It has been while since I got excited about new technology or hardware product. Today is the day. Adobe has introduced its digital pen together with digital ruler. I have not tried it myself so can’t say how well it works but the idea behind it and the execution on the design front looks great.

Fully biological computers are getting closer to reality. Scientists at Stanford University today announced they have created a new type of transistor, the most basic part of a computer (and almost all other modern electronics), that is made entirely using genetic material, and works inside of living bacteria. The new biological transistor is actually better than its inorganic counterpart in some ways, according to the researchers, who say their device will be able to help build fully functioning computers within the cells of living organisms — plants and animals alike — in the future.

The technology and science has been pushing the progress in last couple of years really massively. I believe we are not far a way from some major breakthrough. Something really big is behind the doors, something on scale of discovering electricity.

If I ever get tired of coding or design I will get one of these and live my life as cafe barista on the go.

Erik Spiekermann: Die Electric-Espresso-Idee from A-MOTIONS on Vimeo.

Just came across latest Jeremy’s article about fluid design.

I have to say, I wasn’t big fan of fluid designs and it all felt like to much work to me but I have changed my mind and to be honest I do understand the CSS language lot better then I used to.

The upcoming version of Getquantify 2013 is going to be fluid. It makes lot more sense to let the design adjust to whatever the screen resolution is, specially now with so many different devices on the market.

Interestingly it somehow forces me to build my code in lot more modular loose coupled way, which makes the code lot more flexible. You pretty much need to build your code as objects which need to fit into box of any size and still look good. It requires more thinking at the beginning of the project but lot less code down the line and ultimately lot cleaner workflows, lot easier to build on as the project grows.

Watch it live in here.

Can’t wait! Fingers cross all goes well.

The question “who is going to be the next Steave Jobs” was pretty common during the last year. In my mind, it is pretty clear. Elon Musk is the one who will have even bigger and more significant impact on our society and even the planet itself. He is still very young and already achieved amazing results with previous projects like Paypal but even more with his current projects around space travel and electronic cars.

He is personal hero of mine and I wish there were lot more people like him.

Enjoy!

schriftgestalten | the face of type | english subtitle from Jonas Kaminski on Vimeo.

Great article Learn Vim Progressively describing the basics of my favorite editor VIM.

I suggest you teach yourself Vim in 4 steps:

• Survive
• Feel comfortable
• Feel Better, Stronger, Faster
• Use superpowers of vim

By the end of this journey, you’ll become a vim superstar.

Simply beautiful!

Field Notes Brand: From Seed from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

Fascinating. Beautiful craftsmanship.

Wings: Making the Field Notes 2010 Fall Edition from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

Opera.com:

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser.

This is great news and I wish IE would follow as well. Wouldn’t it be great if all browsers would run on the same engine. Couldn’t they move forward faster? Webkit is open source, which is great. There are many more features the browsers could compete at. Having one engine behind all browsers would highly benefit the end users and developers as well. Good move Opera!

Looking forward to listen to the live presentation by Tim Cook on Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference tomorrow.

You can find the live stream in here.

Looking forward to watch this very interesting documentary movie about the guys from Pirate Bay.
You can see it live in here.

Cade Metz from Wired has written great article about Facebook infrastructure.

The trouble is that the Facebook infrastructure now spans four data centers in four separate parts of the world, tens of thousands of computer servers, and more software tools than you could list without taking a deep breath in the middle of it all.

These guys with super-brains have my huge admiration! This kind of stuff interests me zillion times more then any of that other jazz around web apps. like: investments, a-rounds, b-rounds, runaways, buy-outs, sell-outs etc. I was always huge fan of “do-ers” rather then “talk-ers”. (if those are even English words)

Read the full story in Wired.com

Jeff Bezos:

We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” he said. “After five years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast — up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent. We’re excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever expanding ecosystem and selection.

(via: All Things D)

I remember saying on some discussion forum few years ago that paper book business is gong to die soon and lots of people disagreed. I bet there are still lots of people who would not agree with me today. The stats are here to show the trends and they are very clear to me.

