Category: Uncategorized

Michael O’Connor Clarke was the “Good Guy Greg” of the Toronto blogosphere. He was part of the social glue that held the Toronto tech community together, even before its DemoCamp days, friend and trusted advisor to so many of us who specialized in corralling eyeballs, pixels or code and organizer of HoHoTO, a regular charity event that brings tens of thousands of much-needed dollars to the Daily Bread Food Bank. On top of that, he had an impressive resume and was a husband, father of three children and sole breadwinner of the household.

Michael was diagnosed earlier this year with esophageal cancer, an aggressive variety of the disease, and he died last night. My heart goes out to his wife Leona and his kids, Charlie, Lily and Ruairi.

I owe Michael all sorts of debts for his help throughout the years, from referring the Globe and Mail to me to giving me the best damned media training ever in a half-hour over coffee to always greeting me with a smile and a joke whenever I saw him. I plan to repay those debts by following his example as best I can.

I’ll leave you with AKMA’s words about Michael:

Michael is already a winner, a bigger winner than ’most anyone I know, and he will always be. We have a job to do, now, of holding him and his dear ones tight in an embrace, a solidarity, a real, effectual net woven by our caring and our love — but we can’t lose sight of the real goal, to which Michael gives so much time and energy. We have to build out the network of our effectual love and caring till it avails not just for people we know first-hand, but reaches even to strangers and eventually even to f*cknozzles, because none of us can stand alone against all the forces of corruption and exploitation and violence. Michael’s drawing Toronto further toward that, contributing his skills and resources and energy to the Daily Bread Food Bank; by all means let’s rally to Michael’s side, show him our respect and solidarity, and by sharing in his spirit of generosity and love, share with him in winning something vast and vital and imperishable, something that cancer can’t touch. Help Michael and his family. Make someone laugh; feed someone; give a hand to someone who needs a boost; find a way to hire someone; knit us all together more kindly, more securely. That’s the win; that’s what I have to say for Michael: a champion, an unbeatable champion.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Game box design by FancyHam.

Imagine a videogame adaptation of Blade Runner, as made for the #1 console of that time.

Then again, it might not be such a good idea:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

iPad Mini Predicted to be Announced on October 23

Rendering of iPad Mini by Martin Hajek.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski reports that Apple is likely to unveil the rumoured iPad Mini — a 7-inch-or-thereabouts version of the iPad — on Tuesday, October 23rd at the Town Hall Auditorium on the Apple Campus. He observes:

That’s a Tuesday, not a Wednesday, so this is a bit of a break with recent tradition. It also happens to be just three days prior to the street date for Microsoft’s new Surface tablet and two days before Apple reports earnings for its latest quarter.

iPhone 5 in Big Demand

Based on a “user agent analysis on millions of mobile ad impressions, spanning a 7-day time frame from October 3rd through October 9th, 2012″, Chitika Insights, the research wing of the online ad company Chitika, says that web traffic volume from the iPhone 5 is greater than from the Samsung Galaxy S III — it’s 56% to 44%. It should be noted that the Galaxy S III has been out for 4 months, while the iPhone 5 hasn’t been available even 3 weeks.

There’s more evidence of how well the iPhone 5’s doing: findings released by 451/Changewave Research based on an opinion poll of “4,270 North American consumers” say that the iPhone 5’s sales are breaking the sales records of previous iPhone models.

Teehan + Lax’s iOS 6 for iPhone 5 GUI PSDs

If you use Photoshop for designing iPhone UIs, I have good news: Teehan + Lax have just published their iOS 6 for iPhone 5 GUI PSDs! Best of all, they’re free-as-in-beer because they believe in the “Create more value than you capture” mantra.

UIButton in Depth

If you thought you knew how to put buttons on an iPhone screen, you’d best check out Designing for iOS: Taming UIButton, which looks at the many ways, from simplest to most complex, of doing so.

Source Code for Cheddar

There are many “to-do” lists available for iOS, but Cheddar stands apart for a couple of reasons. For starters, it’s received many good reviews. More importantly — at least to readers of this blog — Cheddar’s source code is on GitHub. From a casual skimming of the code, it looks to be pretty well-organized, with #pragma marks aplenty, short (as possible) succinct methods and all-round readability. If you’ve been wondering how other people are writing commercial-quality apps, this source is a good place to look.

The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983

A page from the 1980s book Computer Systems in Business, from my stack of old computer books.

In case you missed all the hoopla surrounding the finding of an old recording of Steve Jobs’ 1983 presentation at the International Design Conference in Aspen, here it is:

Here’s an excerpt from the blog entry containing the recording:

In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to a relatively small audience at a somewhat obscure event called the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). The theme of that year’s conference was “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”, which looking back seems all too fitting. Circumstances being what they are, very little is available on the Internet regarding this Steve Jobs speech. In my extensive research, I could find only one recording of this talk, which itself was just posted in June of this year. This talk received a fair amount of attention at the end of August, after it was mentioned in a Smithsonian Magazine article written by Walter Issacson, Jobs’ biographer. However, the recording currently available is not complete. It ends after about 20 minutes, which corresponds with the end of Jobs’ prepared speech. Left out is almost 40 minutes of a follow-up question and answer session where Jobs offered incredible insight into his vision of future technology. I now present this recording to the world so that it may be preserved indefinitely.

