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The Call-Dad Edition Saturday, April 30, 2016

A Letter Of Thanks To Apple, From A Grateful Dad, by Davidahouse

He grabbed the phone with no screen, then he pressed the home button. He felt it try to vibrate and just said “Call Dad”. After what seemed like minutes, he heard “Calling Dad”. Siri never sounded so good. That is the call I got where I could hear him. Siri worked. The iPhone microphone worked. Amazing.

Vogueing Apple

Vogue And Apple: A Love Story, by Nicola Fumo and Kwame Opam, Racked

To the world at large, Vogue is fashion and Apple is tech. Each represents the premium in their space: Vogue with over a century in print and access to A-list everyone, Apple with the slickest must-have gadgets on the planet. Whether we subscribe to the magazine or own an Apple device personally is moot — they're mega-brands with mega-influence.

The two have united this year to produce the annual spring Costume Institute exhibit and its corresponding over-the-top event, the red carpet blowout known as the Met Gala. The exhibit, "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology," loosely covers the intersection of both industries. What a marriage.

Who Said It: Steve Jobs Or Anna Wintour?, by Jenni Avins, Quartz

Marketing 101

Phil Schiller Has Fun On Twitter, Internet Loses Its Fool Mind, by Rene Ritchie, iMore

How do you get Apple pedants and tech pubs to fall all over themselves? If you're Phil Schiller, you reply to a tweet...

Tor Myhren Officially Starts As Apple's New VP Of Marketing Communications, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

Myhren will be responsible for advertising, the company's internet presence, and packaging design, according to his newly-uploaded profile. Given the importance of the position, he will be reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook.

Common Language

The Convergence Of Emoji, by Sebastiaan de With

Companies like Google and Microsoft are entirely free to attempt to reshape our popular culture by changing the way their emoji look. They could easily dig their heels in and refuse to change their emoji iconography despite jarring differences between sets.

Fortunately, this isn’t the case. What we’re seeing instead is that the new emoji sets from Google and Microsoft have converged to a look that is far more similar to Apple’s, often mimicking particular peculiarities in expression or design that Apple apparently chose on a whim.

Here’s Why You Keep Seeing Popcorn Emojis All Over Drake’s Instagram Page, by Ashley Williams, Hiphollywood

This Month, The Beyhive Sent Over 2 Million Tweets With Lemon Emojis, by Fast Company

Stuff

Apple Debuts 'Reimagined And Redesigned' Support Site, by Husain Sumra, MacRumors

Apple today updated its support site with a brand new look and new ways for users to interact with it. The new site is broken into several different blocks, with most of the attention going to three different ways users can get help.

Review: Griffin's BreakSafe Cable Provides Handy Magnetic USB-C Charging, But With A Few Drawbacks, by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

In the first test, I left the cable plugged in and returned intermittently to check my MacBook's charge level, and discovered twice that the two correctly aligned magnetic ends were touching, but not fully connected.

Develop

This Is Why Proprietary Sync Servers Are A Mistake, by Kirk McElhearn

Sync is hard. If you can’t get it right, don’t try and roll your own sync server. There are other solutions, which worked well enough with the previous version of the app.

Notes

Reassuring Words About Apple’s Approach To Services, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

As the platform owner, Apple has the advantage of deeply integrating its services with iOS in ways that competitors can’t. I don’t begrudge them their ability to make money off of additional services, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of a fundamentally good user experience.

Little Scamp Causes Full Minute Of Dead Air On NPR On Take Your Child To Work Day, by Andy Cush, Gawker

“One of our junior journalists was some how able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not” the email read. “Feel free to giggle at will.”

A Poem About Silicon Valley, Assembled From Quora Questions About Silicon Valley, by Jason O. Gilbert, Fusion

Why do so many startups fail?
Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male?
Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives?
Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives?

Bottom of the Page

Surely, Apple has something in their secret labs that will be the next big thing and which doesn't require me to go out to get a driving license?

~

Thanks for reading.