Are you still buying DVDs? If you live in Europe you probably do. I strongly advice you to stop and just use streaming services or renting over iTunes. If you are really sure there are movies you would like to watch ten times (In my case: “As good as it gets” with Jack Nickolson) you get these in digital form over iTunes, Amazon, Google or some other store. Get yourself one big hardrive and keep them there. Don’t by DVDs, they will not even be usable in few years.

For those who know me better, you are aware that I work from coffe shops almost daily. I love it. I found it pretty hard to define why I love it so much but I do. I have come across this article which summarises quite well the reasons.

Wesley Verhoeve- Fastcompany:

Fewer distractions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but working from a bustling coffee shop can be less distracting than working from a quiet office. Being surrounded by awesome team and officemates means being interrupted for water cooler chats and work questions. Being interrupted kills productivity. The coffee shop environment combines the benefit of anonymity with the dull buzz of exciting activity. Unlike working at home, with the ever-present black hole of solitude and procrastination, a coffee shop provides the opportunity of human interaction, on your terms.

Community and meeting new people. Meeting new people always provides me with new ideas, a different perspective at existing problems, or an interesting connection to a new person doing something awesome that inspires me. Today alone I met a top Skillshare teacher whose class I will now take, a sleep consultant, a publicist who offered to help with a project, and a wine consultant who recommended some bars.

Surprisingly McDonald’s is one of the first coming with the idea of nutritions QR codes and that is great news. Company like McDonald has noticed a big shift in peoples behaviour where more healthy food options are introduced into our diets daily. The trend is going towards healthy food in long run and even companies famous for producing junk food are reacting to it. Personally, I don’t eat at McDonald but I am very happy to see the nutrition QR codes on their products and hoping this will spread widely.

One of the problems of healthy diet is that the way the nutrition information is present is not very clear and you would pretty much need calculator to get the right values out of the nutrition tabels each time you eat. Let me give you an example. You buy product which is 375 grams heavy and the nutrition table represents values for one serving, which is 35 grams. So lets say you eat half of the package, now you would need to calculate the nutritions, going step by step from calories to proteins, carbs, fats…

By simply having QR code which you can easily scan and type the portion size in, would simplify the whole process of calorie counting and people would be more encourage to do so. Finding a system to automate it without requiring peoples input would made this even better.

This would bring a whole new level of understanding nutrition values of individual food to mass audience and would bring more awareness of good vs bad food, helping people to eat more healthy, stay fit, leave longer, look better.

Even if the system would not be automatic from start, lots of people would find the process of scanning their products before consuming them very simple thing to do. The phone application would tell them straight away if the portion is ok, and how much calories they are going to consume and how many are left for a day to stay on their target, whatever that might be.

There is a great video on the Verge web site about the way Google has shifted its design direction towards more consistency and new way of doing things. I would defiantly agree that there was massive shift during the last year and Google is becoming a role model for designers, specially in few of their products.

It must be very hard to achieve the consistency across so many products and despite the fact that the design language in Google is getting together it is still not fully there. There are few design directions across their product line. Even though there are trying to use unified elements, fonts, colors across their products, you can still very clearly tell that there are several teams working on the products. My personal winner is the team behind Google Now and Google Maps. These guys are really onto something and the direction they picked is the one I see going mainstream in next few years. Simplicity, clarity, visual minimalism, removed clutter.

As I have said before, it is really hard to stay consistent and even companies like Apple fails on this department a lot. Just compare their application design. MAC Mail versus Calendar. These are two completely different directions. I am actually not fan of any of them and I hope then the new design direction under Johny Ive will bring more consistency and fresh style across all of their native applications.

If you would look at the grandfather of the software companies – Microsoft, you would find their new design direction pretty consistent and solid. It pushes similar principles as some of the new Google products. Simplicity, clarity, functionality over skeumorphism. Microsoft is doing pretty good on design front even though the style their picked is not my favorite.

