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CMD+Space with Jared Sinclair→

This week Myke is joined by Jared Sinclair. They talk about balancing being a developer and a designer, and his apps Riposte, Whisper and Unread.

Speaking of Myke and podcasts, I particularly enjoyed this episode of CMD+Space with Jared Sinclair. Jared is the creator of Unread – my current favorite RSS reader for iOS – and I found his career path and decisions to be fascinating and inspiring. There are a lot of points worth thinking about in the episode, such as balancing utility and artistry when making apps with a vision, and I highly recommend it.

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Five Years of Pinboard→

Perspective does not make you immune to burnout. It just makes burnout less scary. I’ve gone through a few episodes since starting Pinboard, and I’m sure there will be more to come. People have been very understanding about my occasional need to flee the Internet. I find that the longer I run the site, the more resistant I become to the idea of ever giving it up, even if I need to take the occasional break. It is pleasant to work on something that people draw benefit from. It is especially pleasant to work on something lasting. And I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules.

A great post on Pinboard’s fifth birthday by Maciej Cegłowski. Pinboard is one of my favorite web services because it does its job well and it’s dependable. There’s a lot to learn from Maciej when it comes to building trust and a profitable business on the Internet.

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The End of Our Podcasts and A New Challenge

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.

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Apple Publishes 2014 Environmental Responsibility Report

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).

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Panic PunchClock→

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.

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Ultratext Lets You Create GIFs with Text and Selfies

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.

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Inspecting Yosemite’s Icons→

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.

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