I'm a freelance tech writer currently covering Apple and Google at Cult of Mac and Cult of Android.

Automattic Acquires Poster for iOS

The company that owns Wordpress has bought Poster, a fantastic iOS app for using Wordpress.

The developer behind Poster, Tom Witkin, is a great guy. I’m happy for him. I remember emailing him several months ago with a feature request. He promptly responded and said he was looking into it for a future update. It still hasn’t been added. I wonder if the acquisition talks were going on back then.

The official Wordpress client has been pretty bad since its initial release. Apparently Poster’s features will be implemented to make it better. I really hope that Poster itself doesn’t disappear, because it has been my answer to blogging on the go for a long time.

The MacLegion Security Bundle

Six great Mac apps for a crazy price: $29.99. Normal value is $360.92. Even if there’s only one or two apps you want in the list, it’s worth purchasing at this insane of a discount.

(The above is an affiliate link that will help me buy coffee to survive. I know the guys at MacLegion, and they have been doing great stuff in the indie Mac dev community for years. Their bundles are always top notch and you get full customer support with your purchase. Thanks for your support.)

Yeezus

Kanye West hardly ever gives interviews, so that alone makes this piece notable. On top of that, you have golden nuggets like, “It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.”

That’s a real quote. He actually said that out loud to a New York Times reporter.

He also thinks that he is the successor to Steve Jobs.

I still can’t tell which is more gargantuan: Kanye’s talent, or his ego.

"Apple’s latest creation is a woman named Mieko Haire"

In its efforts to show off features of its new mobile operating system software known as iOS 7, Apple has imagined a user to populate a virtual device with typical content. Apple calls that user Mieko Haire, and in marketing tutorials describes her as a young woman who has recently moved to Los Angeles…

Fascinating look at how Apple uses real employees in its promotional material.

An underrated iOS 7 addition I’m super excited about

Buried beneath the avalanche of iOS 7 news week is an extremely interesting addition: support for hardware game controllers. Half-baked products like the iCADE arcade cabinet have attempted to bring analog gaming to iOS already, but what iOS 7 offers takes it to a whole new level.

In iOS 7, developers will have the ability to directly integrate Apple-approved physical controllers with iOS games.

When Tim Cook talked about Apple being “more open” with developers a couple weeks ago, perhaps this is one of the areas he was referring to. A rumor from awhile ago claimed that Apple was working on a physical game controller of its own. It would make sense for Apple to prototype the game hardware integration in iOS 7 before developers were given access.

And suddenly gaming on the Apple TV makes more sense.

Design it yourself

The “if you hate iOS 7 so much why don’t you design it yourself” argument holds little merit. I’ve been seeing it on Twitter a lot since Monday.

If something doesn’t look good to a considerable amount of people (like iOS 7), then its design choices should be questioned. Apple is not infallible, and iOS 7 should not be judged solely on the fact that the Apple name is behind it. 

I may lack the technical ability to design something like iOS 7 on my own (much less something that looks better), but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell when something is designed well. Users are the judges of a product. If the users don’t like it, then the creator’s opinion doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. In my opinion, iOS 7 is disjointed and more confusing to use than iOS 6 (in its current state, at least).

Imagine [insert politician’s name here] making a hugely controversial decision that millions of Americans were troubled by or disagreed with. Does it make sense to say that you can’t judge the politician’s decision because you don’t have a degree in political science or law? Of course not.

Westward

Moments from traveling through more than 7 states in 2 weeks, including Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

I’ve been on vacation for the past couple of weeks. Here’s some stills taken on a Sony Nex 7. I used Analog for Mac to do all the editing, and I was pretty pleased with the app’s constraints. It allowed me to apply changes more quickly and get the album done.

(Also, my first time using Flickr since the redesign. I like the new look.)

Kamas, Utah from the Uinta mountain range

Tech Companies And PRISM

But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.

All of the denial statements issued by the companies involved in PRISM mean nothing. The wording is carefully constructed with terms like “back door” and “direct access.” Heck, the situation probably requires these kinds of denials. A simple “no comment” would be more incriminating.

In fact, the only thing these denials from companies like Google and Facebook mean is that all parties involved are—and have been—complicit with each other behind closed doors. Congress has apparently re-approved PRISM countless times over the past several years, which is even more disheartening.

What’s interesting to me is that Twitter is missing from the list.