Interesting story by Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple:
"Not only was I tasked by Scott Forstall with building a browser and building a team to build that browser, I had to keep the whole damn project a secret. Which, by the way, really complicated the shit out of hiring most of the original team since I couldn’t tell them what they were working on until they took the job. Talk about your management challenges."
via The Loop
Ben Brooks has turned 30, so he's listed 30 things he thinks he knows.
My favorite:
20. "Don’t give a shit about what people think of your honest opinion. If you think Android is better than iOS, Windows better than Mac, and Nikon better than Canon — so be it. You’d be wrong, but at least you’re standing for what you believe in, and that’s more important."
Patrick Rhone, in one of my favorite tech pieces from 2012:
"Then, a commercial for The Secret World of Arrietty comes on.
“This! I want to watch this!”, Beatrix exclaims.
“We can’t honey. It’s not out yet. It’s just a commercial.”, I say. She seems more confused so I try an analogy.
“You know when we go to a movie theater, and they show you previews of movies that are not out yet before the real movie? It’s like that.”
“Oh.”, she resigns. Not sure she gets this but I think the television executives and I have finally worn down her curious resolve."
Like Patrick, we don't have cable TV at our house. Instead, we use a combination of Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, and even Amazon Instant Video for the occasional rental. All of this is streamed through our PS3 and is relatively easy to deal with. It's certainly convenient, anyway.
Because of this setup, the only times we ever see commercials at home are when we're using the Hulu Plus service. If I could pay a few more bucks a month to get rid of those commercials too, I would do it in an instant. Not only for myself, but for Brendon. If he can grow up hardly ever seeing a TV commercial, I'd consider that a parenting success.
When visiting relatives from either side of our family, there tends to be a TV consantly on whether anybody's watching it or not, providing background noise at all times. Don't ask me why, that's just how it is. If I ever happen to glance at the TV during a commercial break, I'm always astounded and annoyed by the sheer bottom-of-the-barrel stupidity being shoved into my eyeballs. I honestly have no idea why or how people put up with it.
By contrast, our experience at home is like living in another, better world. Custom queues full of content that we have chosen for ourselves. Fantastic recommendation engines suggesting great content that we might not have otherwise found, almost like hearing about something cool via trusted word-of-mouth (which I believe to be the best kind of advertising). Convenient access to just about anything we'd ever be interested in watching. No need or temptation to flip through hundreds of pointless channels, hoping something decent will be on somewhere.
I've tried to sell my parents on such a setup, but alas, they cling to their old ways. Mom still likes to watch her evening reality shows and Dad has never minded the process of flipping channels a bunch until he finds something good. Both of them are inextricably hooked on the Food Network, which is always the most likely thing I'll see on their TV as soon as I walk in the door.
If that's what works for them, then that's great. As for me, I can't justify spending so much more money on a huge cable/satellite package that not only offers ~1000% more channels than I'm interested in, but is somehow still less convenient and can't even bother to advertise products in a way that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out.
No, I think I'll keep on living in the future. It's more comfortable here.
Jeffery Inscho on the new Flickr app:
"Feeling nostalgic for my glory days of the web, I downloaded the app to see what all the fuss was about. And the fuss, in my opinion, is justified. With one fell swoop, Flickr has injected itself back into the conversation of web relevance."
This is a perfect way of putting it. Flickr's diehard fans have long expressed worry that the service is waning and that Yahoo! hasn't paid enough attention to it even though it's likely their best product.
Now that Marissa Mayer is manning (womanning?) the helm, Flickr seems to be setting itself up for a resurgence. I'm still amazed at how good the new app is, and I've noticed a few subtle design changes taking place on Flickr.com itself. Despite following a large number of tech bloggers and photographers online, I have yet to see a negative statement about anything Flickr is doing right now.
It's pretty wild that a single app update on a phone can cause public opinion about an entire company to sway suddenly and drastically in the opposite direction. Any app developers out there not taking their work seriously would do well to consider that.
Phil Plait, astronomer and writer of the Bad Astronomer blog, has assembled some truly fantastic images from the world of astronomy in 2012. I highly recommend checking them out.
Relatedly, Phil also wrote about an image taken from the dark side of Saturn. Make sure to head over there and click for the big version because it's magnificent.
Shawn Blanc:
"But when we interrupt our own time with habitual checking of email, Facebook, Twitter, et al. then it’s like having micro meetings all day long."
I'm guilty of this sort of thing myself. Sometimes I'll be in the middle of writing and receive a Twitter notification, and instead of ignoring it I pick up my phone to see what it is. Somehow or another, this leads to me "catching up" on my Twitter feed since I last put it down, which of course leads to checking other feeds like App.net, RSS and email.
One of my goals for 2013 will be to cut back on these kinds of addictive distractions. I probably won't be doing a "digital jubilee" the way Shawn intends to, but I do intend on scaling back on who/what I follow online.
"If we’re going to use free services, we have to realize that nearly all bets are off."
That's true, but the "if" at the beginning of the sentence is the major factor. If these kinds of services begin using my information or my content in ways I disagree with, I'm free to leave at anytime and I will exercise that right unreservedly.