Looking at the biggest software players out there, it is pretty clear that the direction for the next few years is simplicity. I believe that we will see less and less of the application interface as we know it today, bringing it only in case where we find it necessary and in places where it can prevent confusion.

Katherine Bourzac for MIT Technology Review

DNA could someday store more than just the blueprints for life — it could also house vast collections of documents, music, or video in an impossibly compact format that lasts for thousands of years.

There have been some great science projects running around in MIT which brings out the question “How will the devices like phones, computers look like in the future. Turns out you will be able to store data in your own DNA which is very interesting. Perhaps you will be able to boot and run a software using DNA as storage for the files of the OS. Would you need monitor, speakers, touch pads? No, not really, you have your eyes, ears and hands already, or even better, you have your brain and that is enough.

The last thing would be to connect the dots and find out how you could send the already existing human signals from the OS to your sensors (eg ears). Lets imagine you have a MP3 song stored in your DNA and your media player can be run inside your DNA as well. Now you need a way of listening to that song. You need a way of sending this data to brain to hear it. Could we use something like a nerve system for that?

Sounds crazy, right? Yes, today it does. But what about 50 years from now?

Atari filing for bankruptcy today. The company who I remember from old days. It was the time when I was kid and could not afford it. Now its gone. The company has reached quite a few milestones during its era. You can read nice summary of its evolution in iconic logo.

There have been lots of articles about Apple and its so called problems. This time highly respected news companies are making these judgements based on thin air which is very strange.

Tim Cook is charisma-challenged. He starts to speak and credibility goes out the window. Phil Schiller has more gravitas, and Jonny Ive eclipses even him, but who’s really driving this car? Everybody knows Cook is an efficiency expert. Who’s the heart and soul of the enterprise, and where is it going?

(via: businessinsider.com)

Tim Cook is very charismatic leader of Apple. For me, personally, even more then Steve was.

This article is full of “you’ve got to”. You know what? You don’t have to. Apple doesn’t have to. Apple can do whatever they think is the best for the company. If you think “you’ve got to” then build your own company a do what you think you have to do.

Apple has the best devices on the several markets and financially is doing better then any company out there. If you think Apple is in big trouble then I have no idea what is your explanation of very successful company.

Apple might have troubles in the future, but it is not today, so just chill out.

I have just watched the video showing off the new Facebook search and it looks superb. I like it a lot.

The fact that you can use “human” language to get the results is a big move forward. You can see in the search suggestions how they really nail down all the possibilities in terms of search query representation, making sure the search actually searches what you meant by the search query.

I am not sure how this going to work in non english sites though but its a great start. I also haven’t noticed the voice to text (html5) option which could be nice for search like this and its pretty simple to implement.

Great job Facebook!

Watch the video in here.

Alex Wilhelm – The next web

The reasoning here is quite simple: if the code is open, no one can sneak new elements into it, and thus cheat the system by writing exceptions that might hide revenues, for example. You begin to wonder just how dedicated retailers are in the small European country at dodging their taxes.

Love the idea! This is the right direction for any country computer systems.

Recent article about unit testing on the Arstechnica reminded me of my thinking some time ago.

When I started to code first version of my application about two years ago I have not find the time to write the tests and over the time I learned my lesson. When you are working with languages like Ruby on Rails where big part of the application back-end code depends on external code sources (plugins, gems) you have to write tests. The reason is not that the gem will break itself. Most of the time the gems are super-tested and they do not really break but the code base involves and some of the methods become depreciate and obsolete. Updating your gems to their latest version is good practice so sooner or later the code of the gem will change and some of your code will stop working. The bigger you code base is the harder it will be to spot the changes.

Since I started the second version of my application I have decided to write tests. I am still not perfect at it and I know I need to do more. I actually think that this feeling will never change, I will always feel that I need to write more tests. Currently my application has about 500 individual tests which I run on regular bases. They include model, controller and front-end tests.

During the last year these tests helped me massively to catch problems I would probably not catch by simply testing my application by hand and these bugs would have huge impact on the application.

