My friends over at Ghostly International released a lovely free iPhone app a while back that's worth a look. Discovery is a music streaming tool that lets you listen to full songs from the Ghostly International and Spectral Sound catalogs and generate playlists by entering mood, desired tempo, and digital/organic preference.
I'm looking forward to hearing some "Laid Back" myself.
As you no doubt know by now, earlier this month, 25-year old Sun Danyong, an employee of Foxconn -- the company that manufactures the iPhone for Apple -- was apparently driven to commit suicide as he was subjected "unbearable interrogation techniques" by his employer's internal security group. Danyong was under investigation for losing a prototype device of a forthcoming iPhone.
As this incident unfolded, we were naturally following it, preparing to write a lengthy post for BlogLESS detailing the dense web of ethically unattractive business practices that combined to manufacture this grossly tragic event.
Given the magnitude of the tragedy, though, pontificating about business ethics, Apple or Foxconn seemed, if not misplaced, then at least unsavory. What luck for us all then, that Fake Steve Jobs delivered one of his best posts ever, finding an appropriate path to the heart of the problem without degenerating too far into the preachiness or grandstanding that a more sober response threatened.
(For those four of you who are currently reading BlogLESS and have never heard of FSJ -- first of all, god bless you. Secondly, you're in for a treat. FSJ runs a Steve Jobs parody blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs -- tagline: "I will restore your sense of childlike wonder. There is nothing you can do to stop me." -- which, under normal auspices, can be very funny.)
Back to the matter at hand, though. I'll now quote the July 21 entry from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:
Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them. We can't make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did...
This time it's getting to me. It really is. For a long time I couldn't stop crying. Since then I've just been sitting in my office with the blinds shut. I can't stop thinking about it. It's why I wasn't on the earnings call today. I'm just numb. I'm asking myself, Is this really worth it? Is this what I want to do with my life? Can I live with myself?
A while back, we pitched an idea for a logo that was an optical illusion—the kind that looks like one thing or another depending on how you look at it. Things didn’t pan out, but due to our rigorous research for the project, we’ve developed quite a collection of good optical illusions.
I find such images appealing; lots of people do. I think the brain likes to be teased a bit. It’s fun.
For today’s post, I’m going to share some images of designs that make use of perspective-based illusions. These are interesting because they are spatial: a viewer stands in a particular spot and visual cues are exploited to form a 2D image.
As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.
This means that some 1 million people – within two days – took advantage of Apple's swell offer, which was, and I quote: "Twice as fast. Half the price."
Now, way back when Nick was Not Keen on Kindle, he diagnosed what he thought was a developing trend in the release strategies of the lifestyle technology market. Namely, that the companies that manufacture these devices – the Kindle, the Nintendo Gameboy DS, and, I'm going to add, the iPhone – "lead with a subpar, feature-crippled design only to follow it with the design they should of come up with in the first place..."
I'm asking now: Can anybody out there give me any reason that the first-generation iPhone should ever have been mass produced? I mean, aside from the obvious fact that a handful or two million Apple fanboys and gadget-lifestyle types are going to buy whatever Apple comes out with? (Not that this isn't a good reason, from Apple's perspective.)
The first-gen iPhone was not only plagued by activation problems – which would by itself seem to indicate a premature release, at least in some sense – it has been alleged that "something like one in ten of the initial iPhones bought was defective," (and if you don't strictly believe that number, you can still get the point by browsing the comments on that last post).
So here's my question: Short of the first-gen iPhone being defective by design, what changed so much this year as to allow Apple to come up with such a substantially better phone, so much cheaper?
And here's what I'm concerned is the answer: Nothing.
