CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-06-02 23:27:57 (6 comments, 3 reshares, 80 +1s)

Umami Burger is an LA-based gourmet hamburger chain that recently opened a place on University Ave in Palo Alto.   Each restaurant features a decor that's tailored to its locale, so the student infested Palo Alto version is decorated as a faux library, teeming with bookshelves.

Amazingly, we ate there without even realizing that three out of the five posters adorning the walls were based on my book, "Revolution in the Valley".   For example, in one poster, pages from the book were superimposed with an old black and white photo of the Palo Alto tree, a William Burroughs quote about the future and some obscure Radiohead lyrics.  I love that someone thought my book was emblematic of Palo Alto.

2013-05-27 05:23:57 (18 comments, 19 reshares, 105 +1s)

Illegal downloading is certainly a problem, but it doesn't justify anti-user terrorism like this insane proposal.  They might be more successful if they focused on pleasing their users instead of attacking them.

2013-04-02 04:24:12 (15 comments, 10 reshares, 77 +1s)

I pass by these street signs on the lawn of the Palo Alto Art Center twice a day on my way to and from work, but last week I finally decided to walk by to get a closer look.

2013-03-18 04:55:25 (13 comments, 6 reshares, 124 +1s)

I almost forgot that last fall my wife got me the perfect shirt to wear on St. Patrick's day.

2013-01-04 06:07:55 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 26 +1s)

I was surprised to see these scarily impractical cigarette lighters / bottle openers prominently displayed at Mac's Smoke Shop in Palo Alto this week.

2012-12-21 06:32:17 (30 comments, 10 reshares, 123 +1s)

My publisher O'Reilly neglected to inform me that my book about the development of the original Macintosh, "Revolution in the Valley", was being translated into Spanish, so I was pleasantly surprised when a couple of Spanish copies showed up in my mailbox yesterday.  I was also surprised to see that they changed the cover again, this time to prominently feature a 28 year old Steve Jobs along with MacPaint creator +Bill Atkinson.

2012-10-30 17:21:32 (18 comments, 18 reshares, 84 +1s)

Here is another unused commercial for Apple's original Macintosh computer that was produced by Chiat-Day in the fall of 1983.   This one features brilliant Macintosh artist Susan Kare, who designed the Mac's fonts and icons, extolling the virtues of the exciting new medium.

2012-10-19 21:54:00 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 18 +1s)

Good luck to the Giants today, who must win all three of the remaining games in the NLCS to move on to the World Series against the Tigers.  If you're a Giants fan, I'm sure you'll get a kick out of listening to Dan Bern's anthem celebrating their victory two years ago, as well the rest of their storied past.

2012-09-28 19:04:41 (13 comments, 17 reshares, 102 +1s)

Here is another in the series of commercials for the original Macintosh produced by Chiat-Day in the fall of 1983 that were never used.   This one immodestly features myself, talking about the amazing things users were going to do with Macintosh, half a lifetime ago.

2012-08-30 19:25:25 (4 comments, 17 reshares, 88 +1s)

As an inveterate Bruce Springsteen fan, I was tickled to notice this brief sight gag in a recent episode of Futurama.

2012-08-29 19:05:02 (13 comments, 12 reshares, 78 +1s)

Here's another clip of a short commercial for the original Macintosh produced by Chiat Day in the fall of 1983 that was never used.   This one features the brilliant Mac digital board designer Burrell Smith discussing the liberation of electrons.

2012-08-17 17:46:00 (43 comments, 35 reshares, 123 +1s)

It's hard to believe, but the 25th anniversary of HyperCard occurred last week on August 11th.   HyperCard was a major inspiration for the World Wide Web, and a high water mark for end-user programming. It enabled ordinary users to create their own data-rich applications more effectively than practically any tool available today.

To help celebrate, here is a short video featuring an interview with HyperCard's primary creator, Bill Atkinson, discussing his artistic, iterative approach that led to breakthroughs like MacPaint and HyperCard.   It's one of a series of never used commercials that were created by Chiat-Day in the fall of 1983 for the original Macintosh launch.  I have a few more of them that I will post soon.

2012-08-09 16:59:51 (44 comments, 98 reshares, 243 +1s)

Here's a rare commercial for the original Macintosh that Chiat-Day made in the fall of 1983 , featuring snippets from interviews of the design team.  It never aired because Apple deemed it too self-congratulatory, although it was used in some promotional materials sent to dealers.

2012-07-17 20:18:28 (6 comments, 5 reshares, 56 +1s)

Exciting news for Dylan fans!

2012-06-18 04:59:05 (184 comments, 225 reshares, 786 +1s)

In 1971, at an early meeting at Xerox PARC, Alan Kay coined one of my favorite quotes, that I used at the very beginning of my book:

    "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".