Note to you and myself: Write more tests!

Have you heard of agile process? Well, if the answer is no, I am going to point you to the right direction. There is a great article on Nettuts+ which describes the basics, just enough to get you excited.

I work with team spread around the globe where we have been using the agile process for software development and I really like it. You might find the agile process ideal for programming but if you are not developer yourself and just trying to manage projects, whatever they might be, I would recommend the agile process anyway. It is a way of working and it does not really matter what kind of project your work is related to.

Patkos Csaba

Everything depends on dedication and good will. If you want your team to be efficient, productive, and deliver on time, you need someone to embrace some form of Agile techniques. Scrum may or may not be ideal for you, but it is surely one of the best places to start. Find that someone on your team who is willing to help the others, or you, yourself, can take on the responsibility of introducing Scrum.

(via: Nettuts+)

Highly recommend to read the full article. I have enjoyed it massively.

Schiller – Apple

Despite the popularity of cheap smartphones, this will never be the future of Apple’s products. In fact, although Apple’s market share of smartphones is just about 20%, we own the 75% of the profit.

(via: The Next Web

Apple has never tried to dominate the market by reducing its prices but increasing the quality of their products. This is not about Steve being at Apple or not, it is about Apple being Apple.

I am not very frequent user of the Facebook but I find it interesting as tech project. I am curious where Mark is going to push it this time.

Every-time Mark is on the stage talking about his project you can always feel his passion and excitement. I truly believe he loves his work and he would do it regardless of money. It must be huge challenge to run such a project where every decision is affecting millions of people.

There is lot to learn from guys working at Facebook.

Digital Book World estimates that best-sellers now average just $8.23 per title, down more than 50 cents from just a few weeks ago. The drop is almost entirely attributable to deep discounts in e-book sales over the holidays. Amazon has free rein to move the product, whether on Kindles, iPads, or any other device under the sun.

Amazon is the company who has been in disruption mode for a while. Think about books, cloud computing, online retail. What is coming next?

Miguel Helft – tech.fortune.cnn

Outlandish ideas and effective, pragmatic management rarely go hand in hand. What’s remarkable about Page is that while he’s been pushing his engineers and executives to pursue big dreams, he has also been running a complex $38 billion business of 53,000 workers with surprising efficacy. When he took over in April 2011, Google’s once-phenomenal innovation engine was showing signs of age, and bureaucracy was beginning to take root. Page quickly reorganized the company to give top executives more responsibility and accountability and to sharpen Google’s focus on a handful of product areas. The result is a more top-down and aggressive organization. The changes have ruffled the feathers of some old-timers who miss the more freewheeling ways of Google’s first decade. But almost everyone agrees that Google is running more cohesively and faster than when Page took over. It’s a feat that has surprised many in Silicon Valley, where Page’s wonkish, diffident persona is legendary. “Larry’s substance has been so high, and his ability to run the company so impressive, that he has overcome all those things,” says Ben Horowitz, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist who often coaches first-time CEOs. “It’s fairly shocking how well he’s done.”

Larry has dones some amazing work since he took his CEO role. He cleared the product line and put focus on important stuff. We can see the results almost daily. What is even more important, in my opinion, are all the projects which he is doing back in his “kitchen”. Projects like glass, self driven cars and others which will change the world we live in today forever in very near feature.

The next quote says a lot about a different management approach he is taking compare to others…

Getting a new project started no longer requires convincing executives from across the company to get on board. And once a product ships, engineers and managers can’t jump to the next thing so easily and leave important products like Gmail in unfinished “beta” versions for years.

Michael Graham Richard

Buffett is that he thinks long-term. He’s not looking to flip assets, he wants to own them forever if possible. So that makes his very conservative about going into unpredictable industries (that’s why he almost never invests in technology companies, he can’t predict what the field will be like in 10-20 years). This tells us that Buffett feels that the long-term future of solar looks rosy, and that even though natural gas prices have been low recently, that in the long-term, solar is one of the the places to be.

