Steve Jobs is an Industrial Beethoven

Peter Hossli recently interviewed author and management guru Jim Collins for Swiss magazine Bilanz. He talks about how great leaders are driven to do great things. He elegantly links Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Ludwig van Beethoven:

What does Jobs have that others don’t?

Collins: Steve Jobs is an industrial Beethoven. I think that the Macintosh is like the Third Symphony. And the iPod is like the Fifth Symphony. And maybe the iPhone is the Seventh Symphony. I admire his dedication to creating great things, tremendously. He’s one of the people I really admire.

So Jobs might be admired for the wrong things. He mostly took existing ideas, put them together and turned them into great things.

Collins: They’re no great things without the supreme execution around them. A lot of other people have the same ideas. A lot of people could have had the idea of “Bum bum bum baba baba bum [humming Beethoven’s Fifth].” But not everybody could have written the Fifth Symphony.

Steve Jobs is an Industrial Beethoven, by Peter Hossli

New Safari 4 Browser (Beta)

Safari Browser

I am loving some of the new features in New Safari 4 Browser (Beta). My favorite is the Top Sites Feature: Safari automatically identifies your favorite sites and displays them as a wall of stunning graphical previews. To visit one of your top sites, just click any of the previews. As you browse, Safari identifies the websites you’re most interested in based on how often and how recently you visit a site. So as you explore the web and discover new websites, your top sites will change to match your evolving tastes.

Check out this list of 150 Features. And if you want to experience them all, Download Safari 4 (Beta).

Photoshop CS4 Shortcut Cheatsheets

Photoshop CS4 Shortcut Cheatsheets

Creative Techs Tip: Photoshop CS4 Shortcut Cheatsheets. If you haven’t upgraded to Photoshop CS4 yet, don’t worry. There’s an archive of previous cheatsheets all the way back to Photoshop 5.

Running out of Space. Everywhere.

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My iPhone, my laptop, my harddrives, my brain; all running out of disk space. Signs of our times!? What are we going to do?

Kern

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KERN from FORMation is “a minimalist typography experience challenging you to precisely place a missing letter into a falling word while avoiding any unnecessary ligatures! Practice and prove your typographical acumen with a score that gives new meaning to point-size!”

(via iainclaridge)

WhatTheFont for the iPhone! YAY!!

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I have big news! What heFont, the ingenious font recognition app that I use on a regular basis is now available for the iPhone.

With the iPhone version of WhatTheFont you can use the phone’s built-in camera to photograph the text in question (or choose an existing image from your photo albums). The app allows you to crop the image, focusing on only the important parts before uploading. After confirming which characters are used in the image, the app provides a list of possible matching fonts. You can then either e-mail a link to a MyFonts page with more info on that font, or open it up in the iPhone’s built-in Safari web browser.

Download it for free from the App Store.

(thank you nick)

Swiss iPhone Memory Game

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Dieter pointed me to the Switzerland iPhone Memory App. From the alpenhorn to the Combat des Reines through to the Swiss army knife, the whole originality of the game lies in a selection of symbols that celebrate the culture, the traditions, the particularities and the geography of Switzerland, all within a typically Swiss red and white design. Made me smile.

Automatically Save Your Work on Your Mac On Any Application

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EverSave… is a free application for the Mac which saves your documents on regular intervals based on your preferences. You can save on all applications or just a select few and most importantly it seems to work with any application!

CameraBag for the iPhone

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Derek pointed me to another fabulous iPhone Camera App called CameraBag. Choose from a cool range of retro filters that you can apply to your pictures. Wonderful!

Quad Animator for the Quad Camera

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How cool: Michael found out about the QuadCamera on swissmiss, and I now learned about the Quad Animator that will turn images into an animated gif on his blog. Going full circle!

Quad Camera

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QuadCamera is the the 4th release by Art&Mobile of their ToyCamera series and features continuous shooting. Just pressing the button, and it takes 4-8 serial shots to create one image in multiple dimensions and repetitions: a 4×2 portrait, 4×1, 2×2 landscape, and 8×1 landscape. Love. Love. Love.

(via EmilyChang, that lady has her finger on the pulse)

iPhone CSS Design Gallery

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I agree with Michael: How cool is this? A CSS Design gallery showing sites as viewed through the iPhone.

