Word of the Day
Animus (n., ANN-ih-muss)
Hostility and animosity or motivation. Yes, really, both things. We'll let you draw your own conclusions.
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Link of the Day
iPhone's 10th anniversary
Yesterday, the iPhone turned ten years old. There was a lot written about it yesterday (not here; we, unaware of this fact ran a Google-centric entry, whoops), reflecting on how revolutionary it was and how much it changed our technological landscape and world. What everyone agreed on was that the iPhone announcement was probably Steve Jobs' best moment as a presenter:
I love this. Jobs knows he has a good product and you can sense his gleeful cockiness as he walks through the features.
But the demo was not as smooth as it looked. As one of our favorite tech stories relates, the demo was an intricately constructed sequence that often didn't work:
The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.
But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional.
Lest you think this was all smoke and mirrors, the design of iPhone took many, many, many refinements and iterations. It's hard to quote any section of it but it's well worth a read.
The iPhone launched when we were in college and it transformed the campus rapidly. It was an instant status symbol. The head-in-phone look and mind-elsewhere-while-talking feeling became common. People interacted differently. The iPhone's impact was clear from the start and has continued far beyond the brick-and-hills campus. A unique, generational device.
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