Posts tagged with "interview"

MacStories Interviews: Dave Caolo, Author of “Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool”

If you live in a corporate environment these days, chances are your employer has given you an iPad to try out. It is no secret that hundreds of companies are piloting or deploying iPads and iPhones, but when it comes to a machine that’s less than a year old and has created a new category of portable computing, trying to make it fit in your daily workflow can become a problem. What apps do I need to install? What about email settings? What’s the best way to manage my calendar? And Exchange?

Author Dave Caolo provides answers to these questions in his first book “Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool”. The book is available now in the iBookstore for iPad at $5.99, but you can also pre-order it for your Kindle on Amazon. We had the chance to chat with Dave about the background of this book, and why he decided to focus on the iPad, a relatively young device for a business audience.

So head after the break for the full interview, and go download the book for your iPad here. Read more

An Interview With The Designer Of The Apple Logo→

Craig Grannel posted a transcript of his interview with the designer of the original Apple logo, Rob Janoff. Sorry to destroy all the theories about the logo:

What was the thinking behind the colour order of the stripes, and the ‘bite’?

There wasn’t a whole lot of hidden meaning behind the colours. The logo predates the gay-pride flag by about a year, so that wasn’t it—and there also goes the whole Alan Turing myth! The religious myths are just that too—there’s no ‘Eve and Garden of Eden’ and ‘bite from the fruit of knowledge’ symbolism!

I didn’t have much of a formal brief on the logo assignment, other than “don’t make it cute”. But I did know the selling points of the Apple Computer, and one of the biggest was colour capability. To me, that looked like colour bars on a monitor, which became the stripes in the logo. The order of the stripes, I’m sorry to say, had no particular grand plan other than I liked them that way. And, of course, the green stripe would be at the top where the leaf is.

The bite is really about scale and the common experience of biting into an apple. It was a happy accident that ‘byte’ is a computer term.

It’s just an Apple. [via The Brooks Review]

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Gameloft’s VP Talks Premium Games, Maturing iOS Gaming Market And EA’s Sale Tactics

Last week over at Mobile World Congress Gameloft’s vice president Gonzague de Vallois spoke to PocketGamer and had some interesting remarks regarding iOS gaming. One of the things he spoke about was iOS gamers gaining an increasingly high expectation for games on the platform, particularly in regards to graphics and utilizing the full potential of the device.

He says that taste’s of iOS gamers are maturing and are moving on from supporting the small developers who make small, casual games to the games that are more fully featured and more fully use the potential of the device. To me at least, this seems like a bit of an odd comment given the continuing success of games such as Angry Birds and the caliber of indie games that are continuing to come to the App Store such as Rockin’ Rockets.

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Found Footage: Young Steve Jobs’ First TV Appearance

Before the “Stevenotes”, the “magical” and “wonderful” products announced at conferences streamed live worldwide, there was a kid amazed to see himself on a TV monitor for the first time. In the video below, courtesy of Electricpig, you can see Steve Jobs in his twenties getting ready for an interview on national television.

It turns out – surprise – Jobs wasn’t always confident and “arrogant” as you’ve seen him in the past few years. He’s nervous, asks for some water before the show, people adjust his hair and microphone before the interview.

Ah, the good times. Check out the video below. Fascinating. Read more

MacStories Interviews: Mike Rundle

[MacStories Interviews is a new series of email interviews and conversations with with well-known developers, designers, bloggers, journalists, geeks.]

Please welcome Mike Rundle, designer and web, iOS and Mac developer. You can follow him on Twitter as @flyosity. The interview was conducted from October 12th to December 10th.

- Tell me a little about yourself: who are you, what do you do, etc…?

Hey there! I’m Mike Rundle and I do a number of different things. First, I’m a designer. I’ve been designing websites, applications, blogs and icons for many years. Second, I’m a web developer and have been writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP for a long, long time as well. Third, I’m a Mac, iPhone and iPad developer and have been learning and using Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs since around 2008. I’m the author of Beak, a Mac Twitter app that’s no longer in development, and am also the author of Digital Post, an iPad newspaper app. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of writing and am the author of a chapter on mobile interface design that’s part of the next book from Smashing Magazine. I’ve also been busy reviewing and editing iPhone and iPad books for some of the larger tech publishers.

At the moment I’m working on a project I’ve been looking forward to for awhile: a series of highly-detailed guides that will teach designers how to actually code the interfaces for iPhone and iPad apps. So many designers out there have such great visual design talent but can’t actually put an app together due to a lack of programming knowledge. I’m fortunate to have both design and programming skills so I really want to reach out to my fellow pixel pushers out there and get them in Xcode building cool apps. These guides will also be useful for developers because I go through every step of the design process as well so I hope they’ll also pick up a thing or two. Oh, and after these guides are done I’ll start in on the myriad iPhone and iPad app ideas I have, starting with a really unique puzzle game that’s been in my head for 2 years. Never a dull moment! Read more

MacStories Interviews: MG Siegler

[MacStories Interviews is a new series of email interviews and conversations with with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists, geeks. You can check out more MacStories interviews here.]

