When the young people of Tokyo want to go shopping, they head for Harajuku. A fabled wellspring of youth culture, the neighborhood offers international retail chains on its main streets and tiny purveyors of bleeding-edge fashion in its back alleys. On this Saturday morning in mid-December, a throng of extremely excited twentysomething men and women crowd into the grand opening of a 1,700-square-foot shop located across the street from H&M and Forever 21. As they enter the store, they’re greeted by two costumed characters: a deadpan bear and an exuberant

I’ve wanted to understand Line for a while now, and Harry McCracken published an in-depth look at the company today. Fascinating story and impressive ability to turn something “simple” like messaging into wholly different monetization routes.

This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen cover Jony Ive, Project Titan and iOS extensions.

A fun episode of Connected this week, but I’d recommend listening after reading The New Yorker’s profile of Jony Ive and Apple’s design team. You can get the episode here.

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Today, my friend and co-host Myke Hurley is launching Behind the App, a special series of his podcast Inquisitive focused on app development. From the description of the first episode:

In the first episode of “Behind the App”, a special series of Inquisitive, we take a look at the beginnings of iOS app development, by focusing on the introduction of the iPhone and the App Store.

I’ve seen Myke working on this for the past four months, and I’ve listened to the first episode. Everything about Behind the App is top notch and you won’t find this kind of in-depth tech storytelling anywhere else. The pacing is just right. The story is fascinating. The music is by Brave Wave (seriously). The guests have something useful and relevant to say. The script is well done. I know I’m being impartial when I say that Myke had the right idea at the right time and he’s making the best of it.

As he writes (and he doesn’t write often):

As of today, I have three episodes recorded of the series. I expect it to run for maybe 10-15 episodes, but I’m going to see how that fares as I continue to plough through.

Making these shows has been an incredible amount of work, but I am so proud of them. It’s totally different in style and production to anything I have made before, and I am learning new skills as I progress. I think I’m getting better at it every day too.

I genuinely believe that my last five years in podcasting has taught me all of the base skills that I needed to do this, and ‘Behind the App’ is going to teach me what I need to know for the next five years.

I’m genuinely excited for Myke and the whole team behind this. Grab your podcast app of choice (or use a web browser), listen at whatever speed you like, and wait for the next installments of Behind the App. I know I will.

Here’s something you don’t hear every day: next week’s episode of ABC’s Modern Family will take place entirely on the screen of a MacBook Pro. The Verge writes:

In the Modern Family episode, we’re looking at the computer screen of Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen) while she’s waiting at the airport. She’s had a disagreement with her daughter Haley (Sarah Hyland) and can’t reach her, and over the course of the episode Claire jumps across multiple Mac apps and video chats to talk to her family and track Haley down (apparently everyone in the Modern Family universe uses Apple products for convenient FaceTime and iMessage sessions).

The best part, tech-wise, is that the graphics have been entirely recreated manually for resolution needs, forcing the authors to cope with changes in the Yosemite betas.

“I was building the assets for Yosemite back when Yosemite was still in beta,” he said. While it helped ensure the episode wouldn’t feel dated when it finally aired, it also led to the unfortunate situation of Brown finishing up assets, only to have to tweak or swap things around when Apple updated the interface in a new build. “It was frustrating to be like, ‘Act one, totally locked,’ and then come in Monday and hear the FaceTime notification has changed.”

And Re/Code:

The trick was producing footage that would look good (and prove readable) on a giant living-room TV. That required the technical intervention of a post-production team, which worked for months to create a replica of Apple’s OS X “Yosemite” desktop operating system painstakingly updated with every revision to the software.

“Basically, what you’re seeing on screen is all hand-made,” said John Brown, the show’s motion graphics producer, who had previously worked on commercials for the Google+ social network that uses a similar narrative approach.

Modern Family isn’t new to Apple devices. In 2010, before the iPad’s release, the show featured an episode focused on the device and Phil (one of the characters) struggling to get one on launch day.