How to Make a Vesper: Design ๏ฟฝ Vesper:

We looked through photographs of luxury watches, thinking about how they used orange as a pop color for branding or second hands. I offered opinions, but John tracked hex codes along with impressions in a Field Notes notebook. We arenโ€™t afraid to sweat the details.

For some reason, the constant Vesper love on Daring Fireball over the last few days/weeks reminds me too much of Conan's excellent iPad 2 ad parody (sorry, Googled up this one and couldn't find an official link to the ad quickly).  "One of my favorite things about the iPad 2 launch is that I get to keep this tight black shirt, which I think really pops against white backgrounds."

Look, Daring Fireball's great.  It's one of my favorite rss reads every day.  I own the shirt.  And I love the sort of critical deconstruction he does in stuff like the recent, "Itโ€™s Been a While Since Iโ€™ve Done the Thing Where I Quote the Entirety (or Nearly So) of an Article and Then Dissect/Comment Upon It Line-by-Line, but I Do Still Have a Taste for It, Even Though in This Particular Case Itโ€™s a Month Late."

But if I was going to get overly excited about a note-taking app that I thought I'd designed like it was built in proverbial Cupertino, well, my blog's RSS feed would look a lot DF's does now.

Do you really have to drink the AppleAid to make a good iOS app?  And is this pretentious orange-watching efficiently produce a better app experience for Jane and Joe User?  Or are these guys just fooling the crud out of themselves?  (And why don't they just have the click sound fade out a bit more each time you use it until it's silent?  Then you don't need a "sounds" setting.  See, I've listened to the podcasts too...)

(I should probably also admit I think the lines between advert and helpful post are blurring on the site a bit.  There were two or three (iirc) posts on App Store app pricing right before Vesper came out that, surprise, recommended that paying more for apps in general would be a good/fair thing.  Even if I don't disagree, I felt a little hoodwinked when it became clear that was just the sort of conundrum Gruber, as part of the marketing wing of ye olde Q-branch (?  If Apple has to pay someone in Brazil for iPhone, I'm not sure the wisdom of "Q-branch") had just waded through weeks earlier, if not exactly at the time he was posting.  It's an interesting and pixel-pushing conflict of interest, but it's still a conflict of interest, even if someone claims they're not a journalist.  (Who is, today?)  As interesting as it is to watch their hobbyist start-up flame on, the release unmistakeably shifts and colors the rest of Daring Fireball in a way that I can't say I find comforting.)

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