Click the photo above to register for the event.

Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group, cofounder of TechStars, investor, entrepreneur and author of so many books with colons in the title:

• Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup,
• Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist,
• Brad Feld’s Burning Entrepreneur: How to Launch, Fund and Set Your Startup on Fire!
• and the just-published Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

is appearing in Toronto on Tuesday, October 30th at 6:00 p.m. in the Toronto Reference Library at an event being put together by the find folks at StartupNorth and with the help of a lot of sponsors.

The evening will feature cocktails, networking and a discussion on how to make Toronto a better place for startups. There’s a $25 registration fee for this event, which includes a copy of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City in either dead-tree or DRM’d PDF format (the Canadian list price for the hardcover edition is $30, so it’s a pretty good deal).

William Mougayar recently wrote a review of Startup Communities in the Startup North blog, in which he explains Feld’s “Boulder Thesis”, which he describes as “a fresh framework that is based on pragmatism and lower barriers of entry” and “all about on-the-ground reality as a lever to making things happen.” Feld prefers real get-stuff-done events such as “hackathons, New Tech Meetups, Open Coffee Clubs, Startup Weekends, and accelerators” over more-fluff-than-stuff ones like “entrepreneurial award events, periodic cocktail parties, monthly networking events, panel discussions, and open houses”, arguing that they “go deeper into the entrepreneurial stack”.

Want to attend this event? Register now!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

TechCrunch, one of the most-read techie news sites, is holding a series of meetups far from their home base in Silicon Valley, and the first stop on their northern tour is Toronto on Monday, November 5th (which also happens to be my birthday). They’re on a mission to find new startups up here, so if you’re “a founder, a college kid, an investor, or a dreamer,” you’re going to want to be at this meetup.

The Toronto venue is the Steam Whistle Brewing Company (255 Bremner, across the street from the CN Tower, Rogers Centre and Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building), and the event will run from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m..

There are two levels of admission for the TechCrunch Toronto Meetup:

• It’s FREE if you’d just like to attend, mingle and watch local startups do their presentations.
• If you’d like to demo your startup that evening, $1,500 will put you onstage.

This event has the potential to sell out soon, so if you want to go, I suggest that you register now. See you there!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

iOS Simulator Tips and Tricks

If you build iOS apps, you spend a fair bit of time in the simulator. Here’s a set of tips to get the most out of it:

1. Use custom coordinates to simulate being in a specific location or in a moving vehicle.
2. Slow down animations so that you can polish them.
3. Apply colours to views to it’s easier to check your layouts.
4. Simulate hardware and software events, including simulating a hardware keyboard and the “TV Out” option.
5. Add photos to the simulator.

A Guide to the iOS SDK for Web Designers

If you’re a designer and not a developer, building iOS UIs with Xcode can seem pretty daunting. The Smashing Magazine article, A Guide to the iOS SDK for Web Designers, is a designer-focused overview of Xcode, covering the preparation of graphics for Xcode, importing them into Xcode, building user interfaces and evening doing a little coding.

The Pew Research Center’s Survey of Smartphone and Tablet Users

A Pew Research Center survey of about 10,000 adults conducted online from June to August 2012, reports that:

• 22% of U.S. adults own a tablet, double that from the previous year
• 44% of U.S. adults have smartphones, up from 35% in May 2011
• 52% of tablet owners said they own an iPad, down from 81% a year ago
• 48% of tablet owners said they own an Android device; half of them were Kindle Fires

Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes

And finally, an amusing little Tumblr showing how people use them (at least in North America, anyway): Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes.

What will the 2019 picture look like?

Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo pointed to some food for thought from an old entry in Jason Kottke’s blog, dated February 27, 2000 — which was after the iMac and iBook, but before the really big hits:

• a year before OS X (March 2001),
• a year and a half before the iPod (October 2001),
• 7 years before the iPhone (June 2007), and
• a full ten years before the iPad (April 2010)

Here’s the key excerpt:

And that brings us to Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft is perhaps the largest target of this sort of “boycott”, organized or otherwise. People hate Microsoft. Companies hate Microsoft. It’s the company you love to hate. Apple, on the other hand, is one of the most beloved companies in the world. People love Apple.

But what if Apple were Microsoft? What if Apple had won the battle of the PC and was the largest company in the world? People would hate them. Why? Because they would be using the same tactics as Microsoft to stay ahead and keep every bit of that advantage in anyway that they could. Apple is the way it is because they are the underdog.

I’ll even argue that life would be worse under Apple’s rein. Apple controls the OS *and* the hardware: if we were under Apple’s boot instead of Microsoft’s, we’d be paying too much for hardware as well as the software.

It’s been over a dozen years since Kottke wrote that article, and his “What if?” has effectively come true. Apple is “the largest company in the world” if you go by its market cap — according to Forbes, it’s now “The Most Valuable Company in History”. Android may have the larger market share, but when it comes to the platform that people line up for, makes the news, is considered to be the reference platform, has the developer love and makes them the most money, it’s iOS.

Here’s the question, which I’ll leave up to you to answer: now that we’re “under Apple’s rein”, is life worse, as Kottke speculated it would be?