On http://www.stacksocial.com, InstaDesk can now be bought as part of a fantastic Mac bundle. Say hello to the Mac Photo Effects Mini-Bundle!
You get three cutting-edge Mac Photography Apps for less than the price of just one:
FX Photo Studio Pro ($39.99 retail) – Bring a brand new image processing experience to your Mac. Get access to over 170 magnificent photography effects.
Color Splash Studio ($1.99 retail) – A brand-spanking new Mac App lets you create amazing photos with selective colors in a snap. No similar app offers the same!
InstaDesk ($4.99 retail) – This Instragram Client for Mac OS lets you easily browse your photos or explore your friends and not only that, but you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows to boot.
That’s right, you can get all three of these stellar apps for a measly $35. That’s $5 less than the cost of FX Photo Studio Pro alone!
AND if you’re one of the first 500 people to buy this bundle, you’ll get *four extra licenses* for both FX Studio Pro and Color Splash Studio to share with your friends.
This bundle ends on Oct 26, 2011.
Get it here:
http://www.stacksocial.com/
“In many ways an apps‘ icon is an integral part of the product.”
- From a marketing perspective, it incorporates your branding: It has to be easy to decipher, easy to recognize, and it should employ the main strengths of your brand.
From a usability perspective, it needs to give the users hints about your apps main functionality. But it is strongly advised not to overstimulate this: If the actual app fails to fulfill the expectations that the icon sets, you will burn your users.
- From a graphic design perspective, the icon has to look beautiful, strong, and not out of place when it is composed into its actual environment (i.e. the iPod Screen, or the Mac OS X Dock).
- From a semiotic perspective, the signs and symbols that you use should have a shared and distinct meaning in your audience. If you intend to use symbols (like a note, a truck, a cup, a newspaper, or a book) you should make sure that they fit the attribution you are trying to apply in general.
- Finally, the icon is the entry point into your app experience. And in most App Stores (iPod / iPhone, Ovi, Android …) the icon also represents your advertising in the store. It is the first thing people see, and the icon quality can influence the decision whether people like to request more information or not.
Now, that does not mean that only perfect icons will lead to success (as Google has shown time and time again), but if you have limited other advertising resources at hand, then it is certainly advisable to optimize the hell out of your icon.
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Via www.alleyinsider.com
„Twitter will eventually be worth more than $1 billion, possibly a lot more."
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via lesswrong.com
„Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens – not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children.
[…]
"In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence.""
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via arstechnica.com
„Acquisitions are about enabling growth in a hot new market, and not about sustaining revenue in a mature one."
ars technica on why Apple won't buy AMD
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via paulgraham.com
„But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."
Paul Graham on Addiction
Published from QuoteVault.org
One of my friends recently linked to this impressive quote from Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame, writing in 2006:
If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.
(footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p. 228),
Hackers and Painters)
It reminded me a, at least as I see it, equally impressive forecast by Fake Steve Jobs (née Dan Lyons). Back in 2006, in one of his parodical pieces, he contemplated what Steve Jobs might want that mythical iPhone to be like, and wrote:
So as soon as I got back to the Jobs Pod I sent out an email to the iPhone team: We’re back to square one. Starting over. Tabula rasa. Throwing out everything we’ve done so far and making a new phone that just makes phone calls. Small, white, gorgeous, as few buttons as possible. Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less.
Keep in mind, this was in 2006. Back then there was no iPhone, and nobody knew if Apple intended to ever build one. Even more, when people thought what this mythical unicorn could be like, they came up with this, this, this, or that.
Via www.info.ucl.ac.be
„The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves."
On Literary Criticism
Sounds about right to me.
Published from QuoteVault.org
Via www.nytimes.com
„I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.
“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”"
Just found this gem while browsing through my QuoteVault archive.
Mr. Tevanian, the Mac OS X lead System Architect, on whether Microsoft could / should rebuild Windows from the ground up, as Apple did with Mac OS X.
Published from QuoteVault.org
John Gruber discussed a Technologizer article on the Future of Windows yesterday. In said article some of the “big brains” of the software industry were asked for their opinion on what Microsoft ought to do to keep Windows relevant in the years to come. Gruber quotes a scenario that imagines a tabula rasa, a new Windows without cruft and legacy code (much like Apple did when they switched from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X), but then takes this idea even further, wondering whether it is actually necessary to replace the current Windows.
Or just maintain Windows in parallel. Point is, there’s no reason why Microsoft should have one and only one PC desktop operating system. Why not two: the new cool no-cruft one; and Windows, the established, familiar, chock-full-of-baggage-and-legacy-compatibility one.
I disagree, however. As splendid, as the idea actually feels, the characteristics of the two Windows user bases (Developers and Users) won’t resonate with such a setting. Let’s call the two versions “WIN” (New, no legacy code, cool) and “Classic” (Current Windows) Developers only invest their time and money up front if there is a viable market available (or to come), so that the investment is at least likely to generate a positive outcome. They won’t start developing for a new system until the user base is of a certain size (or a huge growth is expected, see iPad). Windows users, on the other hand, are not really known for their progressiveness. I usually tend to divide them into three groups:
- Business users, who have no choice anyway since IT installs their machines. As businesses are actually the main force behind Microsofts keen upholding of legacy code, there is little reason for them to ever leave Classic. So here we have a very low adoption rate.
- Non-Computer users: The kind of people who almost accidentally bought their PC at Walmart, still run Windows XP (maybe even 98SE), and mostly use the system to print ugly birthday flyers or play Solitaire. They would probably enjoy WIN, but they won’t ever notice it exists until they go and buy a new PC at Walmart. Here, we have another low adoption rate.
- The enthusiast Computer user: These are people that grew up with Windows, know (and sometimes love) all of it’s kinks and quirks, and use it for a variety of tasks. They’re its avid defenders in Engadget comment threads and tend to be a tad regressive, since Classic has always worked for them quite well and as they fear loosing the high investment in Windows knowledge that they accumulated over the years. The less regressive, the higher the chance that this particular person has already switched to Mac or Linux. The more regressive, the higher the chance that he/she would actually reject or even despise WIN as it deviates too much from her/his well known Classic. The adoption rate should be pretty solid, but this market segment is also heavily courted by the alternatives.
The problem with the above scenario is that the actual market for a brand new cruft free Windows deems me not big enough to attract enough developer traction to get a larger user base to switch over. One possibility, of course, would be to leverage .NET so that new applications would natively work on Classic and WIN sans problems (much like Apple did with Carbon). This, however, would disable any chances for Microsoft to radically change the user interface, accommodating usability research and results of the past decade.
Instead, I think it would make more sense for Microsoft to create a brand new OS that still runs old apps by means of a virtual machine or something resembling the classic environment in Mac OS X. Microsoft needs to enforce adoption as much as they can, otherwise most of their user base simply won’t switch. (Even the almost 10 years old Internet Explorer 6 is still being used way too much. This simple fact is telling about the Windows demographic)
I 
