Tidbits | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

Simply slot your device into the end of it and you’ll get an extra 1ft+ of reach, kind of like a pointer, only used for maximising Facebook Likes rather than learning things!

Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam. In the past three weeks I’ve seen this thing everywhere I went.

Whether Secret comes up with a problem-free system for filtering certain content on its platform that certain users don’t want to (or shouldn’t) see remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: This app is in a complex, long-term relationship with adult content.

I don’t get this article. I don’t know what it wants to tell us. That you get higher click rates when you write about sex?

The country has a partly deserved reputation for sterile predictability that has earned it descriptions like William Gibson’s “Disneyland with the death penalty” or the “world’s only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations”. Nevertheless, the Switzerland of Asia is for many a welcome respite from the poverty and dirt of much of the Asian mainland. If you scratch below the squeaky clean surface and get away from the tourist trail you’ll soon find more than meets the eye.

I’ve been to several Asian countries and Singapore is my new favorite. The city is clean but not as sterile as I’ve expected. Transportation is great. People speak English which makes things much easier.

It was also the first place where I had the feeling that it doesn’t make a difference whether you’re Asian or Caucasian. People would treat you the same way as they treat everyone else.

In Bali I felt like a walking wallet. Everyone tried to sell me something. In China people would still look at the “老外”, the foreigner. Some out of curiosity but some with undeserved respect.

In Singapore I don’t feel any special. I like that a lot.

Here’s a quick look at the visual design changes in Yosemite and my impressions of them.

I like the new look but Min Ming also points out some glitches that should be fixed before the release.

Indonesians do not generally use the Western naming practice of a given first name and a family last name. The majority of Indonesians do not have family names as westerners would understand them, but such names as are given are geographically and culturally specific.

A friend of mine is named after Axl Rose and Metallica.

If you’re not yet convinced that Iceland must be your next destination, here are 37 photographs with astonishing Icelandic scenes to prove that it should be!

Wow.

Gustave Coubert’s famous painting “L’Origine du monde” (“The Origin of the World”) shows the genitals of a naked woman. Performance artist Deborah de Robertis provides the visitors of the Musée d’Orsay with the oportunity to see how realistic the artwork is.

I posted an add on Craigslist seeking women who have never seen their vaginas. This is the result.

I think that’s more common than one would guess.

This is how Facebook built much of Paper. Matas and other designers used Origami to create unusually complete prototypes, and then a group of software engineers reproduced and refined these prototypes, building software they could ship to a world of phones. […]

Tweaks is a bit like Origami. But rather than providing a way of quickly molding prototypes, it lets engineers instantly shape and reshape an application after they’ve actually built it with software code. Both designers and engineers can test changes to an app without having to recode and recompile it. Instead, they can open a menu that lets them adjust all sorts of specific behavior, including the way the app’s smorgasbord of interactive animations responds to movements and finger gestures.

These are some pretty interesting tools.

Time is seen in a particularly different light by Eastern and Western cultures, and even within these groupings assumes quite dissimilar aspects from country to country. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Mexico employ time in such diametrically opposing manners that it causes intense friction between the two peoples. In Western Europe, the Swiss attitude to time bears little relation to that of neighboring Italy. Thais do not evaluate the passing of time in the same way that the Japanese do. In Britain the future stretches out in front of you. In Madagascar it flows into the back of your head from behind.

I didn’t know there were so many different understandings of time.

The Braintrust meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid. The Braintrust is not foolproof, but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal.

Pixar’s president Ed Catmull gives examples of how the Braintrust changed movies like WALL-E, Toy Story and the yet to be released Inside Out.

CENTR allows you to capture your experiences and share them in a whole new way. Capture 360° video in real-time on a camera that fits in the palm of your hand. With decades of experience working on cameras at Apple, the CENTR team knows what it takes to bring beautiful design and groundbreaking technology together in one product.

This looks pretty cool.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg:

And so if you always start from the position of: “This is what I believe. I don’t expect you to believe it, I don’t think you have to believe it, I’m not saying it’s true” you can actually always communicate authentically.

‘cause if you walk in the room – and this gets worse as you get more senior: “Here’s the answer.” You’re not giving anyone else any room to say anything.

And if you walk in the room and say: “I believe this. For this reason. What do you believe?” If you share your truth in that language, you give people room to […] communicate authentically.

Treptower Park by Andre Wagner on Flickr.

I’m on TechCrunch :-D.