296: ‘Cameras Every Single Where’, With Michael Simmons

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Special guest Michael Simmons joins the show. Topics include the release of iOS 14, widgets and home screen customization, pricing models for indie apps in the App Store era, and, of course, flying robot cameras.

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Links:

• Fantastical’s iOS 14 update with customizable widgets galore.
• Apple gave developers less than 24 hours notice that iOS 14 was about to ship, despite spending all summer encouraging developers to be ready with iOS 14 features at launch.
• Nova — Panic’s new code editor/IDE for Mac.
• Sketch — excellent Mac design and prototyping tool.
• Agenda — excellent notes/planning app for Mac and iOS.
• @mcharo on Twitter customized all his apps with icons of their company CEOs (or indie creators).
• IEEE Spectrum: “Why You Should Be Very Skeptical of Ring’s Indoor Security Drone”.

Mac desktop customization memory lane with Greg Landweber’s utilities:

• Greg’s Browser — NeXT-style column view file manager for classic Mac, worked wonderfully alongside the classic Finder.
• Greg’s Buttons — Control Panel to customize the interface of System 7, turned flat black-and-white buttons into cool 3D buttons. Now we’ve turned all our cool 3D buttons into boring monochromatic flat buttons.
• Aaron — brought the then-future Platinum appearance to System 7.
• BeView — made your Mac look like BeOS.
• Kaleidoscope — the masterpiece of the genre, from Landweber and Arlo Rose. A full-on custom theme engine for an OS that was not designed with system-wide theming as a feature. The golden age of interface customization hacks.
• Appearance Manager — Apple’s officially supported theming engine that wound up shipping with just one theme.
• Info on Apple’s Hi-Tech, Gizmo, and Drawing Board themes.
• August 2000 ATPM story by Christopher Turner on Kaleidoscope and Appearance Manager.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.