Hivelogic is a website about efficiency, technology, development, and design. Established in 2000 by Dan Benjamin.
Episode 2 of The Conversation, my live talk show, is now available in podcast format for those of you who missed it. Entitled Don’t Twiddle the Knobs, it features special guests including Dave Nanian, Adam Keys, Christina Warren, Mike Davidson, and Merlin Mann.
We discuss Flash, HTML5, and the future of the web, Gowalla, the newsvine acquisition, technology and kids, comments on the web and losing control, and creating an identity on the internet.
Join me for The Conversation, streamed to you live on Thursday 4 February, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST.
I have a bunch of great guests lined up, and an improved embedded chat client for your convenience.
See you then.
My sponsor this week is MacSlaps, designer vinyl decals that utilize the backlit apple, allowing Mac owners to instantly customize their computer. There are a ton of designs, like Mario, the Ruby on Rails tracks, Pac Man, and my current favorite, Chuck Taylors. Because your Mac should be as unique as you are.
It’s been 15 years since Watterson stopped producing the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, and 20 years since he granted an interview, making this short interview even that much more special. Watterson:
It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.
Still my favorite strip ever, perhaps even more now that my little boy seems to be turning into Calvin.
Mike Davidson offers some excellent advice in a recent article regarding Jason Calacanis’ iPad Twitter exposition:
If you want to be influential, lead by doing, not by talking, and certainly not by duping. If what you create is really good, other people will talk about it for you.
The premiere episode of The Pipeline, my new interview show, features an in-depth talk with my friend and mentor Jeffrey Zeldman, founder of Happy Cog, A List Apart, An Event Apart, and a new project, A Book Apart, revealed for the first time on this show.
Please enjoy!
My main man Jason Seifer has a new post with a nice roundup of Chrome extensions for web developers.
Apple’s subtle mention that the iPad features a CPU of their own making, the A4, was actually the most exciting part of the whole announcement. It’s pretty important.
Of course it makes sense why Apple’s not making a big deal about it if you understand what Apple’s real goal is. This chip is so important to Apple because it gives them greater control of the user experience … from the inside out, while allowing them to reach their goals — and more importantly — control their own destiny, by decreasing their dependency on outside, external companies. If you’ve played poker, you know this is something you might not want to make too big a deal of.
Gruber sums up the importance of the new CPU in his iPad article:
Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world […] They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.
This is important, and even if they’re not making a big thing out of it, is a very big deal for Apple. And as much as you’d expect them to brag about it, they’re not. For example, the A4 is mentioned on the iPad’s design page, halfway down, “The A4 chip inside iPad was custom-designed by Apple engineers to be extremely powerful yet extremely power efficient.” It’s mentioned again on the tech specs page it is described as a “high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip”.
They’re not bragging about the A4 for the same reason that Disney doesn’t talk about how their attractions’ animatronic actors work: it detracts from the experience and clouds the message which is, in a nutshell, “let us worry about the experience, just enjoy it.”
The more Apple can control the technology, the more they can control the experience. And when it comes to consumer products, this controlled experience is why Apple is king.
Update: Siracusa and a few others predicted an Apple CPU would power the iPad, but I think its real-life performance is surprising everybody.
This is just a start. There are hundreds of articles in the archive.
Copyright © 2010 Secret Space Agency. Published using ExpressionEngine on Slicehost.
Subscribe via RSS
