During my week between leaving Rogers and starting my new job I was working on cleaning up my slate of articles for The Georgia Straight. The last of that batch, an article on local iPad development appeared online today [tgs] and will hit The Straight in paper form on Thursday.
As always everyone who I interviewed was incredibly generous with their time, and there was a lot of good conversation that did not make it into the finished article. It's actually kind of disheartening to see how much I just can't fit into a 900 word article. Typically I'll talk to someone for ten to fifteen minutes, and then end up using only about two minutes of that conversation in print.
Brad Dolman and Pierre Houston of Room1337 (pictured above), for example, spoke with me for around forty minutes in a Blenz in Yaletown and I barely touched on everything we talked about. One quote that I wished I could have used, but could not find the context for, was this from Doleman:
"I think the thing that Apple does better than anyone else is remove features that people think that they need but don't really require. I think that the iPad is a really good example of that. I think the iPhone was when it came out too. They're very good at pinpointing what people do and don't need, and then getting rid of the stuff that complicates it and makes it confusing."
In the aftermath of the iPhone 4 announcement yesterday, I think this is right on. A lot of people thought that Apple would do a feature dump to try to "catch up" to the newer Android phones. Apple has never tried to compete on features, it's all about user experience.
We're off-topic.
Go read the article, a lot of smart people say smart things in it.
Image: Stephen Hui for The Georgia Straight.
Friday, July 16, 2010 at 3:00PM 
