Gmail’s logo (Google):

Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand.
…
The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.

Scott Forstall’s loupe (Apple):

Apple also places an unusual emphasis on interface design. It sweats the cosmetic details that don’t seem very important until you really sweat them. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice president of Platform Experience. “We will argue over literally a single pixel.”

Attention to Detail is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Remember Apple’s “1984″ Mac commercial?

What else do we remember from 1984?

• War is peace.
• Freedom is slavery.
• Ignorance is strength.

How about this one?

• Silence is noise.

Daring Fireball (writing about this):

I think the current behavior of the iPhone mute switch is correct. You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.

Whereas if the mute switch silenced everything, there’d be thousands of people oversleeping every single day because they went to bed the night before unaware that the phone was still in silent mode.

I’ve been in the same situation as “Patron X” at the concert: I put my phone in “mute” mode believing that “mute” means the same thing it means in the dictionary, in normal everyday discourse and in every other use: not making noise; silent. I totally sympathize and blame Apple for the mistake. He is not the edge case. This has happened to tons of people: iPhone makes noise in a quiet space, like a movie or a meeting, followed by someone sheepishly muttering, “I thought I silenced it!”

I recognize that some people refuse to buy an alarm clock and insist on using their iPhones to wake them up in the morning AND habitually fail to turn their ringers back on at night. But they are the real edge case – most people who use a phone for an alarm surely are able to make sure the phone is not “mute” first.

The iPhone mute switch fiasco is a clear example of a mistake that Apple makes, or a failure to evolve in the correct direction, that they later stubbornly insist was intentional all along, and that they really wanted not to work (kind of like a mouse with only one button… until they made a mouse with five buttons). The worst part of this is that the iPhone has no option in the settings to let the user decide how he wants the alarm to behave and whether it should be subject to being muted or not. I predict that we can expect to see this feature quietly added in iOS 6.0.

When Silent Isn’t Silent is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Whenever I hear Armagideon Time, it makes me want to watch Ghost Dog.

Armagideon Time is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

I can tolerate when a rock band wants to switch out one member for someone else, or when they replace a drummer who dies in a freak accident involving alcohol. But a band must retire when they’ve got more former members than current members.

New Rule for Bands is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Here’s my tech prediction for 2012: Apple will not release a product called “iPhone 5.”

Why not? Look at the names of the previous iPhones:

1. iPhone (2007)
2. iPhone 3G (2008)
3. iPhone 3GS (2009)
4. iPhone 4 (2010)
5. iPhone 4S (2011)

Notice anything? How about that only a single time has the new iPhone’s name reflected its number in the product series?

Assuming that Apple does release a new iPhone (all signs indicate that this will happen, whether around June, as in 2007-2010, or in September-October, as in 2011), and assuming it’s numbered, it’s going to be the iPhone 6. Another equally likely name would be the iPhone 4G. Of course, that would depends on Apple getting 4G into the iPhone, which they definitely won’t do without some huge improvements to battery life.

So there will not be an iPhone 5.

Prediction: There Will Be No iPhone 5 is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

New York Times:

“We are making less money because the company is forcing us to slash prices,” Mr. Lall said, standing amid rows of flickering television sets. Mr. Lall says the days of making big money from televisions are in the past.

The days of making big money from crap televisions are in the past. Just wait until the television market is upended.

A strong yen, relative to the dollar, has further hurt Japanese manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic…

Tablet devices like iPads that can be used like televisions are also cutting into sales….

Sounds like a lot of excuses from those responsible for making and selling devices that people are starting not to want. Making televisions thinner and wider might have been enough in the past, but now people see that usability and user experience matter. They’re seeing that operating systems matter. They won’t pay $2,600 for a $6,000 television that Samsung or Sony made, but they’re standing in line to pay double for a device that Apple might not even be making.

Boo Hoo for TV Sales is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Christopher Hitchens died tonight (CBS News) from the cancer that he knew would kill him.

He was one of the greatest active writers in the English language, and certainly his writing has been consistently provocative, both topically and stylistically. Since most people writing about him now will mention the subject matters he covered, I’ll add a note on his challenging and brilliant style. Simply put, it was one of a kind. I’ve never encountered any other writer who managed to use so many words that I couldn’t legitimately define but whose sentences managed to come off as so clear. If there’s any writer in the world whose “voice” I’ve most desired to copy and subsume into my own, it is his.

Hitchens’ debate style will also long be admired. His normal method in speaking against some other person was to begin a sentence, let it taper off, allow his interlocutor to begin a rebuttal, and then to continue speaking directly through the poor other guy, raising his voice as necessary and going on, refusing to stop until all opposition had relented. He was a phenomenally talented debater with excellent natural skill, exceptional training and constant practice.

He was a prolific smoker of tobacco (until recently) and drinker of alcohol – quite a serious drinker, in fact – whose indulgence in these pleasures was infamous. A favorite slander of his detractors was that Hitchens was a drunk. But despite his drinking a lot, I’m not aware of any negative effects on his work due to the alcohol. And speaking of which, he continued writing actively until shortly before his death – I just read one of his columns a couple of days ago.

Since his views offended everybody, I feel less bad that I disagreed with him on many points. But I also think he was pretty well consistent across most issues, which isn’t easy for a journalist who made it a point to cover every beat. I’m going to miss reading him in Slate, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic.

Christopher Hitchens is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Congratulations on buying your first Mac. I’m going to give you some tips about how to make your Mac experience awesome.

Best IM program for Mac: Adium.

Best web browser for Mac: no clear winner. Firefox is still the most extensible, and Chrome is the fastest. For a long time I mostly used Safari because it had the best balance of speed and addons, but recent updates broke some unsupported addons that I really liked, so I’m not using it daily right now. Firefox is still so painfully slow on my Mac that I’m using Chrome as my default browser for the very first time. Overall, I’m more or less happy with it.

