Matt Stone:

“Comedy for me has to be either completely absurdist, or it has to be meaty and dark,” Stone says. “I just can’t do with romantic comedy. Really, you’re going to do another joke about going on a date? I’m like, ‘How do you go to work and do that?’ You’re not touching anything real, anything dangerous.”

The Book Of Mormon, which they wrote with Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), exemplifies the pair’s skill at undercutting audience assumptions. Far from simply mocking Mormonism, it celebrates the human need for myths to make sense of the world, even if quite a few Mormon myths get a proper kicking: “I belieeeeve,” one Mormon character croons in the show, “that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!”

Can’t this be applied to technology, too? “Really, you’re going to do another social media app?”

There are many insightful things in this interview with Alan Kay and I suggest you read it in its entirety. Here are two:

By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms).

For most people, what is going on is quite harmful.

And:

One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

Thanks to the people behind Shopster for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. Shopster is a grocery shopping app that learns where you buy certain items so it can remind you to pick them up the next time you’re around the store. Clever idea. The amount picker for entering how much of an item you need is really smart, too.

Looks like a great little app, and it’s only $0.99.

Shopster is a new kind of groceries list app that learns what you purchase and where, so it can remind you later on.

Whenever you check an item as purchased, Shopster learns the location where you got it. The next time you look for the same thing, a geofenced alarm will be triggered when you are near the location.

Features:
- Autolearning of locations when checking items as purchased.
- Geofenced reminders for your products, based on your prior buying history.
- In-place editing table, for quick corrections and editions.
- Unique ruler to quickly enter the number of items you need to buy.
- Smart autocomplete, to assist you entering frequently purchased products, based on your previous history.
- Reorder items with a simple tap and hold.

Check out Shopster on the AppStore, it’s only $0.99

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Stephen Hackett:

The Pebble is like the Model A. When people looked at the Model A, some realized it was the future, and that one day, everyone would drive one. Others thought Henry Ford was off his rocker and that his invention was a one-off that wouldn’t ever go anywhere.

Good analogy.

Wow:

In March 2010, just a couple of weeks before the iPad was due to be released publicly, I had a reason to contact Steve. A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible. She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.

This is a short little story from David Gelphman, but it’s a must-read. This is an example of how a company should be run: make exceptions when necessary, empower employees, and trust them to do the right thing with that power.

Oh, and be human.

What a beautiful story.

Patrick Rhone:

I’ve started to notice a trend with the apps that garner my personal praise. Some traits that they almost always share.

Simplicity, ingenuity and gumption. I love that. Very good way to summarize what good design is.

Sean Sperte wrote a short, but very good, piece on hashtags. Here’s one part that stuck out to me:

Hashtags do have great potential. Even in their most basic form – for taxonomy – hashtags can trump inferral through machines. No one knows better what they’re saying than the person saying it.

So, so right. One of Cheddar’s features that seemed immediately obvious to me after seeing it, but had never even entered my mind beforehand, was categorizing tasks using hashtags within the task itself. Then, to see tasks with a certain hashtag, you just tap one of the hashtags. It’s instant categorization that somehow feels both quicker and more natural than managing a categories list and choosing one from a drop-down menu.

That’s one small example, but Sean’s right that it could provide much more accurate taxonomy for virtually all forms of text (or anything, really) with very little effort from users themselves.

Google introduced a same-day shopping service called Shopping Express. Here’s John Gruber’s take:

This, from the company that shitcanned Google Reader because they wanted to “focus”.

Hard to disagree. And undermines much of what I wrote last week about Google. And by “undermine,” I mean “make completely wrong.”

Brent Simmons on why you shouldn’t use iCloud, even if it worked without issue:

Here’s the thing: half the mobile revolution is about designing and building apps for smartphones and tablets.

The other half is about writing the web services that power those apps.

How comfortable are you with outsourcing half your app to another company? The answer should be: not at all comfortable.

