CrazyOnes
Latest
"Crazy Ones" poster being sold for charity
The "Crazy Ones" quote used in a few different places around Apple, including some icon Easter eggs and the famous commercials, has been turned into a typeface posted by Los Angeles advertising firm TBWA/Chiat/Day in order to raise funds for charity. You can see and buy the poster over at the aptly named crazyonesquote.com; It's available unframed for $95, and with a frame around it for $100 more. The quote is labeled with Steve Jobs' name at the bottom, and while it's definitely been used a lot lately to represent Jobs' life and what he stood for, all we really have in terms of credit is a general sense that Jobs helped put most of it together for defining Apple's brand. Still, it fits, and Chiat/Day's design on this poster looks great. All proceeds from the sale will go to the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that helps by investing in great social enterprises and ideas around the world. Because, you know, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world ... are the ones who do. [via TNW]
Here's to the crazy ones: a farewell to Steve Jobs
We knew. We may not have wished to know, and perhaps it was easier to push away that sense of impending sadness, the awareness that time was short, but we knew what was coming. After August, after the resignation, we knew. And yet, it's still shocking. It still hurts. Steve Jobs was a father and a husband, and the loss for his family -- having suffered with him through the acute, chronic and finally terminal phases of his illness -- is simply unfathomable. For those of us who have seen a family member or loved one taken away decades too soon by this loathsome disease, who know intimately the costs of cancer and its consequences, this is far too familiar. We feel the bereft emptiness they feel now as an echo of our own pain, a sharp pull on the cord of sorrow that connects us to our own absences of the heart. As for the rest of us: perhaps we had briefly encountered Steve at Macworld Expo in years past, or been privileged to see him deliver one of his legendary keynote addresses in person. Perhaps we got a terse reply to an email about a problem, or heard from an Apple support team member that Steve had personally escalated an issue on our behalf. Perhaps the connection was entirely one-way, and our perception of Steve was delivered at a distance. It does not matter. For all of us who were touched by his life's work, we feel a sense of loss that is surprising in its intensity. Part of that feeling is anger. Fifty-six. Fifty-six years young and you imagine, you try and simply fail to imagine what could have emerged from a full lifespan, from that kind of creative force. The world is poorer for the lack of another twenty years of Steve Jobs's brain, his energy, his judgement, his almost uncanny power to force reality to conform to his expectations rather than the other way around. Selfishly and callously we are angry, for what was taken from us, but that is part of grief too; part of knowing that you had something wonderful that you never properly appreciated until, suddenly, it was gone. Imagine how difficult it was for Tim Cook to introduce the iPhone 4S on Tuesday when he certainly knew that his own iPhone would be ringing soon with such horrible news. We are glad Tim is there, but we are still very, very angry Steve is gone. Another part is awe. How many second acts in business lead to the kind of success that Apple has found over the past decade? One, really; what Steve did in returning to Apple is unique. After wandering in the wilderness, fired from the company he created with Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak in that legendary garage, Steve did astonishing things again and again. Pixar, created from the unsuccessful Lucasfilm computer animation group, set free the remarkable creativity of John Lasseter and his band of perfectionist maniacs as they became the heir to Walt Disney's legacy -- and eventually, the artistic core of Disney's animation division, in the process making Jobs the entertainment megacorp's largest individual shareholder. Jobs's longstanding admiration of Walt Disney found its natural conclusion as Steve was effectively granted the keys to the Magic Kingdom. NeXT, built around the idea of a desktop computing experience without compromises in performance or ease of use, may not have taken over the world with hardware sales: the machines themselves were perhaps too good for the market, too expensive for business or home users. But they gained popularity in academic and scientific settings like CERN (where a NeXT workstation responded to the first http:// prompt) and Wolfram Research (where the flagship product, Mathematica, named by Steve himself, was bundled with the NeXT computer). The NeXTStep OS, in the end, built atop Avie Tevanian's Mach microkernel and with a GUI powered by Adobe's Display PostScript, begat the modern Mac OS X and the now-ubiquitous iOS. Lots of 'failed technology companies' would be thrilled with that kind of legacy. Finally, there is appreciation, there is gratitude. For all his notable faults, his temper, his intolerance for half-baked efforts, for all the people who both loved and hated working with and for Steve, we still cannot cherish and thank him enough. How many of us owe our livelihoods to the ecosystems and industries he helped create? How many of us spend our days intimately connected with the products he envisioned and shepherded to the market? Today you can walk into hundreds of Apple stores and thousands of other outlets around the world and