  Today, more than 40 years later, Alan Kay spoke at the Alan Turing Centenary Celebration, where he revised his famous quote to address the current litigious state of the computer industry:

     "The easiest way to predict the future is to prevent it".

2012-06-12 06:31:56 (116 comments, 54 reshares, 338 +1s)

The next generation MacBook Pro announced today at WWDC looks fantastic.  I ordered one immediately and can't wait to start using it.  Unfortunately, the euphoria was negated by my deep disappointment with the meagre, lame update that was silently bequeathed to the Mac Pro today.

The Mac Pro is Apple's top of the line, expandable Macintosh, aimed at users who need lots of computing power and disk storage, like programmers or other professionals.  I have an 8-core Mac Pro with 16 GB of RAM in my home office that was an amazing machine when I acquired it in 2008, but it's not so hot by today's standards.   I've been looking to get a new one for a while now, but Apple hadn't updated the hardware for two years, so I was looking forward to finally seeing a new one announced today, with essential features like Thunderbolt and USB 3.0.

When they didn't mentionthe... more »

2012-05-30 01:46:02 (16 comments, 27 reshares, 123 +1s)

Congratulations, Bob!

2012-05-06 17:45:14 (8 comments, 21 reshares, 74 +1s)

This is a picture of the genuine Steve Jobs autograph.

It is written on a Japanese "shikishi" which is a square card originally for writing poems or pictures. He wrote it for a sushi restaurant in Kyoto when he visited Japan with his family in July 2010.

Actually, the Kyoto visit and the sushi restaurant is briefly mentioned in the Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The line can be read as "They also found a tiny neighborhood sushi restaurant, and Jobs tagged it on his iPhone as 'best sushi I’ve ever had.' Erin agreed." The name of the restaurant was not revealed on the book, however. Now it turned out to be "Sushi-Iwa (http://www.sushiiwa.jp/)." from an episode follows.

I play a role of an surveyor and commentator in a Japanese
TV show called "Kaiun Nandemo Kanteidan", from time to time. It's something like at... more »

2012-05-04 15:03:07 (34 comments, 61 reshares, 116 +1s)

Commercial e-books are currently plagued by "Digital Rights Management", which is thoroughly anti-user, inconveniencing and restricting legitimate fair usage of books you have purchased. Help celebrate and support the Free Software Foundation's "Day against DRM" today by buying a DRM-free e-book for half-price from O'Reilly.

2012-03-16 04:32:57 (4 comments, 13 reshares, 66 +1s)

Here's a link to Bruce Springsteen's SXSW keynote speech from earlier today, as inspirational as ever:

"There is no right way, no pure way of doing it; there's just doing it. We live in a post-authentic world, today authenticity is a house of mirrors, it's all just what you're bringing to it when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, your personal history, and at the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters..."

2012-01-24 16:08:54 (10 comments, 26 reshares, 67 +1s)

Here's the brand new Leonard Cohen album, his first in more than seven years. He's a sportsman and a shepherd, he's a lazy bastard living in a suit.

2011-12-31 03:00:39 (31 comments, 17 reshares, 101 +1s)

I saw an interesting license plate on Highway 280 this afternoon and managed to get a photograph.

2012-01-01 09:53:42 (128 comments, 746 reshares, 1166 +1s)

In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here's one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit. In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time. Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.

2011-12-12 01:50:03 (18 comments, 48 reshares, 144 +1s)

This might be my favorite TV commercial ever...

2011-10-19 05:49:22 (35 comments, 22 reshares, 137 +1s)

My book about the development of the original Macintosh, "Revolution in the Valley", is being reprinted in a paperback edition this week on October 20th. I haven't seen a physical copy yet, so when a book from O'Reilly arrived in the mail today, I assumed it was the paperback. Instead, it was the new Korean language edition, which apparently has a brand new cover and a surprising title change that they didn't bother to run by me. I was shocked at first, but it's kind of growing on me.

2011-10-07 06:55:19 (74 comments, 148 reshares, 640 +1s)

Here is a rarely seen photo of Steve Jobs and myself that was taken in June 1981. The reason that we're dressed so formally is that we were ushers at Steve Wozniak's wedding to Candi Clark, who emailed me the photo earlier today. Maybe it helped inspire Steve's bow-tie phase a couple of years later; I'm pretty sure that I've never worn one since.

2011-10-06 04:52:49 (46 comments, 126 reshares, 862 +1s)

Steve Jobs was my friend and hero for over thirty years. The Apple II changed my life before I met him, and working closely with him to create the original Macintosh was the high point of my career, if not my entire life. Steve was more than the greatest business person of his generation, he was a passionate artist who poured his soul into his work. I will miss him terribly, even though he will live on in Apple's products for many years to come.

