“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 innovate 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.

It looks like the kind of application where you would add fake content over and over again, just to experience the joy of interacting with it. Now that’s what I would call a great user experience.

It’s never too late to create a new product in an well-established category, you just have to do it much better.

Even though it looks great, I haven’t tried it yet. Many people have, and they say it’s as good as it looks, but I have to give it a spin before I can deem it a success or not.

Clear is built by Realmac Software, Milen and Impending. It has been sent to Apple and should be out very soon.

Update: It’s out. Clear lives up to all my expectations. Lovely, well-crafted and really fun to use. And make sure you have the sound on! Unfortunately it’s too light for me to make the switch from Things, especially since I’m using the Cloud beta version.

When Steve Jobs talked about he’s ‘cracked it’, he’s talking about connectivity – so we’ve had that in the market already for 12 months, it’s nothing new, it was new for them because they didn’t play in the space. It’s old news as far as the traditional players are concerned and we have broadened that with things like voice control and touch control; the remote control for these TVs has a touch pad.

Hmm. Phones did exist before the iPhone, no? That could connect to the internet? And that had apps on them? You could call, send messages and listen to music. Yes, I think that was possible.

Samsung, and many companies like it, just doesn’t get Apple. If my mind serves me correctly, Microsoft and Nokia showed this exact type of ignorance back when rumors about an Apple-phone started to float around. And they even did so after Apple had their unveiling. How did that end again?

In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be. When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”

A good and interesting read about how GitHub got started. What really stuck with me though, is that last sentence in the excerpt above. When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”. Hell yes, I definitively plan on doing the same.

Via @aral.

It’s no mistake that this is very much the sort of thing that is most valued within the most effective software teams in Silicon Valley. Let’s call it “the designer who codes.” This is the sort of person can build exactly what he knows people need, with an aesthetic that compliments its use, with no back-and-forth.

Silicon Valley start-up Quora does it this way to great effect. They take the process simplicity to the next level. Every person on lead designer Rebekah Cox’s team is also an engineer. The design doesn’t happen in Photoshop. It happens in the text editor, in code.

Great article about the new breed of designers, that doesn’t just live in Photoshop all day, but can, and do, design just as much directly in code. For interface design, it’s just nothing that can match it. Facebook, and especially Quora, are excellent at this. The experience is stellar.

The article also tell’s a fun little story about Steve Jobs and the first calculator on a mac.

Today that stops. It’s a new year, with new possibilities and with the wonderful opportunity of “resetting”. I’ve spent all December designing, developing and editing it, so I hope you’ll enjoy what you see and read.

I’ve also changed the format of my blog. It will still include articles like before, but I’ll also be posting links to all kinds of different content, with my opinion or comment below. The new blog setup is inspired by Daring Fireball.

I’d really appreciate to hear your thoughts, be it good or bad. Feel free to add a comment below or message me on twitter. Thank you!