A great detailed look at the larger picture of iOS 7. Well worth a read.

This is a set of the features I’m looking forward to seeing some benefit from with Mavericks.

This is going to be a little rough and full of first impressions, but I wanted to get some of these thoughts written down. There’s a lot of good in iOS 7, but at the same time there are some rough edges.

Let’s take a look…

Typography

The typography in iOS 7 takes it to the next level and gives a clean, modern look to the OS.

Lock Screen. The enchanced functionality on the lock screen is mostly playing catch-up, but it’s nice to see that it’s there. Apple got rid of the slider bar, and now the whole lock screen slides. So you can unlock by swiping from any part of the lock screen. Access to the notification center and the new control center are handy.

Control Center

It houses some of the functions that were available in the app switcher previously as well as some new stuff. The flashlight has already come in handy. It’s nothing new or revolutionary, but it’s good.

Camera

The new camera app is big improvement. Options are easily available without accessing a menu. Swipe to switch from Video/Still/Square/Panoramic. The HDR option is also available. There’s a basic ‘enchance’ function that works pretty well. The filters are okay, but not great. It feels like they tacked them on because every camera app has them. Hopefully this is something that sees improvement before launch.

Backgrounds

Live backgrounds are now available. There are two subtle ones available, I like them. Still photos have a parallax effect that again, is subtle, but adds some nice depth to the experience.

UI/Animation

Navigating the device, while familiar, is also completely new. Apps don’t open, instead it’s more like a camera zooming in and out to various bits. When you launch an app, you can see the app screen inside the app icon as it zooms to take over the screen. The reverse happens when you close the app. App folders now show the 9 icons as-is when opened. No more changing visual places. Although the background of the folders is kind of odd. It looks ‘unfinished’.

Basic Apple Apps

Lots of updates across the board here. Mail is nicely improved, so is the Calendar app. Newsstand no longer looks like an app folder, but an actual app. Camera and Photos are nicely improved. Maps works well. Notes is no longer using Comic Sans. Interestingly the built-in weather app feels like a simplified version of the new Yahoo app, with the live weather effects instead of local photography.

iTunes Radio

From my initial impressions this is going to get popular fast. It’s definitely a much easier way to get Internet Radio than messing with Pandora. Currently, the ads are pretty few. I can only recall hearing one last night. However, that will probably change as time goes on. Either way, this is a pretty good alternative to a free Pandora account.

Mobile Safari

A cleaner interface, it gets out of the way, etc. But the big feature I like? Unified search/url bar.

Summary

Overall, I see a huge improvement and upgrading to iOS 7 really has felt like getting a new phone in a lot of ways. However, it’s definitely an early developer preview. Hopefully they take some time to address the rough edges, the mismatched icons, etc…

Yesterday Yahoo released a huge update to [Flickr][http://flickr.com]. The old Pro account is gone, replaced by an upgraded free account. Everyone now gets 1TB of storage.

I’m in.

Weather websites have always been rather terrible. It looks like the makers of Dark Sky have taken upon themselves to fix that.

After playing with the site for a little while, it’s definitely going to be my go-to site.

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl is by far one of the best programming tutorial books ever written, and not just for Rails.

The beta version for Rails 4 is out now, but you should also check out the current Rails 3 tutorial if you don’t like living on the bleeding edge.

Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today.

“It’s outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that,” Webber said. “We’re in a new region. And everything we’re measuring is different and exciting.”

Congratulations and thank you to all the people who have worked on Voyager I over the past 35 years.

Basically, WordPress isn’t a platform suited to anyone except those unlucky enough to have somehow become WordPress developers.

I think that sums up what most of us who have dealt with Wordpress for any amount of time have come to recognize, if we didn’t already know it going in. However, as James also points out in his essay there really is no competition at the low-end of the market for cheap, quick, cookie-cutter website development.

From my point of view, it’s the Wordpress admin interface. It’s not that difficult to replicate the front-end development, but giving clients a consistant and good-enough interface is the hard part.

Boxen is a framework for managing almost every aspect of your Mac. We built a massive standard library of Puppet modules optimized for Boxen to manage everything from running MySQL to installing Minecraft.

Sounds awesome. I can’t wait to give it a spin.

We launched Cedar in beta in May 2011 with support for Node.js and Ruby on Rails. Our documentation recommends the use of Thin, which is a single-threaded, evented web server. In theory, an evented server like Thin can process multiple concurrent requests, but doing this successfully depends on the code you write and the libraries you use. Rails, in fact, does not yet reliably support concurrent request handling. This leaves Rails developers unable to leverage the additional concurrency capabilities offered by the Cedar stack, unless they move to a concurrent web server like Puma or Unicorn.

All of Heroku’s reasoning aside, the main issue is that Heroku is supposed to be routing requests to idle dynos. That’s the whole point of their service. That’s what people are paying them for.