297: ‘Subscribed to a Hamburger’, With David Smith
The Talk Show With John Gruber
09/30/20
•166m
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Special guest “Underscore” David Smith joins the show to talk about iOS 14 widgets, WatchOS complications, sleep tracking, and his App Store chart-topping hit Widgetsmith.
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Underscore’s apps:
- Widgetsmith
- Watchsmith
- Sleep++
- Pedometer++
- And a lot more. Seriously, he makes a lot of apps.
Other links:
- Under the Radar — Underscore’s weekly podcast with Marco Arment.
- Daring Fireball: “Widgetsmith and The Case of the Missing App Store Bunco Squad”.
- National Weather Service.
- Weatherline.
- Michael Ward’s classic 2004 piece for McSweeney’s: “E-Mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone”.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Previous Episode
296: ‘Cameras Every Single Where’, With Michael Simmons
September 26, 2020
•140m
Special guest Michael Simmons joins the show. Topics include the release of iOS 14, widgets and home screen customization, pricing models for indie apps in the App Store era, and, of course, flying robot cameras.
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Links:
- Fantastical’s iOS 14 update with customizable widgets galore.
- Apple gave developers less than 24 hours notice that iOS 14 was about to ship, despite spending all summer encouraging developers to be ready with iOS 14 features at launch.
- Nova — Panic’s new code editor/IDE for Mac.
- Sketch — excellent Mac design and prototyping tool.
- Agenda — excellent notes/planning app for Mac and iOS.
- @mcharo on Twitter customized all his apps with icons of their company CEOs (or indie creators).
- IEEE Spectrum: “Why You Should Be Very Skeptical of Ring’s Indoor Security Drone”.
Mac desktop customization memory lane with Greg Landweber’s utilities:
- Greg’s Browser — NeXT-style column view file manager for classic Mac, worked wonderfully alongside the classic Finder.
- Greg’s Buttons — Control Panel to customize the interface of System 7, turned flat black-and-white buttons into cool 3D buttons. Now we’ve turned all our cool 3D buttons into boring monochromatic flat buttons.
- Aaron — brought the then-future Platinum appearance to System 7.
- BeView — made your Mac look like BeOS.
- Kaleidoscope — the masterpiece of the genre, from Landweber and Arlo Rose. A full-on custom theme engine for an OS that was not designed with system-wide theming as a feature. The golden age of interface customization hacks.
- Appearance Manager — Apple’s officially supported theming engine that wound up shipping with just one theme.
- Info on Apple’s Hi-Tech, Gizmo, and Drawing Board themes.
- August 2000 ATPM story by Christopher Turner on Kaleidoscope and Appearance Manager.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Next Episode
298: ‘I’m Expecting Led Zeppelin IV’, With Special Guest MG Siegler
October 9, 2020
•144m
MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about Apple Watch, the future of premium TV and movies, and a preview of next week’s “Hi, Speed” Apple event.
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Links:
- MG on Apple Watch Series 6, and why he swapped Graphite stainless steel for blue aluminum.
- MG on App Clips and the Clip demo of the game Phoenix 2.
- “Apple, Influence, and Ive” — Ben Clymer’s 2018 profile of Jony Ive for Hodinkee.
- The seminal 2018 town hall meeting led by John Stankey, the longtime AT&T executive who now oversees HBO, that foreshadowed HBO’s decline.
- Christopher Nolan’s work on the 2018 50th anniversary “unrestored” print of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Nolan’s ill-advised decision to force Tenet into theaters amidst the COVID pandemic.
- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol — perhaps the best film in a great series, directed by Brad Bird.
- Cary Joji Fukunaga — director of the astounding first season of True Detective and the upcoming No Time to Die James Bond film.
- Michael Clayton — quietly great movie by Tony Gilroy, starring George Clooney.
- DisneyQuest, the aborted urban entertainment center in Philly that Disney never built in the late 1990s.
- United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. — 1948 Supreme Court antitrust case that resulted in movie studios being banned from owning theaters.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
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