As an experienced musician and occasional audio engineer, I was excited by the prospect of producing The Digital Life, a podcast on design and technology, which is sponsored by Involution Studios. Over nearly a year of production, we've learned a great deal about creating an online radio show. Every so often we get requests from friends of the show to describe how we go about generating the podcast. We're more than happy to share our knowledge, so, we thought we'd pull back the curtain today and reveal a few of our production methods.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

Lion Roars
Apple launched the latest version of their ground breaking OS X operating system today with a host of UI innovations culled from their iOS mobile platform. As might be expected, these innovations were met with both cheers and jeers.

Last week Involution Studios celebrated seven years in business. We've had a bunch of highs, a handful of lows, and a whole lot of fun in that time. We've had amazing employees, partners and clients, and even as another recession seems to be looming we are going strong and showing no signs of slowing down. Here are the seven most important moments for the company, one for each year, even if not evenly distributed, in chronological order.

I don't use the moniker "IT" very often, typically only to talk about the internal stuff at my company that has to do with computing technology in the vaguest way. Under "IT" falls our hardware and software that runs the gamut of business technology: computers, phones, Internet connection, printers, other peripherals...everything. However, with the recent wave of unexpected and in many cases surprising mergers, it appears we may start talking more about giant "IT" conglomerates that seem to be in any and every technology related to computing and communication.

I recently returned from a 2 week vacation and my source of digital consumption was with my iPhone or iPad. So for 2 weeks I was only using a touchscreen - and digging it.

The press is reporting today on a patent filed in January by Apple for what amounts to a "convertible" iMac - Apple's line of large screen all-in-one desktop computers - that also functions as a giant desktop iPad. This sort of device is certainly inevitable, in one form or another. The evolution introduced to everyday computing by the iPhone and now being accelerated by Android devices, the iPad, and other tablet solutions would certainly evolve into our desktop computing experiences. It was simply a question of when - and how. With this patent application we're seeing one potential approach to implementing these next-generation solutions.

Leave it to Apple to turn speculation of the future obsolescence of the mouse as a computing input device into present reality. Today Apple launched the Magic Trackpad, a mouse replacement that accomplishes all of the input interactions of the mouse as well as all of the input interactions of portable computing devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Today the Droid X was released, Android's latest salvo in the smartphone wars.

Unveiled yesterday, Google App Inventor aspires to provide everyday people - extensively tested with sixth graders - to easily build their own Android apps using a relatively simple WYSIWYG editor. The interaction model appears based on LEGO toys, taking different, interchangeable pieces and snapping them together to create a complete app. The New York Times exclusively introduced the service on Sunday night.

There has been considerable fallout and speculation from this latest product launch by Google. We've talked about Google extensively here, both from the standpoint of being the now and future computing superpower as well as their open philosophy to Android development in stark contrast to Apple's closed model. Many touts in the media see the Google App Inventor as a potentially "killer app" that could be the difference-maker in the mobile arms race between Google and Apple. Others are more measured but still believe Google App Inventor will have a major impact. I think both of these assessments are quite exaggerated. What Google has created is a tool that is akin to Microsoft Publisher in the 1990's, a piece of software that takes a task reserved for a skilled technical elite - in their case, publishing periodicals; in today's case, designing mobile apps - and allows even unsophisticated users to produce something with the potential to be usable, if not respectable.

Today Adobe launched an aggressive ad campaign skewering Apple’s “closed” philosophy. Retaliation for Apple’s muscling Adobe’s Flash technology off their mobile operating system, Adobe is choosing to take a “high ground” argument by ignoring their specific exclusion and focusing instead on the closed ecosystem Apple prefers.

This is hardly the beginning of the “open vs. closed” debate and certainly not the end. In fact, Adobe’s strategy is precisely calculated to take advantage of the fact that many proponents of the open approach are passionate, even zealous advocates of openness while those who prefer closed largely do so as a personal lifestyle choice and not as part of a conscious philosophical choice. Thus Adobe is betting that stoking the flames of open systems and frameworks will raise a larger argument and objection to the Apple approach and, in the process, perhaps help them outflank their present antagonist.