Sorry for the delay. I know you all have been missing my Weekly Picks! (You did, right?) I finally got around to reading some excellent longreads, along with some more current pieces.

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future (The Atlantic, in April) // Important essay by Alexis Madrigal on the state of digital consumer technology, asking “Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this ‘ecosystem’ or that ‘ecosystem’” by doing some variation on the social-local-mobile theme.

Gamification And UX: Where Users Win Or Lose (Smashing UX Design, in April) // Insightful piece by Peter Steen Høgenhaug on the nature of games and when to (not) use gamification in UX design. An interesting tidbit on the nature of playing: “In Danish and many other languages, the word ‘play’ can be translated as two words, ‘lege’ and ‘spille.’ Lege is like when children are playing. … When children are playing, there are usually no initial goals or rules — they are playing simply because they want to play.” Which explains the brilliant name given to colorful plastic bricks.

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS (The Verge) // Fascinating sad account of the demise of the PDA-and-smartphone pioneer and their audacious attempt at reinventing themselves on the basis of webOS, the much-loved and admired operating system they created in the process.

Redesigning With Personality in Web Design (Smashing Magazine, in March) // Aarron Walter: “Personality will help you filter the audience down to those with whom you share common values, interests and goals. These folks are your passionate users. They are the ones to cater to, and they will express their love for your brand openly.”

Culture

A Man. A Woman. Just Friends? (NY Times, in April) // “So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end.”

The psychology of morality: Time to be honest (The Economist, in March) // Two researchers inquire “if the impulse to cheat is something that grows or diminishes when the potential cheater has time for reflection on his actions.”

iOS Dev

The Easy Way to Get iOS Screenshots On Your Mac // Great simple hack: Locate the right folder, create a Saved search. // via iOS Dev Weekly

iOS 6 “Sherlocking” Roundup // Oliver Drobnik lists apps as well as open-source and commercial code components that will be obsoleted by Apple’s upcoming platform upgrade. (“Sherlocking” refers to the third-party vendor’s nightmare that its software becomes obsolete when Apple includes nigh-identical functionality in their operating systems. An early incarnation that gave this pattern its name was Apple’s “Sherlock” 3.0 application that obsoleted Karelia’s commercial “Watson” application.)

YACYAML // “ James Montgomerie open-sourced a YAML parser. Last year, I had looked into using YAML for modelling an iPad app’s content structure, as I much prefer it to Plists for its simplicity and readability, but at the time found no parser that was good enough. Time to reconsider.