Kicking Bear writes about Apple, software design, and the app economy, including the Mac Pro and the shift in how people use technology.
Commenters point to it as describing a shift in how people value cheap apps, one that tech people need to be aware of.
My blog and podcast feeds go around these few main interests of mine: software, art, design, music and Apple.
Podcasts:
Varieties, science, design.
* This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
* Radiolab. http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/
* Planet Money. http://www.npr.org/planetmoney
* Stuff You Should Know. http://www.howstuffworks.com/
* The Infinite Monkey Cage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w
* The Weekly Briefly (Shawn Blanc). http://feedpress.me/weeklybriefly
* Actuality (from Quartz). http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/actuality-marketplace-and-quartz
* Anticast (for Portuguese speakers out there - the best Brazilian podcast I know). http://www.brainstorm9.com.br/anticast/
* 99% Invisible. http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/
Technology, programming, Apple, etc.
* Debug. http://www.imore.com/debug/
* Mac Power Users. http://www.relay.fm/mpu
* Accidental Tech Podcast. http://atp.fm/
* Overtired. http://www.esn.fm/overtired/
* The Vergecast. http://www.theverge.com/verge/verge_archives/show?mode=EntryGroup&slug=the-vergecast
* What's Tech (also from The Verge, fun show). http://www.theverge.com/whatstech
* Pragmatic. http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic
* Iterate. http://www.imore.com/iterate
* The Changelog. http://5by5.tv/changelog
* Build Podcast (each post is actually a screencast about some technology). http://build-podcast.com/
* The Talk Show With John Gruber. http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow
*…
True. I see people everyday on the train, using their mobile devices to fritter away time. They're consumers of technology, not producers.
However, the ongoing democratization of technology(1) will make it easier to make. Or at least for them to share something. Or at least for non-technical people to do the stuff that they want. My brother-in-law had a PC for years. He got a MacBook and suddenly he was making DVDs, slideshows, editing video. Was it just the technology or was it the fact that Apple makes it easy to do things most people would like to do be able to do with their computers (the iLife software)?
Why do you think YouTube became so successful? They took a really hard problem (how to allow people to upload and share a video and made it easy).
"Over the span of one week two million people downloaded [Tap Tap Revenge] to their iPhone or iPod Touch devices.
Something has changed. It has changed for good. Has it changed for the better? I’m not yet sure – but I am sure there’s no going back."
http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67
(1) This essay by one of the coders behind Tap Tap Revenge that was posted yesterday on HN (but kinda got buried) goes more into the democratization of technology, wherein the people don't care about big software, they want Pop Software, they want to do cool stuff with their mobile devices.
I think you should read this: http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67
It's a shift that we tech people need to be aware of. People are getting far more than 99c of value out of goofy little fun or even one-time-use apps. How much value is there in something that you can show to your kid, your partner, your friend, your potential love interest and make them laugh! I know much of it's not particularly appealing from a computer science / software engineering standpoint. But from a human standpoint, this is fascinating and wonderful.
There's room for (somewhat) sophisticated productivity apps and the like on phones, but there is also a big, big market for stuff that's just fun! Unless human nature changes in 6-12 months (either users decide they don't want fun little novelty apps or developers decide they don't want to make the money from selling them) I think the App Store is rather unlikely to become "unused".
> I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro
Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:
"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with."
http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349