walk out with a chunk of the future that fits in your pocket. The teams that build the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are legion, their numbers in the tens of thousands. If not for the vision of one man -- one man who simply refused to accept that good enough was good enough, and who made whole industries over to be right by his exacting standards -- where would we be now? It is perhaps not all that remarkable that America's president delivered a statement on the passing of Steve Jobs, as the former CEO of the country's (and the world's) most valuable business. It is remarkable, however, to note that the emotional impact of Jobs's death is the same for Barack Obama as it is for all of us. The two men shared eerily parallel origins; both children of foreign fathers and young American mothers, both raised outside their birth families (Obama by his grandparents, Jobs by his adoptive family), both somehow marked by heritage and circumstance to be destined for the history books and to do things that had never been done before. Now one of them is gone, but just as the world cannot be the same after the election of America's first biracial president, the world cannot be the same as it was before Steve Jobs. Namaste, Steve. We remember you with fondness and delight. We wish for your colleagues and for Tim Cook the wisdom and energy to lead Apple the way you would have continued to lead it for many years, if not for the harsh unfairness of cancer and the inevitable tick of life's clock. And we hope and pray that your wife and children may find a tiny seed of solace in the knowledge that their beloved was our beloved too. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Here's to the crazy ones: thanks to the unofficial iPhone developers
Back at the introduction of the iPhone (was it only just over a year ago? How the time flies) we all cast a jaundiced eye at Apple's "develop for the Web" philosophy for extending the platform, while simultaneously wondering if Apple might provide a true SDK for the device of the future; I seem to recall a conversation back on an early talkcast where a couple of people (yours truly included) stated for the record that a Apple SDK was an inevitability, with the only question being exactly when.Now, on the cusp of the official App Store and 2.0 firmware launch and ensuing flood of iPhone/iPod touch native applications, we owe a moment of acknowledgment to the folks who refused to take "Safari" for an answer when it came to making iPhone applications: the jailbreakers and community toolchain developers.Not to take anything away from the diligent work of the Mobile Safari application developers -- many of their results, including TUAW fave Hahlo, stand up well against desktop apps -- but it's hard not to feel some degree of astonishment when a few (sometimes fractious) loosely-affiliated bands of hackers, with some help from our friends, start from the barest hints of access to the iPhone's system and create castles floating on air. Scores of applications (some great, some not-so) including music, games, dictionaries, utilities and not one but two complete or nearly-so ports of the BSD subsystem, complete with sophisticated software deployment capabilities, are currently available for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touch handhelds. This is a notable body of work, and what makes it more surprising is that it's been done over the course of one year, absent any support from the device manufacturer (to say nothing of active discouragement) and with no particular financial incentive to proceed. This is hacking in the original, non-pejorative sense: diving into the innards of the coolest gadget under the sun to figure out how it works and how far you can take it.As exciting as the App Store is, there's a bit of wistfullness amidst the hype and enthusiasm; we are replacing the grimy, rough-edged and self-sustaining Times Square of iPhone application development with the sanitized, "Disney/Apple" reworking of the original. Knowing that a substantial fraction of the jailbreak app developers are under 18 and cannot legitimately join the authorized development program until they come of age, we can only hope that the energy and enthusiasm they brought to the iPhone will not be lost to another mobile platform.
TUAW On Scene: from the premiere of Welcome to Macintosh
Here's to the crazy ones. TUAW reader Tony Walla got to attend the Wisconsin premiere of the new Mac-doc film that's sure to be a crowd pleaser (depending on the crowd), and he sent us this report.On April 6th, the documentary "Welcome to Macintosh" premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison, WI to a packed theater of about 275 festival goers. Josh Rizzo and Rob Baca, who co-directed and produced the film, were in attendance. Before the film began, attendees could be seen checking email on their MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and iPhones. Even a Newton or two was in the crowd. One audience member even used the iSight on his MacBook Pro to snap a picture of the audience. To the attendees, this was not just a documentary, this was an Apple event.Rizzo and Baca's goal is to tell the story of the Macintosh experience. "In order to do the Mac experience, you've got to put it in context of the Mac history," notes Baca. Rizzo added, "You can't appreciate where it is today without knowing some of the past and the fact that there is a sprit, a personality. There is a flame that lives in Apple, that lives through some of the products that is dispersed though the creativity of the people that make them."
