Jacob Kastrenakes
TikTok’s leather guy tore apart Apple’s iPhone case.
He estimates the case costs about $14 to make and says it uses a “pretty good choice for leather.” Verdict: he’d buy it.
Jacob Kastrenakes
Executive Editor
Executive Editor
More From Jacob Kastrenakes
Jacob Kastrenakes
Dream has a face.
The masked YouTuber finally revealed what he looks like last night, putting a face to the biggest creator in the Minecraft world. Dream’s in-game exploits have been a sensation on YouTube in recent years. Here’s Julia Alexander writing last year about the server shared by Dream and his friends:
Together, they get into hijinxes, stage lengthy feuds, and pal around for a combined audience of tens of millions of people. Dream went from 1 million to 15 million subscribers in one year alone ... Like a television show or cinematic universe, Dream SMP found its audience through a series of never-ending epic battles.
Now that he has a face, Dream is talking about maybe taking some future adventures offline, too.
Living the Dream SMP
Julia Alexander
Jacob Kastrenakes
I’m having a ton of fun playing with Dall-E.
Some quick takeaways now that it’s available:
-Typing a weird description and getting back an accurate result of a cat in a suit is endlessly entertaining.
-A lot of results miss the mark. The incredible illustrations getting shared around are very much the standouts.
-Dall-E benefits a lot from specific style suggestions. A medium or artistic movement is helpful; a specific artist is even better. It’s a valid reason for artists to be concerned.
-Do not accidentally generate variations of a selfie of yourself, it is disturbing.
Jacob Kastrenakes
The Elon attrition is real.
“Hundreds of Twitter employees have fled since June,” according to Insider’s sources. That’s just over a month after Twitter agreed to sell the company to Musk — or, about as long as it’d take a highly qualified engineer to find a new job.
The company is down about 700 employees, according to the report, with many citing Musk and the acquisition as the reason why.
Jacob Kastrenakes
YouTube’s biggest defense against TikTok: money.
The company is going to start giving creators a share of ad revenue when commercials play between YouTube Shorts. The platform’s relatively generous payments are a large part of its rich creator culture, and now we’ll find out if they’re enough to lure short-form creators away from TikTok.
Jacob Kastrenakes
“I still stand by that tweet.”
–Figma CEO Dylan Field, in the unenviable position of having to reflect on an old tweet.
Field tweeted last year that Figma’s goal “is to be Figma not Adobe.” Fast forward to today and... Figma is going to be part of Adobe! My colleague Jay Peters spoke with the two companies’ leaders about what the merger means for designers everywhere.
Jacob Kastrenakes
Apple Maps turns 10.
The app was released on this day 10 years ago... and immediately became a laughingstock, leading to multiple people getting canned and a public apology from Tim Cook.
Now that Maps is a good enough product to warrant advertising, my big question is: when does Apple release a version for Android or the web? Apple made an alternative to Google Maps — now it needs to make a real competitor.
Jacob Kastrenakes
You can now listen to podcasts inside Twitter.
If you pay Twitter, at least. The latest feature to join the Twitter Blue subscription is early access to the redesigned Spaces tab on iOS, which includes support for tuning into podcasts.
I am not entirely convinced this will take off (short-form social network + long-form audio = 🤨), but I can see a compelling use case if Twitter eventually lets podcasters promote clips from their shows. My colleague Ariel Shapiro wrote about the launch last month:
Twitter is becoming a podcast app
Ariel Shapiro
Jacob Kastrenakes
The Lightning port turns 10 years old today.
Apple’s tiny connector was announced in 2012 alongside the iPhone 5. It was a genuinely revolutionary port: tiny, reversible, and super easy to use, setting the stage for the existence of USB-C today. Unfortunately, USB-C’s ubiquity makes it so much better, and as the Lightning cable turns 10... we can’t wait to see it go away.
Apple’s Lightning cable turns 10, but its time is over
Mitchell Clark
Jacob Kastrenakes
More drama in the world of competitive Donkey Kong.
Billy Mitchell, famously the “villain” of the documentary King of Kong, has been wracked by cheating allegations in recent years, including in a new report out this week. It’s not that Mitchell isn’t really good at Donkey Kong, it’s that he might be really good at the wrong version of it: the emulated version, instead of the arcade version, as the report alleges.