(via: treehugger.com & us.sunpowercorp.com)

It does not really matter that he paid 25 billion for that, what really matters is that one of the biggest investors of all times now believes in future of solar power. That is a big thing.

Smart companies, like Apple already run their data centers on solar but big oil loby has been pushing solar, wind (and others) powers away for quite some time. Glad to see it moving forward now.

It might sound funny as we have been using internet for years now but checkout the year to year sales on amazon.com Another 40% increase was recorded for last year. The average population is only now discovering the benefits of online shopping in western countries. There is still massive space to fill in when less developed countries join the flow.

I believe that cheaper hardware devices like $200 tablets will boost the sales in the 2013 even more. If you have been waiting this long and only now starting to think about moving your sales online I would strongly recommend you to do so. It takes time to build the position in search engines, don’t wait no more, get online asap!

Read the full story in here

Mark Fischetti – Scientific American

Spiegelhalter converted reams of statistical risk tables into a simple metric: a microlife—30 minutes. If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life (top graphic). Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife. Over time bad habits accelerate your aging, and good habits slow it down (bottom graphic). “That seems to resonate with people,” Spiegelhalter says. “No one likes to get older faster.”

Checkout the great info-graphic.

More and more companies realizes the true benefits of office cloud software.

• It’s cheaper
• Available from anywhere

I believe the point why Google will eventually beat MS Office is a bit different. Microsoft software is lot more powerful but I bet there is only one percent of all users who are really using its power. 99% of all user only need simple document functionality and simple spreadsheets with charts and this is why Google Docs are just enough for the majority of office workers.

I also believe that Google docs. will at the end get most of the power features MS Office has at the moment.

I have been using Google docs. for six years now and the progress they are making is massive. What more, the software is well designed and all the new functionalities they are adding does not bring clutter and buttons overkill. It is already more user friendly then other offline apps.

I used to be a power user of MS Excel, working with all the advanced features such are macros, pivot tabels, conditional formatting etc. I have been running my own tiny business for more then two years using Google Docs. Have I ever needed the power of MS Excel? No, not really.

Yes, there will always be niche market for more advanced office suits for people who work with high volume data like accountants, analysts, statistics but its only a niche market and there is no need to pay USD 400 for office suite when you can get it cheap online.

In case you do not know, there is an offline access to your Google Docs as well, so not to worry if you travel a lot and can’t get online all the time. Never-less it will be less of an issue in the future as internet will become available 24/7 with higher speed using 4G mobile networks.

Another inspiring interview with great enterpreneur and the top guy in building amazing communities Tony Hsieh from Zappos.

The interview is part of Kevin’s side project called Foundation which consists of interview series with guys like Tim Ferris, Elon Musk or Ryan Carson.

Enjoy the interview! I did.

I found this interview very inspiring. Highly recommend to read the full article.

Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”

(via: Lev Grossman – Time)

Matt Brian – The next web

General Motors will become the first car maker to integrate Apple’s Siri personal assistant into its vehicles, announcing today that it will include functionality for the software in its new Chevrolet Spark (1LT, 2LT) and Sonic LTZ and RS models, available early next year.

BMW, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Audi have also confirmed they will integrate Siri with their vehicle’s electronics system, allowing access to the mobile assistant using a steering wheel button.

It is getting interesting in the car industry. It only confirms that the trend for the next shift in data input is voice. Siri has been collecting voice data for only a short period of time. Once enough of data is accumulated the algorithm for voice recognition will become better and better. I guess in five years time it will be really good.

Farzad – Bloomberg Businessweek

Web Apps vs. the App Store
The rollout of 4G networks is vastly expanding bandwidth, while advances in Web standards are allowing Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and YouTube to take control of their presence on phones. They are using Web apps to avoid the App Store, and consumers are noticing. That iPhone 5 customers unhappy with Apple Maps are easily able to switch back to Google Maps (GOOG) shows that Apple’s grip on the consumer—and its ability to extract high profit margins—is weakening.

