Once upon a time, Apple was no longer a "beleagured" computer maker, but also was not yet the world's most valuable maker of computers and consumer electronics. Mac OS X was downright lickable, and you'd use Internet Explorer 5 for Mac to browse the web from your toilet seat-looking iBook (mine ran at an acceptable 300MHz) while listening to MP3s downloaded from the recently defunct Napster. Maybe you'd burn some of them to CD to listen to on your Discman. Mac OS X's developer documentation was so spotty that seemingly every page of it had a link on it that read "for more information, visit the Omni Group website."
When Safari was announced at MacWorld Expo 2003, I was visiting my sister in Geneva, and had long-since traded in my Discman for a 5GB iPod that astonishingly put "1000 songs in [my] pocket." It was pretty obvious that the iPod was not "lame" as someone once infamously remarked, but was in fact the best way to listen to music. I downloaded the Safari public beta and was absolutely blown away by how ridiculously fast it was. Apple was not yet king of the hill, but it was pretty obvious that they were in ascendancy (although to where, exactly, wasn't clear for another several years).
Don Melton, once the head of Safari at Apple, published a wonderful article on his blog this past week about his experiences with Steve Jobs, and includes a number of anecdotes starting from 2001. It's a relatively lengthy read, but I think you'll find it to be well worth your time.
Until next time,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Apple Claims Mogenerator's Methods
- The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain
- Here's Why Developers Keep Favoring Apple Over Android
- The Fallacy Of Android-First
- The Six Juiciest Documents From the Apple-Samsung Trial This Week
- Apple Expected to Unveil iWatch in September as Suppliers Deliver Circuit Board Samples
- JavaScriptCore by Example
Control of the Week
PWParallaxScrollView
PWParallaxScrollView is a library that provides a simple way to implement a Windows Phone Panorama-style parallax container. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
PCSideBarController
UIViewController which provide navigation via a side bar. Side bar items are to select view controller and manage also actions buttons. MIT licensed. |
NSObject+MethodCallDependingType
Objective-C Category for routing methods depending a specified type MIT licensed. |
Kontaminate
A virus game for iOS with two artificial intelligence types and depth (min-max | alpha-beta). Made for iPhone 5 / iOS 6, fully working in iOS 7. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
BROptionsButton
GTImageViewDraw
Simple category to draw on UIImageView. You can draw on a existent image or you can draw on a blank image. There are many methods (to change color, brush, to erase, etc..). MIT licensed. |
MKToggleButton
A binary toggle button that looks like the iOS7 toolbar toggles. This button draws a rounded-rect button that fills in when selected. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
BRFlabbyTable
CADVoteCountView
The vote counter used at Topic: a circular or linear shaped view where you animate the angle changes, used at Topic app to set the vote count of a post MIT licensed. |
YCameraView
Weather Around (YQL DEMO)
PAImageView
Rounded async imageview downloader based on AFNetworking 2 and lightly cached MIT licensed. |
UIImageView-PlayGIF
UIImageView category/subclass for playing GIF. Simple, high performance, low memory footprint. MIT licensed. |
LPPopupListView
LPPopupListView is custom popup component for iOS with table for single or multiple selection. MIT licensed. |
PZSideMenuViewController
Easy to integrate 2D sliding panel MIT licensed. |
DigitClock
It`s just a simple and flat Digital Clock. BSD licensed. |
INTULocationManager
INTULocationManager makes it easy to get the device's current location on iOS. MIT licensed. |
SimpleCam
A Memory Efficient Drop In Replacement / Alternative for the Native UIImagePicker Camera MPL licensed. |
JMOTableViewDescription
JMOTableViewDescription is an Objective-C library for easily creating and manage complex structured tableView. MIT licensed. |
GeoPointCompass
A simple compass that points towards the direction of a custom geo-location that you can specify by providing latitude and longitude of the location. MIT licensed. |
HPReorderTableView
A drop-in UITableView replacement to reorder cells with long press on any part of the cell. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
QPSplitViewController
Split View Controller (like Settings app) for iOS MIT licensed. |
TKScroller
MVSpeechSynthesizer
XCParameterizedTestCase
Parameterized implementation of XCTestCase. MIT licensed. |
ResizableMKCircleOverlay
A resizable map overlay. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
APCloudCore
Simple iCloud file managment. Read, write, load, list files across devices. Requirements: iOS 5.1 (minimum for iCloud) ARC/Non ARC MIT licensed. |
Gamify
Gamify is a control that lets you easily add gamification elements to your app. MIT licensed. |
AMLoginViewController
RBRouteBuilder
JWGCircleCounter
A handy counter & view that counts down with a circular animation. MIT licensed. |