready to Launch Free MobileMe? [Screenshot] http://bit.ly/bccAd2

John Gruber's Mac and iPhone setup.

Reference material for beginning iPhone OS development.

"These inspectors (for Keynote and Microsoft Word on the Mac) are difficult to use because they show all possible editing controls at once, disabling those which don’t apply to whatever is selected. It’s not easy to find which options apply to what you’re editing at the time, and the density of controls requires the pixel-precision of a mouse pointer and considerable screen space to display.

On the iPad, any globally-positioned inspectors should nonetheless be contextual in terms of what editing UI they show. Don’t overload the user with irrelevant options; hide anything that doesn’t apply. [...] The guideline is simple, and it’s good advice even for the desktop:

*Inspectors should present context-relevant UI.
*Hide controls which don’t apply to the selection or focus.

The concept of context is key to iPad software design."

Lovely article on definite content vs. formless content and the potential of Apple's new device. "The iPad changes the experience formula. It brings the excellent text readability of the iPhone/Kindle to a larger canvas. It combines the intimacy and comfort of reading on those devices with a canvas both large enough and versatile enough to allow for well considered layouts."

"app.itize.us is a painstakingly curated presentation of the best produced and designed iPhone applications that are available for download via the App Store."

"Type-themed & type-inspired iPhone & desktop wallpapers for typenuts. Completely free; no strings attached."