Best RSS reader for Mac: NetNewsWire. Reeder gets a lot of hype, too, but it costs money.

Best weather program for Mac: I have no idea what the best one is, but swackett is nice.

Best text editor for Mac: Notational Velocity / (I actually use a fork called NValt). These sync with Simplenote (for web app and iPhone) without any unnecessary grief.

Best text editor for coding on a Mac: TextMate.

Best text editor for CSS on a Mac: CSSEdit. It’s now part of something else called Espresso, so I’ll have to check that out some time.

Best thing to watch videos on a Mac: VLC. There’s also a Remote VLC app for the iPhone, to use your phone to control VLC on your Mac.

Best FTP program for Mac: I’ve always liked Transmit and I’ve used it for years, but it costs money and the free alternatives are probably just as good now. So check out CyberDuck.

Best email program for Mac: Apple Mail (ie, Mail.app) has a lot of problems, but I still think it’s the best email application for Mac and I’m still using it because it balances having a lot of features, integrating well and playing nicely with the rest of the system, and being free. It also got a nice little overhaul in Lion, though a lot of the tips and extensions on Hawk Wings are still very helpful. Also, Sparrow is good if all you want is a desktop Gmail client and don’t mind paying money.

Best backup solution for your Mac: Get a big external hard drive. It can be cheap, because it’s just for backups, but I recommend one with FireWire 800 if your Mac has a FireWire port. Use Disk Utility to partition it (journaled). Use half for Time Machine and the other half for SuperDuper! (great) or Carbon Copy Cloner (free). Make sure the SD/CCC partition is bootable.

Best password manager for the Mac: 1Password. It will: generate passwords for you that are practically unbreakable, store them securely, hook up with your web browsers via addons to enter your login information there when you need it, sync with your iPhone, and be accessible securely via Dropbox on other computers that you use.

Best p2p filesharing programs for a Mac: XTorrent costs money, but is spectacular for people who don’t want to think too hard about BitTorrent. Transmission is also awesome – simple, Mac-like and free. uTorrent is getting better over time. Of course, don’t download or share any files illegally. In the past, you might have been able to get away with this, but today, you’ll probably get caught.

Best access to Twitter on a Mac: Twitter‘s official app.

Best access to Facebook on a Mac: Facebook notifications.

Best access to Google+ on a Mac: Just kidding!

Best financial management software on a Mac: the jury’s still out on this one, but iBank looks good.

Best ebook manager/converter on a Mac: calibre is annoying and totally un-Mac-like, but it’s the only one I know about.

Best system notifications tool for a Mac: Growl. I’m pretty shocked that it costs money now, but as long as it’s in active development, I guess I can’t complain.

Best way to figure out how you’re using all the space on your hard drive: GrandPerspective.

Best way to find out how to do something on your Mac: ask a friend.

Best way to find the Mac version of a program you know from Windows: ask a friend.

Best way to know whether it’s safe to accept software updates from Apple, whether you’ve got a virus or need to use antivirus software, what an error message means or why your computer won’t start: ask a friend.

Get to know your System Preferences. Click into every icon and figure out for yourself what they all do / what features they all control.

Run Software Update weekly. But don’t take major updates casually. Always repair disk permissions (in Disk Utility) after installing major software updates.

Install AppleJack. Then forget about it.

Don’t keep all your downloaded applications in the Downloads folder. Move them to Applications, where they belong, and run them from there. Throw away your disk images (.dmg files).

Don’t buy RAM from Apple.

Don’t buy adapter cables for an external monitor from Apple.

Do buy AppleCare.

So You Decided to Buy a Mac? is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

And then Steve Jobs was dead. And there was an outpouring of grief from a sad and sentimental world, stoked by the forces of sappy weepiness, sure, but also surprisingly genuine.

The expected backlash came fast, but it was shallow: Steve Jobs didn’t donate to charity (actually, we don’t know if he did or didn’t, we just know that he didn’t pay to get his name on the side of a building); Steve Jobs made “closed” products (partially true, though he may turn out to have been right that mobile must be “closed”); Steve Jobs was mean (I can’t say his personal management style is particularly appealing, but he doesn’t appear to have been an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole); Steve Jobs’ success was because of marketing (false, really false); Steve Jobs stole credit for other people’s ideas (yeah, sometimes the head of a team does get all the credit for the team’s successes, just as he’ll sometimes take all the blame for the team’s failures); Steve Jobs denied paternity (but he also seems to have regretted it and done whatever was necessary to make it right with his daughter and/or her mother).

Meanwhile, the amazing Steve Jobs stories kept rolling in from all corners and filtering back down to everybody. Though the stories are true, Steve Jobs has pretty quickly passed from man to myth.

I expected this to take longer and not to preoccupy the national attention in the way that it did. I didn’t anticipate the intense identification of people with their Apple-made gadgets and the ready personalization of Apple in the form of one man – he wasn’t that charismatic. I also didn’t expect that Steve Jobs would enter so easily into the pantheon of our generation. But he did: in a couple hundred years, children will still learn his name. I’m just not sure they’ll be able to remember the differences between him and Mother Teresa.

Steve Jobs is Really Dead This Time is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.

Twitter is going crazy with unconfirmed reports that Steve Jobs is dead. What’s Trending posted it and then deleted the tweet. It’s not ranking in some basic Google searches or on Google News. I’d be interested to see if it does rank soon.

Update: What’s Trending says the reports are “completely unconfirmed.” How about somebody confirming that he’s alive?

Update: Apparently Bloomberg accidentally posted a pre-written Steve Jobs obit/bio.

Steve Jobs is a post from Lines Writing Lines - Natan Gesher's Blog.