Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Here’s a great article by the founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group. He argues that no individual detail about the iPhone is revolutionary, but that it’s about integration:

What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of Apple. It’s also speaks to the limited vision of the cell phone industry.

Well worth a read if you want to understand why Apple is brilliant.

[via TUAW]

Since coming back home to the Mac, I’ve been trying to find a decent photo-management application to handle all the pictures I take of the kids. It’s a LOT, and so tagging them with keywords is critical if I’m ever to find them again.

Both iPhoto and Aperture support the drag-photos-to-keyword thing or the reverse, but when you have a lot of keywords, it becomes very cumbersome and slow to apply them to a whole host of pictures.

Enter Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager. It makes it easy. Just select the photo or photos, hit ⌘-K and start typing a keyword. With your first character, it picks the most frequently used match and then refines as you type more. It seems to learn the right thing. For a picture with Sophie, Fiona, and Ian, it’s just ⌘-K f <ret> s <ret> i <ret>.

Sweet! Thanks, Bullstorm! Now, just add an option to write my keywords out to the files as iptc keywords (automatically, of course) and I’ll be in heaven!

I’ve been a fan of Joel’s for a while - his blog is one I read regularly. Recently, he announced a new software service from his company - effortless tech support for all the people in your life. It’s called Copilot and it’s the bees knees.

A fun read: Jobs’ Years in the Wilderness - NeXT

TUAW says:

It’s an interesting story, well-told, and all of the characteristic Jobsian traits are on display, including and especially his quasi-maniacal perfectionism and demand for control. And of course since OS X is built on what was NeXTstep, it’s also a kind of genealogy of our favorite operating system as well.

[via TUAW]