Jerry Manock is the industrial designer who designed the Apple II, Apple III and first Macintosh. This is a wonderful piece that’s no doubt come out because of Walter Isaacson’s book: Steve Jobs.

Manock is a great guy, very humble yet he was in the middle of the push to ship the first Macintosh and had a lot of interaction with Jobs.

I have a box of print material saved from those days showing the original Macintosh team and Manock is in there along with Jobs, Atkinson, Herzfeld, Smith, and many others.

The third to last paragraph describing his trip to an Apple board meeting many years later made me cry.

Great stuff, a must read for anyone interested in Apple history.

[via Kottke.org]

The piece of Guy’s essay that appeals to me most is this:

So if you’re in an Apple based household the odds are good that your new Apple TV will be able to talk to one of your other devices and get the required network info from it. I’d bet heavily that this capability makes its way into AirPort devices and Macs. “Want to let this device on your network?”, is exactly the level of simplicity that Apple tends to aim for.

Setting up and using an AirPort network is much simpler than any of the other wifi routers I’ve played with over the years and my guess is that Apple is going to continue to make it simpler to add new devices to the network, including the AppleTV. It’s easy now and it will be even easier which is part of the puzzle of making a living room appliance that’s easy to use and integrate with other devices you already own.

I’m not entirely convinced that Apple will get into the flat panel TV business but I’m convinced that they’ll expand the capabilities of the current AppleTV, turning a Sony or Samsung flat panel TV set into a dumb HD screen, which is fine by me, I hate the menus on my Sony Bravia.

[via Steve Splonskowski]

This is by far the best of the documentaries on Jobs and early Apple. It’s an hour long, make the time to see it, it’s well worth it.

[via Kottke.org]

I first posted about Susan Kare here: Making the Macintosh Project but I’ve known about her since the mid-1980′s because both her icon and font designs were the “face” of the original Macintosh and stayed with us for close to ten years.

She makes and sells limited edition prints: Susan Kare: limited edition prints and has a professional web site for her design work: Susan Kare: user interface graphics.

Don McAllister of ScreenCasts Online has done a great job demoing a Macintosh application I’ve been using a while, Fantastical. I must say, I learned quite a bit from Don’s excellent presentation.

The big selling point in using Fantastical as the front end to iCal is natural language input. Watch Don demo this and you’ll be sold.

Apple’s collection of videos for users at every level on how to use Macs: getting started, moving from Windows, customizing, setting up a wireless network, using included applications like mail, calendar, address book and more.

Brent Simmons has written an excellent piece on proposed changes to Google Reader and how they might affect clients like Reeder which piggy back off it.

I use Google Reader to catalog and organize my various RSS feeds and have been since I dropped NetNewsWire (which Brent Simmons above wrote) years ago in favor of Reeder on my Mac and my two iOS devices.

My RSS feeds are the center of my online activity and I can’t imagine doing what I do online without a single application to organize and read them. I track activity at this site, my flickr account including all of my contacts, various sections of numerous newspapers and news feeds, blogs, photoblog, Apple related stuff, funny videos, and lots more. Google Reader and clients like Reeder and the RSS functionality they use is the single most important part of my computing experience and has been for many years now.

I have no doubt that the authors of the various Google Reader clients (like Reeder) are watching closely and will adapt to whatever Google does, but as Bent says, Google is looking a bit less generous and a bit more self-serving by forcing integration of their social network which may or may not be meaningful associated with RSS feeds.

This announcement isn’t just a reminder of the fragility of the system: it removes some features that people use. Google Reader’s social and sharing features are going away in favor of integration with Google+.

Crap.

Ask Different is a brilliantly built discussion site that allows people to ask questions about their Apple products and get a variety of answers and tips from others.

I first heard about it back here and I decided to subscribe to its RSS feed for a while to see what kinds of questions and answers were being put up.

In short order I figured I might be able to answer a few of the questions so I registered and posted an answer. That led to another and pretty soon I was hooked, less on being a know-it-all (I know much less than most people posting there) but on the challenge of attempting to explain in words the answers to various questions (one can also post screen shot images there).

Questions and answers are rated, much like Amazon or eBay reviews might be and in this case it’s less about a popularity contest, more about helping folks find the credible sources and to support well written questions and answers. Brilliant.

I’ve learned quite a bit from this feed, not just answers to my own technical questions but also about the types of questions and problems people are having in the Apple world. Ask Different could easily turn into a more up to date and fluid source than Apple’s support area or Wikipedia (Apple products) for these types of things. Certainly a parallel source for more specific questions.

Many of my Mac and iOS using friends who read this blog could easily become addicted to this so I’m warning you, be careful.

That same field is in the Address Book in Mac OS 10.7.2 so you can add those phonetic equivalents for your iPhone 4S and Siri on your Mac if you like, syncing through iCoud.

Add the field in Address Book’s Preferences/Template pull down.

My condolences for your loss.

I walked up to your husband in 1984 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco and asked him to give me a then brand new Macintosh computer to take with me to Alaska to work with students and adults with learning disabilities. We talked for a few minutes and by the time I returned home to Oregon the Macintosh was waiting for me. In short order that computer changed my life and the lives of the people in Alaska I worked with.

The Macintosh allowed me to experience my own intelligence, separate from my learning disability for the first time in my life. In turn, I helped thousands of other people all over the world experience the same thing.

I met Steve only once more many years later in an Apple Education Advisory Board meeting I was part of but the size and format of the meeting never allowed me to pull him aside and thank him for what he’d done for me.

Steve’s vision has changed millions of lives all over the world. I’m one of those people.

Thank you for what your husband did for me.

Richard