I am hoping the rise of 4G networks around the globe will bring more attention to web applications. I would like to see Apple App. Store for web applications in the upcoming years.

Build once and use everywhere, with a little help of media queries. What is missing? Why the web apps. are not as smooth as native apps.? It is not really the fact that you access web pages directly from your phone it is the fact how they behave once they are downloaded to your device. All we need is better internet browsers which allows web developers use the same features native apps. can use today. Lot has been done in this direction and I believe the future will bring as great experience in web browsers.

Declan McCullagh – Cnet

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency.

That means that a hotel in Hawaii, for instance, could write a check to Facebook to license photos taken at its resort and use them on its Web site, in TV ads, in glossy brochures, and so on — without paying any money to the Instagram user who took the photo. The language would include not only photos of picturesque sunsets on Waikiki, but also images of young children frolicking on the beach.

You can’t not to make a connection with the Facebook acquisition of Instagram three months ago. I see this as big opportunity for Flickr to step into the game and play fair, which could lead to rebirth of Flickr community.

Marco has written great piece about his reasons for creating the most popular Newsstand application called The Magazine.

Marco Arment

The Magazine and Instapaper operate independently. There’s no master plan. I wanted Instapaper to exist, so I made it. Five years later, I wanted The Magazine to exist, so I made that.

I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry.

I also have no interest in showing the periodical industry “how it’s done”. I set out to create this magazine, not make a template for other publishers to follow.

The app has been very well received, receiving a 4.5/5 rating on the App Store from 1,026 ratings. It has ousted Apple’s own ’12 Days of Christmas’ app, as iPhone and iPod touch owners download Google’s new Maps title to complement or even replace Apple’s own.

Google also launched an SDK that gives developers a chance to integrate it into their iOS apps, bypassing Apple’s own mapping hooks and allowing Google Maps to power their apps, while also linking them to the Google Maps iOS app should they wish.

I have never had a problem with Apple maps here in Prague but I have seen people around the globe had. The Google map has very nicely designed app. The map itself is not as pretty as Apple’s vector map but it works better and that is what matters.

(via: thenextweb.com)

A joint survey of news consumers from the Pew Research Center and The Economist found that 60% of Americans under the age of 40 prefer a traditional, print-like news reading experience on tablets, free of interactive components like audio and video. Those older than 40 expressed similar preferences.

The study found that men and more highly educated adults tend to consumer more news on mobile: 43% of male tablet owners and 41% of male smartphone owners read news daily on their devices, compared to 32% of female tablet owners and 30% of female smartphone owners, respectively. Men also tend to check for news more often and are more likely to engage with long-form news articles and videos.

(via: Mashable)

This is very interesting. Looks like people are coming to their roots and they becoming fed up with all the interactivity placed in wrong place. Reading is something you need to focus on, concentrate and its quite hard to do when there is lots of going on on the screen. I believe the year 2013 will show strong shift towards simplicity.

As I have mentioned before I expect Apple to change the visual direction towards simplicity under direction of its new visual software leader.

All the years we spent learning about typography, grids, contrast for print will come handy when building moder web sites and interfaces in upcoming years.

Square is great company with lots of good ideas, it has disruptive direction and it’s cool. Yeah, I have mentioned this before. The brand needs to be cool in order to disrupt industries.

Square has been making good deals recently with Starbucks and others what I am very happy for. The question is how quickly all this can go global. At the moment it’s all happing in the US. I would really love to see the brand spread around the globe quickly.

Square has already been implemented with another payment solution which going to disrupt the payment systems. I am talking about Apple’s Passbook. Passbook has only been introduced recently but I see a big potential in this service. It takes time till retails stores, cinemas, airports develop their infrastructure but there is no question this is the future of tickets. There only need to be standard set for the ticketing services and I am very positive all the other platforms will create their own Passbooks, whatever the name will be.

Why should we print tickets in 2015? I do not see a reason for that. Every single person is caring phone and it’s only question of one or two years till all the phones will have big screens. Again, it takes time till people replace their old phones with smart phones.

