David Lidsky's Blog, page 3027
March 20, 2015
This Is What Happened When Neil Young Tried To Make Peace With Steve Jobs
Young has been a vocal critic of digital music his whole career—and that didn't sit well with Jobs.
In January, the musician Neil Young revealed a device called the PonoPlayer, a portable high-fidelity music player that looks like a Toblerone. His obsession with sound quality stretches back over two decades, when he lost part of his hearing while recording the 1991 album Weld. In Young's worldview, analog recorded music is unequivocally the best, and the shift from records to CDs to compressed audio files has led to inferior sound fidelity. And he certainly wasn't shy when it came to speaking his mind about the iPod and iTunes.
Disney CEO Bob Iger Knew Steve Jobs's Cancer Was Back Before Pixar Deal
Just 30 minutes before the announcement of Pixar's sale to Disney for $7.4 billion, Steve Jobs told Bob Iger his cancer was back.
"Bob, there's something really important I've got to tell you."
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Why Steve Jobs's Legendary Stanford Commencement Ceremony Almost Never Happened
Stay hungry, stay foolish—and try to always put your keys in the same place.
Although he was a master at public speaking, Steve Jobs rarely gave speeches. "If you look closely at how he spent his time, you'll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attended," says Tim Cook. "He wanted to be home for dinner."
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When Steve Jobs Returned To Apple, Jony Ive Thought His Job Was Toast
But of course, the Apple boss loved him. "You know Jony," said Jobs. "He's kind of a cherub."
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 as part of the acquisition of NeXT, he had one goal: to scorch the earth and rebuild Apple into the gilded computing powerhouse it once was. Of course, that meant cutting countless stale products from Apple's product lineup, including the eMate and the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. And it meant cutting employees, too.
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March 19, 2015
Safari Private Browsing History Is Not Forgotten After All
Visited URLs from Safari private browsing sessions are stored in an easily viewable file on your computer.
Safari users, take note: Your private browsing history is actually quite easy to retrieve. A list of the URLs you have visited during private browsing sessions are stored in a database file, viewable by anyone using your computer who wants to take the time to access it, according to MacIssues. Snoopers, you should stop reading here.
Amazon Expands "Addictive" One-Hour Delivery to Baltimore and Miami
Skipping metropolitan nexuses Boston and D.C., Amazon expands one-hour delivery from NYC down the East Coast.
After a much-anticipated debut of its one-hour Prime Now bike delivery in New York City in February, Amazon will begin offering its one-hour delivery option in Baltimore, Maryland and Miami, Florida, The Verge reports. For an $8 fee, Amazon will ship anything in stock to your door in under an hour. If the NYC launch was any indication, Prime members in Baltimore and Miami should be on their guard lest they get addicted to the convenience of rapid delivery.
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Ex-Apple Designer Rethinks The Bible For A Mobile World
Kory Westerhold and his cofounder, Yahoo design director Aaron Martin, give Co.Design an exclusive look at their beautiful new Bible app.
Former Apple designer Kory Westerhold still remembers the messages that company executives preached from their Cupertino, California, pulpit—variations on "love your neighbor as yourself," reframed in Silicon Valley's terms.
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4 Ways To Design Better Login Screens
Nothing's more frustrating than a badly designed login screen. Here are some lessons from a login screen done right.
The login form doesn't immediately come to mind as something that needs better design standards. Once you think about it, though, it's obvious: How many times has a login screen coughed up a nondescript error, then refused to tell you if you got your password or your username wrong? Or how many times have you entered your login details, hit enter, then sat there for a minute, only to discover that you had to click the "submit" button instead?
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How Y Combinator Startups Manufacture FOMO
In the run-up to the all-important Demo Day, entrepreneurs do whatever it takes to create momentum while staying cool.
In late February, Tom Harari sat down to do something he hadn't done for a few months: plot his company's revenue on a simple line graph. Harari's laundry-on-demand startup, Cleanly, had been in growth mode, rapidly expanding its laundry delivery service from two New York City neighborhoods in early January to cover much of Manhattan by the end of February. The number of orders had jumped by an average of 25% per week. He looked at the chart and saw an arrow skyrocketing to the top right quadrant. Even if everything fell apart before Cleanly completed Y Combinator's winter 2015 batch, a program organized by the ultracompetitive Silicon Valley startup factory that I've been writing about for the past few months, even if growth slowed considerably, Harari and his cofounders, Itay Forer and Chen Atlas, would have six or seven times the number of weekly orders they'd started with. His growth plan was working. In fact, in the parlance of Y Combinator, Cleanly had entered the rarified territory known as hypergrowth. "Oh, shit," Harari recalls thinking. "It's really taking off."
Here's What Automakers Think About Apple Entering The Car Market
Apple's car project is still a mind-bending rumor, but car industry execs are already weighing in.
On a Thursday morning in early November 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan fielded a question that, in hindsight, he probably wishes he had answered differently. Speaking at a Churchill Club breakfast, Colligan responded to a query from New York Times reporter John Markoff about whether Apple would indeed try to enter the smartphone market with the then-rumored iPhone. The Treo maker said: "We've learned and struggled for a few years here, figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
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