2011-09-26 21:01:43 (115 comments, 283 reshares, 259 +1s)

I'm excited to see the "sharing circles" feature that I worked on launch today. For your enjoyment, here is a circle containing some of my favorite technology journalists.

Andy Hertzfeld shared a circle with you.

2011-08-27 05:32:03 (254 comments, 303 reshares, 383 +1s)

Today we’re rolling out a new feature that makes the Google+ bar float at the top of the screen when you scroll down. It also floats differently on big vs. small screens to maximize reading space. Let us know what you think in the comments!

#googleplusupdate

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Andy Hertzfeld and I'm a designer and an engineer on the Google+ team.

One of my favorite features of Google+ is the black "plus bar" across the top, because it unites all of Google, putting most of my frequently used services a mere click away. The red notification count on the right lets me know when there's something new to view, and the drop-down sharing menu makes sharing to your circles accessible no matter what you're doing.

Unfortunately, like most users, I spend most of my time scrolled down in the stream, so the plus bar is usuallyn... more »

2011-12-28 04:57:33 (125 comments, 76 reshares, 480 +1s)

Here's a recent photo of my original Apple II, serial number A2S1-1703, which I purchased in January 1978 for $1295. It was undoubtably the best purchase of my life. Suffused with the genius and irresistible personality of +Steve Wozniak, it inexorably drew me to Apple, like a moth to a flame.

2011-07-23 18:51:50 (34 comments, 163 reshares, 270 +1s)

Here's a tremendous recent episode from NPR's superb This American Life series exposing one of the most hypocritical and harmful companies that I'm aware of, Intellectual Ventures.

Intellectual Ventures is a Microsoft spin-off that's kind of a hi-tech shake-down racket, where they buy up patents on the cheap (over 30,000 so far) and try to intimidate tech companies into licensing agreements, while pretending to be on the side of creativity and invention.

The insanity of software patents is one of the most damaging forces in the tech industry these days, so it's heartening to see journalists shining some light on the issue.

2011-07-18 05:40:31 (71 comments, 53 reshares, 172 +1s)

Please welcome +Bill Atkinson to Google+. Bill was my mentor at Apple, and the author of some of the most essential software in Apple's history: QuickDraw, the lightning-fast graphics package at the heart of the UI, MacPaint, the original killer app for the Mac, and Hypercard, which in 1987 turned countless users into programmers and set the stage for the web.

Bill's latest project is PhotoCard, an iPhone and iPad application that enables composing and sending beautiful picture postcards- check it out at the link below.

2011-07-10 19:24:43 (39 comments, 174 reshares, 403 +1s)

My http://folklore.org site is a repository of anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer. One of my favorite features is the way it displays a relevant quotation under the team photo near the top of the index page.

When I was developing the site, I assembled a collection of quotes that reflect on the spirit and values of Apple and the Macintosh, and have slowly added to it in the following years. Here are some of my favorites:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -- Alan Kay

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. -- Alan Kay

Good artists copy, great artists steal. -- Picasso via Steve Jobs

It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy -- Steve Jobs

There's only one rule in user interface design: Make the user happy. -- Bill... more »

2011-07-09 19:26:59 (97 comments, 8 reshares, 141 +1s)

The first thing to know about me is that I am a big Bob Dylan fan. Here are my current top 5 favorite Bob Dylan studio albums:

1. Blonde on Blonde
2. Blood on the Tracks
3. Time Out Of Mind
4. Bringing It All Back Home
5. Highway 61 Revisited

Funny how "Time Out Of Mind" is climbing up the list as I get older...

2011-07-09 19:24:21 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 22 +1s)

2011-07-09

2011-07-02 01:08:18 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 25 +1s)

Andy Hertzfeld was tagged in Andy Hertzfeld's album.

2011-07-02 01:08:16 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

Andy Hertzfeld was tagged in Andy Hertzfeld's album.

2011-07-01 06:42:38 (259 comments, 1471 reshares, 2639 +1s)

It's great that the user experience of Google Plus is being so well received, and I'm happy about all the positive feedback that's been coming my way, but I'm worried that I'm getting too much credit for it, so this long-winded post is an attempt to set the record straight.

I am indeed the main individual behind the interaction design and implementation of the circle editor. I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype for it almost single-handedly, and then wrote a fair percentage of the production javascript code with lots of help from my friends. I also worked on a couple of other parts of the product a little bit, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.

Steven Levy's excellent Wired article got the story right - I wrote the circle editor and then recently widened my focus to the overall Google Plus user experience. But subsequent... more »

2011-06-30 17:57:22 (2 comments, 14 reshares, 35 +1s)

Bruce Springsteen's Eulogy for Clarence Clemons | Rolling Stone Music

2011-07-13 05:47:50 (34 comments, 1 reshares, 42 +1s)

Andy Hertzfeld changed his profile photo.