Aayush Arya is a student from India and regular contributor for Macworld. You can find him on Facebook, look him up on Flickr, follow him on Twitter, or drop him an e-mail if you need to contact him. His older posts can be found in the archives. Thank you for visiting Penned Thoughts.
…—The first two comments on Matt’s blog post announcing his first iPhone app, TV Forecast
This was in August 2008, a month after the App Store launched. Looks like some users got a head start on the App Store’s pricing-race to the bottom.
I’m reminded of a forum thread from the same time,…
Spot on! I couldn’t agree more. Go ahead, read the full thing.
Funny, and oh-so-true.
Steve Jobs on the importance of branding and core values, in a company meeting prior to the launch of the “Think Different” marketing campaign. It’s the stuff of genius.
[via Macworld]
I Don’t Want Directions.
Haha!
I am conducting an international survey of contemporary followers of Hindu/Dharmic traditions regarding attitudes towards evolution. If you consider yourself to be a follower of any Hindu/Dharmic tradition, I would greatly appreciate your time and effort in completing this survey.
This is a survey organised by C. Mackenzie Brown, who is “a professor of religion at Trinity University in Texas, USA, and has been researching Hindu attitudes towards evolution and creation for a number of years.” I encourage you to participate in it.
Selling my excellent Sennheiser RS 140 Wireless Balanced Headphones on eBay India. Feel free to place a bid.
That would be, hands down, the best feature of the game.
It’s a wonderfully written article. If artificial intelligence is the sort of thing that piques your interest, you cannot go wrong reading this (rather lengthy) essay.
I was never the geeky comic book reading kid while I was in high school but I did visit the comic book store regularly to check out and buy the latest versions of some of the comics I used to like. Spider-Man always was, and still is, one of my favourites and there were some Indian titles, like Tinkle Digest, that I used to like.
Let me tell you what I did not like: Superman. Superman is the ideal superhero. He has every power a superhero could want and then some. Super speed, super strength, the ability to fly and deflect bullets, x-ray vision, heat vision, superhuman hearing, immortality (for all practical purposes), and the list goes on.
But do you know what he doesn’t have? The power to compel. As in, cause a reader to be engrossed in his stories by being a compelling character. I have never read a Superman comic but I have watched him in a lot of 2D television cartoons and in several seasons of the show Smallville.
Before you pick up your pitchforks and tell me that Smallville is the worst depiction of Superman to base my judgement on, I’ll have you know that I agree. But that’s the reason I chose to watch it. Since I do not like Superman as a character, I figured I may enjoy it if I saw him in his childhood, when he would be less, er, perfect.
Every Superman story I have ever read or seen begins, progresses and ends in exactly the same way: Bad guy shows up, Superman hears or sees him doing something from several miles away, flies to the scene of the crime, beats him up and is almost able to defeat him when the bad guy somehow manages to produce some Kryptonite.
Superman immediately weakens and falls to his knees, then onto the ground and is about to die when Lois Lane shows up and knocks out the bad guy or somehow removes the Kryptonite from the scene. Superman’s power is restored and, presto, Superman saves the day! He flies Lois Lane to safety and they make eyes at each other and then he flies away. End of story.
I know that basically every single superhero story follows the “bad guys shows up, superhero finds out about bad guy, bad guy exploits some weakness in superhero and superhero ultimately defeats bad guy” premise, but nowhere is it portrayed in such a starkly black and white manner as it is in Superman comics.
And don’t even get me started on his “disguise”! A different hairstyle and no glasses! Look, here’s me:
Now here’s a random guy who looks nothing like me:
What do you mean it’s me in both pictures? I thought I’d done such a good job of disguising myself! Damn you, Superman! I’m never listening to your “10 Tips to Become the Master of Espionage” podcast again.
Here’s how I imagine the initial discussion on the disguise of Superman might have unfolded:
Superman is boring. The creators of Superman wanted to make a character that embodied the fantasy of every child who reads a comic book: What if there was a superhero who had all the powers in the world!
But then they realised that there would never be any villain that would be able to match up to this ideal superhero, so they gave him one critical weakness, and now every Superman villain worth his salt better have some Kryptonite on their person at all times.
It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that the only reason I even watched Smallville beyond the first few episodes was the amazing performances of Michael Rosenbaum, John glover and John Schneider. How that show has managed to last for ten seasons—and Superman, as a character, for all the years that it has—I’ll never know.
-Aayush
Bradley kicked at the banister railing at the top of the stairs and stomped off to his room, flung himself onto his bed. So unfair, he fumed. Bethany gets all the cool games. Bethany gets to have an iPhone 4 and all I get is a stupid iPod touch which doesn’t even have a Retina Display or a three-axis solid-state gyroscope. Bradley had a tendency to memorize WWDC keynotes.
Go read. Now.
I’d follow that bit of advice if I was you.
The Apple Store is down right now and John Gruber reckons that new iMacs, Mac Pros and a “Magic Trackpad” might be in the offing. The later is supposed to be a trackpad for desktops. Should that actually happen, I would just like you to know that I was the one who came up with that idea. And I totally predicted that the button on Apple’s trackpads was not long for this world.
After a flood of reader emails, we’ve developed this how-to guide about getting as many free Apple devices as you want.
Disclaimer: Anshu Chimala strongly opposes stealing Apple stuff, we think people should remunerate Apple for their hard work. However, we also recognize that it can…
Cult of Mac writer Sayam Aggarwal published an iPhone app piracy guide. Yes, you read that right. And you know what the best part is? That “Cult of Mac strongly opposes software piracy” and thinks that “people should remunerate developers for their hard work.”
Like I said on Twitter, that’s like a slaughter house saying, “we strongly support vegetarianism.” Or a terrorist organisation saying, “we strongly oppose blowing people up for the sake of fun.”
Check out Anshu Chimala’s sarcastic and oh-so-hilarious take on the article above.
The cutest singing kid you will ever see. Hilarious.
