Working Drafts

I love apps like this. It does one thing well and imaginatively, and taps directly into a core human need for routine and forward progress. It uses my daily step count to simulate hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. By combining the morning exercise walks I take most days with the general steps I rack up throughout the day, the virtual character advances along the trail map.

If last year is any indication, I don’t think I’ll quite make the full 2,650-mile trek, but I can’t wait to see where I end up.

Download for iOS

Visit Aaron La Lau's Website

New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72.

Sad news. I never was able to visited Tekserve while it was around, but even when I was a kid, it felt mythical. I'd seen pictures and read about it on early Apple forums and imagined it as a kind of Little Rascals clubhouse for people like me that loved computers.

I miss when Apple Stores — and tech shops in general — felt closer to that spirit. Less polished. More human. Tekserve hilariously even showed up in an episode of Sex and the City.

If you'd like to know what it was like, you should read the novel Laserwriter II by Tamara Shopsin. One of my favorite reads.

Everything I know about Lerner is secondhand, yet the legacy is unmistakable.

LaserWriter II

Tamara Shopsin

tamarashopsin.com ›