Earlier today, I wrote on Apple’s hint at the iPhone 5. To be honest, I wrote the article solely to show you this amazing gif.

I’ll show it to you again. Just in case you missed it the first time.

Anyway, throughout the day I glanced over numerous takes on the naming matter, and MG’s snippet seems to sum it up quite well with, “because of reasons.”

Which, to be exact, is marketing.

Remember Ocean’s Twelve? It wasn’t the 12th film in the series, it simply followed Ocean’s Eleven. Maybe it’s best to think of it that way.

It’s for the people

Non-followers of tech already refer to the upcoming iPhone as iPhone 5. If Apple swung a curveball at them – because let’s be honest, there are more of them than us – and called it iPhone 6, they’ll look blankly into space.

They’ll then proceed to ask seemingly silly questions like “wait, when did the iPhone 5 come out? How did I miss that...

So by now you must have heard that there will indeed be an Apple event on September 12th (next week Wednesday). Apple has reportedly sent out its media invites and the countdown begins.

There’s just one thing that has me scratching my head.

It’s subtle, but the ‘12’ casts a ‘5’ shadow. Two things are wrong with this picture.

1) It’s not the fifth iPhone.

The first iPhone was rightly named, ‘iPhone.’ The second iPhone was named 3G because it was 3G compatible. The third was named 3GS, because–as Apple put it– it was a “speedier” and amped version of its predecessor. And, it was the third device. The forth was named ‘4.’ That’s where the company screwed themselves. Maybe they were hoping to make the device 4G compatible by then, failed, but kept the numeral? The fifth was named the 4S for a similar reason as the 3GS.

Now, the sixth device will supposedly be called the iPhone 5...

Earlier today, The Industry tweeted out:

Not working today? How about showing off your workspace via @instagram? Snap a shot and tag it industryworkspace

So I did just that. However, I didn’t feel like the photo did my workspace any justice. So i grabbed my Nikon, snapped a few shots, dabbled in Photoshop, wrote a few lines in Espresso, and made this.

A webpage dedicated to my workspace. Not to mention, I linked to everything I use, so you can go shopping with a pre-made list if you decide. Check it out!

Going along with what Nathan Kontny said yesterday, once in a while we as writers, designers, developers, and creatives alike should pause and simply say thanks. There’s so much wrong with the web, so much to resent and point out, that often times we easily get caught up in such negative things.

(via xkcd)

Then we write daily short articles that narrate these negative things. We point out the terrible decisions made by large tech companies and silly opinions by people. They get the hell retweeted out of them, hit the front page of Hacker News, then we relax–with a smile (how ironic)–as we watch our blog analytics reach new heights.

But sometimes we just need to take a break and show some kindness.

Kindness (ˈkīn(d)nis) noun The quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.

Yes, there is negativity all over the web, but there’s also positive things. There are too many...

I think it’s now fair to say that Microsoft is making a comeback. I mean, just take a look at how often they’ve been appearing on Techmeme lately.

Jordan Koschei, a writer on The Industry, just delivered a piece I believe the tech giant should post on their homepage. Check it out!

Or, if you’re not into that sort of thing, at least take a peek just for the awesome Dark Knight Rises/Steve Ballmer image.

Today Microsoft announced it’s new logo and company-wide branding.

It looks like this:

or this:

Same thing.

My Thoughts

It looks nice. Simple and square – nothing wrong with that. However, I do wish that they had dropped the logotype “Microsoft,” and simply stick with the symbol as their new logo.

After all, we have seen this color combo for 25 years now (and it was basically the Windows logo). What could we possibly mix it up with?

pause.

Besides, they seem to put heavy emphasis on it too:

The symbol is important in a world of digital motion (as demonstrated in the video above.) The symbol’s squares of color are intended to express the company’s diverse portfolio of products.

Even Twitter went for the major rebranding and dropped the characters from its new icon-only logo at just six years of age.

So is Microsoft afraid of such a move? Or do they simply love the Segoe...

For those of you who hate long articles, I’ll summarize everything in one sentence.

Creators, if you know it’s worth it, charge for your product.

There.

Now for you who don’t mind a few chunks of text, let’s continue. I came up with the idea for this brain dump after last month’s Sparrow acquisition. In that post I said,

If we give these ingenious app creators the financial security they deserve, maybe, just maybe, they’d see a longterm profit in their work and turn these tech giants down. But until then, don’t complain when Google or Facebook show up in front of their door and offer them million dollar buyouts (and in some cases, well paying jobs).

Developers, if you know it’s worth it, charge for your product. Sparrow was worth its weight in gold and I would have happily dropped $49 for the Mac client and $19 for the iOS app… if it had push notifications. And users, stop...

Some minutes ago, the incredible guys at Obvious Corp. announced the launch of their newest project, Medium.

Immediately, I read Ev William’s opening piece explaining the reasoning behind the idea. I then chased down my friends at Obvious for a first-class invite into the special project (I’m still waiting Geoff and Dann…). But I digress.

In William’s article, he made many points which I found hard to disagree with. One such point:

Still, some things haven’t evolved as much as we would have expected. Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others. And in many ways, the web is still mimicking print concepts, while not even catching up to it in terms...

If you haven’t heard by now, our dear Sparrow has been acquired by Google. With that, ends the updates to their existing Mac and iOS applications, but not their vision for better email.

I’ve read dozens of tweets and tech blogs that expressed their disapproval of the acquisition. Yet, within the same articles and 140 characters, they showed their supposed ‘loyalty and commitment’ to Sparrow. Seems a bit ironic if you ask me.

But I digress.

Anyway, late Friday evening, I had a five minute rant on Twitter. In it, I explained my theory that everyone should simply leave Sparrow alone. They built an amazing application that, in its time, served us well. Yes, they’ve now moved on to higher mountains, but so what? That’s their decision. Besides, from what Leca, Hoà, and Denis have been reiterating throughout the interwebs this past weekend, the assault team of five hope to change things up...

A post I just wrote on The Industry about design.

Perpetual, adjective, means never-ending. That’s how I view design – it never ends. Rather, it transcends the office or work hours, gatherings or conferences, force closing Photoshop or Illustrator, Coda or Espresso, Mac or PC, and everything in between. When we start to think of design as something that’s ongoing, our outlook changes, our thought processing changes, and ultimately, our design changes.

You might want to read it.