52 E-Commerce Stores on the iPhone

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Tom Sullivan took screen shots of 52 of the top ecommerce sites on his iphone to see what the support was like. Only 6 of the 50 retailers redirect iPhone users to a mobile-optimized website: Amazon, Best Buy, Foot Locker, Target, Victoria’s Secret, and Walmart. (Ralph Lauren should be on this list, since they offer a mobile-optimized website, but the server doesn’t redirect iPhone visitors.) I am pretty sure this ratio will change quickly considering how important the iPhone has become.

(thank you Jon)

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Gotta love these Onion guys.

(thank you Jim)

My prayers have been heard!

Jed Schmidt is likely to be a very popular man today. He is the first person to create a genuine, legal, no installation (therefore no void of warranty) way of using copy and paste between Safari and Mail: iPhone Copy and Paste Arrives for Safari and Mail

If Mac is like short skis, PC is like…

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Here our metaphor begins to break down. Short skis really don’t work as well at high speeds, for good skiers. But that’s not necessarily true of short-ski computers. Currently, the Macintosh has only limited memory, but that’s more of a financial consideration than a fundamental design problem. There’s no reason the Mac can’t get more powerful without losing its essential character. In fact, the Macintosh uses the power of a high-technology 68000 chip (the same that’s inside many $20,000 computers) to make itself easier. It’s inherently more powerful than the harder-to-use IBM PC, but its power makes things easier, not tougher, for the user. Incidentally, when I told Don Estridge, head of the IBM division that developed the PC, that the Mac was short skis, he thought for a moment, then said: “Yes, but tall people need long skis.”

The Mac On Skis“, by Esther Dyson

(via tallmatters)

Photo Flip Clock

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The creators of Flip Clock for the iPhone/Touch, outdid their first version with the ingenious Photo Flip Clock. Take any image in your gallery, or any photo captured by your iPhone camera, and place it as a clock number.

(thanks for reminding me, Joe)

Sync Gmail Calendars with iCal

Google has opened up their calendar system so that you can have real two-way sync of your online Gmail calendars with iCal. Read more.

swissmiss loves the Pano iPhone App!

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Pano for iPhone lets you take panoramic photos straight from your phone, no other software necessary. Yay! See some examples in this Pano Flickr Group. I am in love with an app!

Dear Airport Utility…

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Dear Airport Utility, I am tired of you going into scanning mode and disconnecting me from the internet. Please stop. Thank you.

(By the way, I know this is a common problem. I’ve searched quite a few forums and tried the hacks that people seemed to have figured out. None of them worked for me. Only solution that works is to connect to the internet via the ethernet cable. Now that is so analog.)

UPDATE 1: One of my readers wrote in a comment below: Apple today released an update that probably fixed the problem.

UPDATE 2: Tried the update that Apple released today. Didn’t help. And now I see the update is no longer available. What in the world is going on??

Flip Clock for your iPhone

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Flip Clock just made my day. It’s FLIQLO but for your iPhone.

(via bauldoff)

Please fix the iPhone

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Please Fix the iPhone gives a collective voice to those that want to smash their iPhone into a wall when it is impossible to do simple and intuitive tasks that we have all been doing for years on other phones. The site was the natural result of FullSIX’s fascination with the iPhone and our desire to build innovative sites that provide added value and an immersive experience for users, not to mention an excuse to spend even more time playing with our phones! Now anyone is free to go to the Please Fix the iPhone site and vote on problems that need to be fixed, or even add new wishes to be addressed, and to see all the wishes that Apple has granted. Every vote counts, so rally around the site, vent your frustrations and make your vote heard.

pleasefixtheiphone.com

iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers

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Poolga features a collection of fantastic (!!!) iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers!

(via infographics)

BatRest, fabulous iphone stand

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Courtenay from Seskimo sent me one of his iPhone stands to test out. My verdict? Fantastic! Small enough to fit my tiny swissmiss wallet but at the same time sturdy enough to solidly hold my iPhone. No more holding the iPhone for Ella in a restaurant in one hand while trying to eat my dinner with the other… Get yourself one of these!