That’s right, and his other arguments (which are similar to the ones I made last year) are convincing, too.

iCloud is limiting, and building your own service allows you to provide more services. All true, but sometimes, all we want is for our data to follow us around to each device we use. With Quotebook, for example, I don’t really want unique social features that they could only build with a custom sync service—I just want all of my quotes on my iPhone and iPad, and I want to be able to add them from any of my devices.

In cases like Quotebook, it’s still possible that iCloud isn’t the right answer, because there’s no way for them to build a web application on top of iCloud. But that doesn’t mean they should have to write their own sync service. We should, ideally, be able to build on top of existing sync solutions, and write our own only if it’s truly necessary. I don’t think it’s good for the future of mobile computing if everyone is effectively required to write their own sync service. The number of devices people use is getting larger, but syncing data across them is still a difficult task. The goal should be to solve much of it for people.

Nasty Gal:

In 2006, Ms. Amoruso was a 22-year-old community college dropout, living in her step-aunt’s cottage, working at an art school checking student IDs for $13 an hour. Then she started a side project, Nasty Gal, an eBay page that sold vintage women’s clothing.

Last year, Nasty Gal sold nearly $100 million of clothing and accessories — profitably.

Great story. There’s a lot to learn from what Amoruso’s done.

Power of a filibuster:

A year ago, as the presidential race was taking shape, The Washington Post’s pollster asked voters whether they favored the use of drones to kill terrorists or terror suspects if they were “American citizens living in other countries.” The net rating at the time was positive: 65 percent for, 26 percent against.

Today, after a month of Rand Paul-driven discussion of drone warfare, Gallup asks basically the same question: Should the U.S. “use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against U.S. citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists?” The new numbers: 41 percent for, 52 percent against.

Wow.

Thanks to Wufoo for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.

Wufoo? Who? It’s a web application that lets you build amazing online forms for your websites.

We host everything. We build the backend. You get an easy, fun and fast way to collect and analyze data, and it even integrates with many payment systems.

With Wufoo you get…

• Over 200 pre-made templates & themes from our form gallery
• Ability to customize branding with your own logo and themes to match
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Just because you’re working with forms and data doesn’t mean you have to do it without personality or style. Gathering information from your users is exciting, why shouldn’t your tools be exciting too?

Experience the difference. Sign up for Free and get started with Wufoo today.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Black Pixel said a little about what’s happening with NetNewsWire. The good news: they’re developing new Mac and iOS versions. The bad news:

As far as sync is concerned, we knew we would likely need an alternative to Google Reader as early as last year. At the time, the option that seemed to make the most sense was to embrace iCloud and Core Data as the new sync solution of choice. We spent a considerable amount of time on this effort, but iCloud and Core Data syncing had issues that we simply could not resolve.

Ugh. As Steve Streza said on Twitter, if they can’t get it to work—a team of incredibly talented people—who can?

I really hope Apple’s working to fix iCloud’s issues. It needs to work, both for developers and for Apple.

Patrick Rhone:

Every Sunday one of those people has the power to make it better. Every Sunday all it would take is one person who seizes the opportunity to care. And, if that one person took the time to find out why it is that every Sunday we do not get our paper, they might just find a solution that solves our problem and makes our lives that much better.

They might also find that there is a problem in the system that not only solves our problem but solves every problem of every delivery of every paper everywhere.

John Siracusa:

Google’s present position looks weak, but it has two big trump cards. First, Google has proven to be one of the few companies capable of creating, popularizing, and supporting a platform. Despite all the skinning and branding by handset makers, Google is still the driving force behind Android. This power can only be negated by another company that’s willing and able to match Google’s Android efforts on all fronts: OS development, app store, developer tools, evangelism, the works. That’s a tall order.

And they’re getting pretty good at hardware, too. Great piece—make sure you read it.

Apple’s biggest weakness right now is web services. Is Apple getting better at it faster than Google is getting better at hardware, as they move toward a more integrated approach? I don’t think so.