Please welcome MG Siegler, writer at TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter as @parislemon.

- Tell me a little about yourself: who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I’m MG Siegler, a technology writer for TechCrunch. Before that, I was at VentureBeat. Before that, I worked in web development. And before that, believe it or not, I worked in Hollywood.

I love my job as it allows me to merge the two things I’m most passionate about: technology and writing.

- What’s your current setup?

I currently have 6 Macs — a little extreme, I know. But my urge to have the latest and greatest forces me to upgrade when something new comes along, and other machines become backups or media centers. Currently, I mainly use my i7 iMac (late 2009) and a new 13-inch MacBook Air. I absolutely love the latter. I’m even thinking about getting an 11-inch as well. It has replaced my (early 2010) i7 MacBook Pro,

When I’m on the go, I always have the iPhone 4 with me. And I often bring the iPad as well. I also have a ridiculous number of iPods, which mainly don’t get used anymore, as the iPhone is my source of all music. Read more

MacStories Interviews: Alex Payne

[MacStories Interviews is a new series of email interviews and conversations with with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists, geeks.]

Please welcome Alex Payne, cofounder and CTO of BankSimple. You can follow him on Twitter as @al3x. The interview was conducted from October 11th to November 15th.

- Tell me a little about yourself: who are you, what do you do, etc…?

My name is Alex Payne. I’m 27, and I’m the CTO and cofounder of BankSimple, a startup combining modern technology with extraordinary customer service to enable a seamless, worry-free banking experience. Before joining BankSimple in May of this year, I was one of the first engineers at Twitter, where I worked for 3.5 years. Last year I coauthored “Programming Scala” for O’Reilly with Dean Wampler. I’m deeply interested in programming language design and implementation, minimalist art, cocktails and spirits, and all sorts of other things. My wife and I just moved to Portland, Oregon a few months ago, and just recently moved into our first house. Read more

MacStories Interviews: Ben Brooks

[MacStories Interviews is a new series of email interviews and conversations with with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists, geeks.]

Please welcome Ben Brooks, author of The Brooks Review. Ben was one of the first people to accept my invitation for MacStories Interviews. You can follow him on Twitter as @benjaminbrooks. The interview was conducted from October 9th to November  3rd.

- Tell me a little about yourself: who are you, what do you do, etc…?

My name is Ben Brooks and I live in Seattle, WA with my beautiful wife. I run a commercial property management company in Lakewood, WA that I co-founded. During my free time I write over at The Brooks Review (brooksreview.net) talking mainly about technology.

When I am not glued in front of my computer I love to get out and hike, or shoot some pictures around town. My wife and I are also seriously addicted to chilling at home in front of our TV watching shows and movies, because the weather in Seattle can often demand that you stay in.

- What’s your current setup?

There are computers scattered throughout my house and office, but my main computer is a first generation unibody MacBook Pro (2.8ghz 6GB RAM 240GB SSD). I compliment that computer at work with a 24” LED Cinema Display. On the road I have a 16gb WiFi only iPad and a 32gb iPhone 4. I pack that all in either my Booq Taipan Shadow Messenger bag or my Booq Boa Push iPad bag - both of which I love.

At my office, other than the monitor, the only other thing that I attached is a Fujitsu Scansnap to stay paperless. I use a Bluetooth Apple Keyboard at both places and a Magic mouse at work.

At home I keep my MacBook Pro on a Rain Design mStand and have a Magic Trackpad paired up in addition to the keyboard. I also have 3+ terabytes of external hard drives for backups and media storage. I keep a well used Mac mini (original G4 1.42ghz model) hooked up to our TV in the living room for a media center.

Two things that come with me when I carry either the iPad or MacBook Pro are my Bose in-ear headphones and my Verizon MiFi for constant Internet access.

I used to be all about big crazy setups but over the past two years I have slimmed it down (still have way too much) to just what I need. I also try to keep the wires to a minimum because no matter what, wires tangle up on me. Read more

An Interview with Shawn Blanc

Shawn Blanc runs one of my favorite weblogs, one of those you open for a quick 5 minutes read and you end up spending the whole afternoon on. With a good cup of coffee and some Mac nerdery state of mind.

Since we started working on MacStories 3.0 in April (true story), I knew that I wanted an interview with Shawn ready to publish by launch day. What happened is an interesting internet experiment: MacStories 3.0 took 6 months to complete, and our email interview turned into a conversation. A pretty long one. We started when the iPad wasn’t available, we wondered what Loren Brichter might be working on and we ended up talking about Flipboard. I think this conversation between me and Shawn is a great example of how fast things change on the internet in a matter of a few months. And, most of all, it’s a great example of how Apple rolls.

Long, unedited, real. Check it out below. And go grab some coffee. Read more