Amazing. Seriously amazing. I really love the Retina Display on the iPhone 4/4S, but this feels like a step forward even from that. Not because it’s a better display (which it may well be), but because the much larger scale of the screen makes it feel transformative to the experience of looking at a Retina Display and using an iPad.

And:

It’s the best display I’ve ever seen. Anywhere, period. And it makes a meaningful difference to the experience — it’s not just a spec.

It’s not just a spec. Can’t wait to see this with my own eyes.

Via Daringfireball.

“We’ve sold just over 350,000 copies,” says product manager Nik Fletcher. “The launch day was massive, and by Wednesday last week it was number one on App Stores around the world. It’s been an incredible response.”

Clear costs 69p on the App Store, meaning that the app has generated net revenues of just over £169,000 so far, after Apple’s 30% cut. The revenues are being shared between Realmac, software studioImpending and co-creator Milen Dzhumerov, as Clear was a collaborative project.

Well-deserved success. Clear received giant amounts publicity because of their unique and innovative user interface, just as Path did when they launched their 2.0 version. I like where the future of marketing is headed.

Via @iA via Browserrank.

… Regardless of how good of a designer you think you are, you can always improve. But if you can’t digest feedback, you won’t. If you can’t improve, you’re done designing. Go learn something new, and never stop learning. Stay open. The best ideas come from the places you’d least expect them to. As one of my idols, architect Zaha Hadid once said, “There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?”

Very true, and something we should often remind ourselves of. This is also one of the reasons why I love what I do so much; Last year, I mostly did not know the technology nor the tools I use today. Several of the projects I work on today couldn’t have existed one year ago. Next year, the situation will be same.

The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announcement event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR.

And:

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

I wonder immediately about that “now”. I don’t press, because I find the question that immediately sprang to mind uncomfortable. And some things remain unchanged: Apple executives explain what they want to explain, and they explain nothing more.

The whole article is a great read worth checking out. I just can’t help to wonder about this strategy though. It was a strange answer coming from Schiller, with the “now” in the end. But if it really is a shift, instead of a one-time-thing, I’m certain it was planned a long time ago, with Steve Jobs’ full knowledge, and not something they changed just because he was no longer around.

AirPlay Mirroring

AirPlay Mirroring is probably the one thing that excite me the most. It’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for. At work, we have this big mess when we are connecting computers to TV’s, with different wires and inputs and other connection problems. Now we can throw all that way and just buy an Apple TV for each TV.

Messages

A very welcome addition. I was disappointed when iChat didn’t get a big upgrade for the Lion-release, so I’m glad they are killing it and launching this instead. Download the beta.

Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is a new security feature, which among it’s many different settings, let’s the user choose the following:

• Only install apps from the Mac App Store
• Only install apps from the Mac App Store and identified developers (developers has to digitally sign their apps)
• Install apps from anywhere

I’m very interested to see which of the three possibilities will be default one when you buy a new Mac. Gatekeeper also hints to a possible future, one with the last option removed. I don’t think that will happen though. It’s too drastic for OS X as a platform, which will be much smaller than iOS going into the future. OS X is only going to be used in work-type situations, where people need powerful and bigger tools than they can get on a tablet-type computer. But that’s a discussion for a different time and place.

Update: John Gruber reports that the second one is the default.

Notifications

Yep, this one made perfect sense. Feel sorry for the guys behind Growl though.

All in all, seems like OS X Mountain Lion is going to be a great release.

His talk from CUSEC 2012, Inventing on Principle, got released on Vimeo today. It’s enlightening, inspiring, thought-provoking, educational and incredibly fascinating. I recommend you take the time to watch it right now.

• Men spent 65 percent more time than women looking at the photos of their potential partner.
• Women spent 50 percent more time than men reading the profiles’ text descriptions, where their background and interests is listed.
• Men spent 58 seconds on average looking on a profile, compared to women’s average of 84 seconds.

So I presume the myth is true, we might be as shallow as they say.

Via AllThingsD.

Will Any Agency Hire This Man?

He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.
He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer.
He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy.
He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.

I doubt if any American agency will hire him.

However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.

He was, of course, talking about himself. It reminds me of how revolutions of industries rarely, if ever, comes from the inside. It happens when people from the outside create products with a new completely new view, not bound or affected by those already in existence.

Via @tor.

Via Asymco.