You might be arguing. So, if I have no smart phone I will not be able to get to the cinema? Yes! Let me ask you a question. If you have no bank account, how easy is to get your salary ? Almost impossible, right? Exactly.

Todays interview with Tim Cook has pretty much confirmed that Apple TV is coming pretty soon. I don’t think he would mentioned it that clearly if it wasn’t behind the corner.

There was a rumour previously about Apple buying top class TV manufacturer Loewe. I would be very happy to have TV screen made by this company in my living room.

Apple is well known for bringing products into the market which people did not know they need or want and now they can’t live without them. I expect big revolution in TV market very soon.

Checkout the interview with Tim:

• Part 1
• Part 2

What American kinds age 6-12 wants for Christmas

• 48% iPad
• 39% Nintentdo Wii U
• 36% iPad Mini
• 36% iPod Touch
• 33% iPhone
• 31% Kinect for Xbox 360
• 31% Computer

(via: Business Insider)

This is the next generation of kids which will become buyers in couple of years. In the meantime, their parents will need to fill in. It says a lot about the future of technology, specially the positon of Apple as product manufacture. Four out of six products are made by Apple!

Some people think that it comes down to the Apple design direction but I think its lot more complex than that. It is the whole experience which makes the product “cool” and “cool” is what kids go for. It is not only the hardware design, it is the whole symbioses of hardware, software, user experience and ecosystem. Apple is the only player on the market who has it all in place. Supereb hardware design which works very well with its software plus apple store full of content with easy payment options. What people tend to forget is the update policy. Having Apple product also means that you get the software updates with bug fixes and new features. This is not true on other platforms or at least it is not a second nature.

I believe Amazon and Google has big potential to catch up in this game as they keep on building the individual layers but they are still not seen as “cool” among youngsters and they should really do something about it, if they want to become on top of the Christmas list in the next few years.

If you feel that your work and private life could run more efficiently I would recommend you to listen the latest show on 5by5 podcast network called Back to Work where Merlin Mann talks about the importance of having system you trust, preferable one system not multiple systems.

As you might know, I am creator of Getquantify.com which is the system I use every day and trust.

Which one is yours? Do you have one?

It does not necessary mater what system you use, it’s the discipline which matters. You have to 100% trust the system you chose and put everything from your head into it. That way you will not keep any open loops running in your head and you can be sure that anything important pops up the day you need to do something about it.

In any given moment I have about 50 open projects with about 100 open tasks. There is no way I could keep this in my head and not to stress that I will forget something.

Cyrus Farivar – arstechnica.com

If you’re a Netflix subscriber and you have kids, you’re about to make those kids happier. Netflix and Disney just inked a new deal, making the former the exclusive American subscription TV service for “first-run live-action and animated feature films from The Walt Disney Studios.”

This marks the first time that a major Hollywood studio decided to side with a digital distribution rather than a traditional TV provider. The deal is also a high-water mark for a company that some were speculating was ripe for takeover as recently as last month.

These are great news. We can only hope Netflix will be available in Europe by then.

Grimshaw – Managing director of the FT.com

The FT decided to pull its native apps for iPhone and iPad devices last year because it “wasn’t right” for the organization. “Being asked to pay 30% of subscription revenue to Apple, when we’d already invested to build our own bidding platform … [impeded] our ability run the business,” he said. “Secondly, as part of that arrangement, we’d end up with an intermediary with our customers.”

Since the app was pulled, the number of iOS subscribers to the FT has increased by 70%, Grimshaw said. In fact, nearly a fifth of new subscriptions are coming from mobile devices, he added.

(via: mashable.com)

This is quite surprising. It is only one example where it worked pretty much the opposite way everyone would expected but It is going to be very interesting to watch how the whole new industry develops in the upcoming year or two.

Yesterday I have hit a major milestone in the development process of my application call Getquantify. I have released mobile application which works in any mobile web browser so it’s not specific to any OS.

