Better Elevation

Kirk Hamilton over at Kotaku has written the best review of Inception I’ve read yet, and does an excellent job of explaining why I think the film fails.

Spoiler alert:

My problems with the story can be summed up by the spinning top. The idea is that you choose something that is personal to you and has some secret characteristic that nobody else could duplicate in the dream world. So someone chooses a top? And the secret is that it falls over after spinning for a minute? This is lazy and thoughtless.

Want.

From the man himself:

So there you have it: my arrogance in a nutshell is 25% refusing to pretend I haven’t done good work, 25% not wanting to speak for other people, 25% me joking around, and 25% other people projecting their own arrogance onto me. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to helping friends and donating my time to writing software for charity. I’m sorry if that sounds arrogant.

Mike Lee is an asshole. He’s also one of the nicest guys in the industry. Which version would you rather spend your emotional energy on?

Better than before, but still amazingly awful. If you need a video to show how clever your logo is, perhaps you should try again. I thought maybe the Q was a very poorly-drawn magnifying glass.

I really love this photo.

(Via SuicideGeeks)

Jenny fucking loves balsamic vinegar.

Krystyn Chong, unofficial WWDC historian, has posted a video featuring various shots and clips of folks from last week’s conference.

Strangely, I’m in nearly every shot. I’m considering a restraining order.

If you like to inexplicably smile like an idiot, I recommend watching this.

You may have noticed a lack of updates recently. Before today, my most recent post was from April 29th. Where the hell did I go? I’ll tell the story like this:

So there’s this guy. We’ll call him “me”. And he spent five years of his life with this girl. Then the girl went away. The end.

Originally, I had written a very long blog post about the relationship and the spectacularly fucked up way in which it ended. But rather than subject my readers to a lot of post-breakup bitterness and depression, I decided to keep things quiet and get myself back to a healthy state of mind. Plus I didn’t want to get sued.

But hey, I’m back, and I feel better than ever. Let’s do this shit.

iDygest is a great idea: take all of the best Apple news sources and provide a single article for each story. Rather than reading the same story on twenty different blogs, you can catch up quickly, and choose your favorite source for details.

Disclosure: I may have had something to do with this app.

The best app demo video I’ve ever seen.

So how did I go about deciding I wanted to make iPhone apps, getting acquired, and becoming an executive at an award-winning iPhone development company?

I went out drinking with Brent Simmons. Everything after that is kind of a blur.

About a year ago, I happened to be flying in to San Jose on business. As the plane touched down, I did what I always do: take my iPhone out of airplane mode. At some point over eastern California, my friend Alex sent an email to myself and Brent Simmons; he had noticed we were both going to be in the area and suggested we meet up. To be honest, I felt terrible that night. I just wanted to go to my hotel and get some sleep.

I had met Brent once before at Ignite Denver, but only briefly. The opportunity to buy the developer of one of my favorite applications a drink was too good to ignore. So I sucked it up and went out.

It just so happened that Brent was in town for 360|iDev, an event organized by a guy named John Wilker, who I sort of knew in passing and — again, by sheer coincidence — had just become my neighbor. Nobody could have said it better than Wilker himself when he walked up to me outside of the eBay Town Hall that night. “Dave? What the hell are you doing here?”

When Brent and I went out, we were joined by Dan Burcaw and Joe Pezzillo — iPhone developers and friends of Brent’s from, of all places, Denver. Jay and I had just launched Coathangr, the social network for fashion, and I asked Dan how much it would cost us to build an iPhone app for it.

He told me that the conversation couldn’t even start for less than twenty grand, and that we’d be better off doing it ourselves. So we did. And we fell in love with iPhone development. And a year later, Dan’s company acquired us. I guess he was right.

Of course, I’m leaving out an entire year’s worth of blood, sweat, education, experience, and perhaps most importantly, failure. I’ll save those for later posts. So part of it was luck, part of it was the truly awesome iPhone developer community, and a lot of it is owed to my generous and patient mentors. But if I had to trace it back to a single decision that changed everything, it would be going to grab that drink.

The lesson here is that when Brent Simmons invites you out, you say yes.

News broke today that my company, Massively Overrated, has been acquired by Double Encore. This is nothing but good news; Jay and I still maintain creative control of internal projects, and now we get to shape applications for huge, international brands. They acquired us, but it feels more like we acquired their team of rock start developers.

TechCrunch’s coverage is remarkably insightful:

With so many app developers around the Apple ecosystem, it makes sense for smaller iPhone app developers to pool their resources and talent and consolidate. I suspect we may be seeing more acquisitions and mergers in the near future.

Ding.

Paul Carr on the iPad as a reader:

The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive. The people who will spout bullshit like “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.” That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.

Carr’s point might be better served if he didn’t sound like he was trying so hard to prove that he was smarter than everyone else.

I’m thrilled for Loren, I really am. Tweetie 2 for the iPhone is one of my favorite pieces of software ever. But the awkwardness of this text gave me pause:

Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up.

I would love to know how they came up with that.