QuickTime, Book, Sculley, develop Magazine

Daring Fireball: John Buck on the Invention of QuickTime

Fun anecdote from 1990:

He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”

Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.

WORTHINGTON: We were dumbfounded.

KONSTANTIN OTHMER, QUICKDRAW ENGINEER: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.

QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, …

John Scully was the CEO of Apple at the time. Although he was much maligned by Steve Jobs and others for some of his decisions, he did have a positive lasting impact on Apple.

This also reminded me of the wonderful Kon & Bal column in Apple Develop around that time.

New conservation sites, new funding model?

CBC: Carney announces $3.8B to protect nature, new conservation sites in James Bay and Manitoba

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced $3.8 billion in funding to protect nature on Tuesday, as the federal government moves to meet its conservation targets.

In addition to public money, the government is seeking private sector investment to fund the conservation strategy, which will involve the creation of new national parks and marine reserves.

“Creating these spaces is ambitious and requires significant funding,” Carney said during a news conference in Wakefield, Que. “We can’t do it with public money alone.”

“Private sector investment” Hmmm. Voluntary taxes? A new federal “pay what you can” strategy? The new “ScotiaBank Nature Reserve”?

Today I was thinking about Will Shipley. He hasn’t posted anything about software in quite a while (since he joined Apple five years ago). I wonder what he thinks of useability in current Apple operating systems? (I wonder if he could say?)

The Ultimate Short Term Greed (US Politics)

NYT: Trump Repeals Key Greenhouse Gas Finding, Erasing EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

This is beyond moronic. If there is evil in this world, it is embodied by Trump and his acolytes.

On my brother’s recommendation I downloaded & listened to Althea Raj’s podcast It’s Political (today’s edition) about the Liberal Alberta oil pipeline/environment rollback perfidy. She handled it really well.

How-To Geek: The 1st and 2nd Gen Nest Thermostat Are Dead

  • Google cut cloud support for original Nest thermostats, disabling the app and remote control.
  • They still work manually as basic thermostats, but smart features and integrations are gone.
  • Google emailed a discounted upgrade: 4th-gen Nest Learning Thermostat for $149.99 (regular $279.99).

They’ve been “Doctorow’ed”!

My life these days seems to primarily consist of recharging my Apple product batteries, and recharging myself with coffee. 🔋 ☕️

I listened to Core Intuition 26.1: Mess Everything Up tonight while making dinner. So great. Maybe Manton and Daniel would consider doing a month end podcast? That’d be nice.

Our solar panels have done surprisingly well with almost no significant degradation over 16 years. (We got the first few panels on in 2009, and then added panels each of the next two years until we reached our full complement.)

Hoping to be in Cardiff this spring for a week or more, and maybe a bus trip up the west side of Wales. Really looking forward to it!

It’s getting hard to find my way through the thicket of Trump craziness and distractions to get to the meat of other significant political events.

TIL that making an appointment with someone who uses the Ethiopian calendar could be a challenge: twelve 30-day months plus a 5- or 6-day kicker. Year zero was 7 or 8 years after the Gregorian started. Finally, it uses 12-hour days starting at 6am “our time”.

For far more details, see Wikipedia!

Once again Drafts broke when the annual subscription auto-renewed. I like the app when it is working, but this has been going on for years and it is so tiresome!

I just bought a graphic novel by Chris Ware after listening to an interesting interview with him on CBC’s Bookends this morning. (I’ll put a link to the interview in tonight’s Eclectic Articles post.)

Looking ahead, how long after people start buying autonomous cars before they’ll be asking to be able to send them to pick up lattés at the Starbucks drive through? 😄

We’re beating plowshares into swords, For those tired old men That we elected King.

This is end Of the innocence.

Somewhere back there in the dust, That same small town in each of us.