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Today, my friend and co-host Myke Hurley announced that he’s leaving 5by5 to pursue new goals and be independent again. From his blog post:
Today I am announcing that I will be departing 5by5 on July 16th 2014.
The last 18 months have been a tremendous experience, but it is time for me to move on to new things. I have new goals that I want to tackle, and to be able to do this I need to be independent again.
Late on Wednesday Apple published their 2014 Environmental Responsibility Report, detailing Apple’s efforts to reduce their impact on the environment. The company also updated their Environmental Responsibility pages on their website, reflecting the new data contained in this year’s Environmental Responsibility Report.
In the report and on their website, they highlight the significant progress they have made to reducing their carbon footprint. Between fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2013, Apple’s carbon footprint from energy use actually dropped by 31 percent, despite overall energy consumption increasing by 44 percent. As for this year’s goal of powering Apple retail stores by renewable energy, they have so far converted 145 of their US retail stores and all 21 of their Australian retail stores to using 100 percent renewable energy (either purchasing from third-party renewable energy providers or participating in
utility green tariff programs).
Panic has fun with iBeacons:
With this new technology in-hand, it wasn’t too long before I put together a brand new office In/Out tracker called PunchClock. It uses a combination of a geo-fence and iBeacon tracking, plus a simple Sinatra backend hosted at Heroku. The part that took the longest to fine-tune was figuring out the right combination of polling to provide good location information without draining the battery.
Not only does their internal app look great – it’s also available on GitHub for you to play with.
Ultratext, available for free on the App Store, is a new and fun iPhone app to create animated GIFs from text and selfies, and share them with others through iMessage, Instagram, or other services. I discovered the app yesterday thanks to a tweet by Casey Newton, and I’ve been using it all day to send animated messages to my friends and family. The idea seems to resonate with normal people in my life and the app is indeed simple and enjoyable, hence it’s worth a mention on the site.
Nick Keppol has published a great look at the icons from the developer beta of OS X Yosemite:
When 10.10 ships this fall, your users will expect your icons to feel at home in the new system. Rather than critique the icons, I’m going to dissect the icon system and focus on the small details that will help you make icons that look great in Yosemite.
When I saw this link in my Twitter feed, I thought the article would focus on colors, gradients, and comparisons with iOS 7. Instead, Nick has inspected the tiniest details of Apple’s icon design on Yosemite, such as reflections, materials, grids, and combination of shapes. If you’re a designer or just curious about Apple’s new dock icon language, I recommend reading this post.
Gary Allen has a summary of Ron Johnson’s talk at Stanford University:
Former Sr. VP Retail Ron Johnson told a Stanford University audience in May that store high-speed Internet connections—nearly unheard of at the time—were intended to attract visitors, allowing them to check their email or surf the Web. Johnson spoke as part of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business “From the Top” series that spotlights company executives. Johnson was an undergraduate at Stanford, and also attended Harvard Business School (HBS). Johnson recalled his close relationship with Steve Jobs, and the main lesson he learned from him—‟You have to be willing to start again.” He recounted the previously-told story of how the original Apple store design was re-done at almost the last minute in 2001, because Jobs’ trusted Johnson’s evaluation that it didn’t match up with the company’s “digital hub” philosophy.
There are a lot of lessons and details to take away from the talk, which you can watch on YouTube here.
Following last month’s Pride Parade in San Francisco, Apple has posted a short video to YouTube that highlights their involvement in the day, in which thousands of Apple employees and their families marched in support of equality.
On June 29, thousands of Apple employees and their families marched in the San Francisco Pride Parade. They came from around the world — from cities as far as Munich, Paris, and Hong Kong — to celebrate Apple’s unwavering commitment to equality and diversity. Because we believe that inclusion inspires innovation.
Congrats to 5000 Apple employees/families who attended today’s Pride parade.Inclusion inspires innovation.#applepride pic.twitter.com/4DncX8F6fO
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 29, 2014
Luis Abreu has published a fantastic roundup of the privacy changes in iOS 8 (via Dave Verwer):
The latest updates to iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite introduce some very welcomed changes to the way Security and Privacy is dealt with on these platforms and may serve as an inspiration for others.
I’ve gathered this information by watching over 17 hours of WWDC 2014 sessions and carefully reviewing, analyzing what was said, and writing a huge number of notes on Security, Privacy, UX and other areas which I will be publishing here in the coming weeks.
Even if you’re not an iOS developer, read through Luis’ post to understand the updates Apple introduced to make it easier to remain in control of your data and decide which apps can access your information. I had a lot of doubts about the Health app and HealthKit data, and Luis’ explanation helped.