With a little help of mobyllete gem I am now able to detect any mobile access to Getquantify. This helps me to load special views so my application can have different features & layout in its mobile version then it has in the desktop version.

If you are familiar with MVC system, you understand that you can specify different views for your application based on the request. This is a big advantage as all my core back-end code functionality sits in models and controllers. I did not have to touch any of that code when building the mobile version. All I had to do is provide simplified views for all mobile requests.

It gets even more interesting. I have built my own javascript modular system based on loose-coupling ideology, where every independent module in the application has its own module (javascript-object) which talks to other modules via core object by use of messaging system. This came again very handy when building mobile application as I have only had to plug-in the modules I was going to use so no duplicity code. I only needed few little adjustments as the layout (views) are a bit different for the mobile app.

I have again very nice system build around my CSS (actually SASS), where I keep the styles in a similar modular fashion. I have few reusable files like colors.scss, where all my themes are defined and interface.scss where all the interfase UI is defined, such are drop-downs, switches, checkboxes, forms, buttons…etc. There is also a file where all the reusable functions (SASS calls them mixins) are defined, things like gradients, drop-shadows, inner-shadows, rounded corners. These 3 files are necessary for any view. The other files like layout.scss are only specific to mobile or desktop version as they each have different layout and there are also files for each application section like project_list.scss, task_list.scss etc. These types of files can be reused in both desktop and mobile version. Little adjustments could be done as single mobile layer on top of all these existing styles, as I have done in my case where I have made the application look like a native app. in some views but simply adjusting some styles here and there. But as I have said that is the final adjusting layer only applied to mobile app. so it’s not touching the existing core styles.

Images are reused as well. I always use sprites to minimised the http requestes. Getquantify is using lots of tiny little icons which if rendered one by one would have significant impact on the application performance. The sprite is 3200px long and 60px wide so you can imagine the number of small icons it includes. I only have to load this single image in both mobile and desktop app. to get all the iconography in place which is great for maintenance as well.

Having system like this in place not only saves lots of development time but it also keeps the application UI & UX consistent as the styles and behaviours are reused, shared across all different platforms.

Barnes & Noble, big player on the e-readers and digital content is reporting 38 percent rise of the digital content in Q2 2013 earnings report.

As previously reported by Amazon Kindle ebook sales have overtaken Amazon print sales, we are quite clearly entering the digital content era. It is no longer only the geeks who consume digital media. I have been reading books on my various e-readers for years but the mass market finally got it. I think we have hit the tipping point now and it’s going to go fast.

I believe the paper books will still be around for niche market which will become smaller and smaller every year. Once the e-readers become free with offers like “buy 3 e-books get e-reader free” then we are done and the paper books will become vintage.

Dell has just released good looking laptop which comes with Ubuntu. Judging by the images in the article the laptop looks really great but you would need to see it live or at least have more images available to really get the full picture.

Having Ubuntu preinstalled with all drivers is goog step forward. I am glad that at least someone is trying to focus on this niche market and it looks like it’s doing it right this time.

I think there is a potential for new player on the market now when Apple’s product becoming mainstream. There is a pretty big group of people who do not want to go mainstream and would like to have something special. It used to be Apple products but that is quickly changing as Apple started to dominate the market in quite a few fields. I believe the synergy between good design, functionality and mainly “being different” would be the key in here. If laptop manufacturer could produce slim, good looking laptop which is not just copying Mac Book Air (as most of the current producers do) they would have pretty good chance to get that niche geek market, which I believe is not small at all. I would also like to see Linux version, preferably Ubuntu which UI is not trying to follow the old Microsoft Windows user interface.

Think different!

Lee Hutchinson – Arstechnica

The laptop comes with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS plus a few additions. Dell worked closely with Canonical and the various peripheral manufacturers to ensure that well-written, feature-complete drivers are available for all of the laptop’s hardware. Out of the box the laptop will just work. They also have their own PPA if you want to pull down the patches separately, either to reload the laptop or to use on a different machine.