I'd rather pay upfront to use a service than become an unwitting walking advertisement, especially without compensation.
Tons of fantastic stuff to browse through here. Loren Brichter's game Letterpress even came in as runner-up for iPhone Game of the Year. Congratulations Loren!
Jim Dalrymple:
"After typing in the name of the restaurant, Google Maps took me to India, which is on the other side of the world from where I am."
Yep.
"The last thing I’d want is for a bunch of The Magazine lookalikes to flood the App Store with mediocre articles that haven’t passed through an editor and should just be (or already are) someone’s mediocre blog posts, just so they can easily charge for a subscription. There’s a time and a place for less-formal, less-polished blog writing — here and now, for instance."
I briefly touched on this point recently, and I'm glad Marco agrees. While it's exciting that new tools will soon enable people to publish their own magazines, it's important to stress that they shouldn't go around ripping off Marco's work.
Unfortunately, my hunch is that those same publishing tools will probably also enable lots of copycats. I hope I'm wrong.
Both Jim Dalrymple and John Gruber have linked to this piece in the last week. Most of its points are perfectly salient, but I strongly disagree with this section:
"Additionally, the grabber itself is flawed. It contradicts the swipe left-to-right motion that is is embedded into every iPhone users muscle memory. By the time I remember I can swipe up from the right to access the camera I've already unlocked the device the normal way.
A better solution might be to add an option to have a permanent camera "notification" that looks and acts like a standard lock screen notification. Swipe left-to-right on the camera icon to go directly to the app. It could be located on the top half of the screen below the date/time bar and would be far enough away from the regular unlock control on the bottom so as to prevent it from being accidentally triggered.
This would be more consistent with how people dismiss the lock screen and have the added benefit of being less visually disruptive to the lock screen's aesthetic balance."
There's nothing wrong with the camera's current 'swipe up' mechanic.
I'm having a hard time believing that anyone finds it to be a confusing feature. In fact, turning it into a constant notification would seem more confusing to me. To a user accustomed to seeing notifications on the lock screen, this would probably look like Camera.app is literally always trying to tell them something when it's not.
While I think that there are useful things that could be done with the iPhone's lock screen, this isn't one of them.
Marco Arment:
"The Magazine costs less than The Daily and has far fewer subscribers (so far), but that’s fine: I can’t even imagine how I’d spend $3 million per year on it. But I’m also not trying to make an all-purpose news and editorial publication for everyone, every day."
I never read The Daily, but with Rupert Murdoch behind the curtain and that much money being thrown at it, I guess I'm not surprised that it went under so quickly.
Still, you have to admit it was a ballsy idea when it started. I think they should be commended for their effort and for attempting to venture into a new frontier, not kicked while they're down the way a lot of people have been doing today.
The power of hindsight is a crazy thing.
Harry Marks gathered together some of the "update" statements made by several tech blogs yesterday, after they were fooled into publishing information on a false press release:
"Notice anything about those update statements? Actually, let me rephrase that - notice anything missing from those update statements? Maybe, I don't know, an apology? A promise to verify a story before reporting on every press release that crosses their desks? I'd even settle for a declarative, "We were wrong," in big letters at the top of each post."
The race to say "FIRST!" is an ugly one.
Marco Arment linked to this fantastic piece regarding The Magazine and the state of mobile publishing. Lots of great quotes to choose from, but this stands out:
"The fact that Marco — a programmer — launched one of the most ‘digitally indigenous’ contemporary tablet publications is indicative of two things:
- Programmers are today’s magicians. In many industries this is obvious, but it’s now becoming more obvious in publishing. Marco was able to make The Magazine happen quickly because he saw that Newsstand was underutilized and understood its capabilities. He knew this because he’s a programmer. Newsstand wasn’t announced at a publishing conference. It was announced at the WWDC.
- The publishing ecosystem is now primed for complete disruption."
Go read the whole thing, it's several magnitudes better than my own little piece on publishing.
Rian van der Merwe has been thinking a lot about family lately:
"But for me it is also a move to a better understanding of what it means to be a family, to be bound together through thick and thin, to care more for these people than I ever thought would be possible. And with that comes the realisation that I don’t want to be that guy. That Dad at the park who’s always on his iPhone. The one who’s never home in time for bath time. So I obsess over these things — it pretty much takes an act of God for me not to be home to give my 3-year old a bath. And when I fail, I fall hard, and sometimes stumble rather slowly back on my feet."
Couldn't agree more. It's the kind of thing I was getting at near the end of my post about hardcore gaming.
Chris Bowler:
“For the past couple of years, I’ve slowly added various settings to my iPhone and iPad; settings like backing up to iCloud and the syncing of purchases. I never paid a lot of attention to these changes — they simply made sense. When I walked back in my head, I realized that my last two computer upgrades did not involve syncing my iPhone and iPad.
iCloud had made that step unnecessary.”
Like him, I've been surprised by how much use I've gotten out of iCloud. I'm not about to switch to it wholesale from Dropbox or anything, but the little things like bookmarks, reminders, contacts, and notes being synced between devices make a big difference.
It's also nice to have the peace of mind that if I ever have to restore my iPhone, all of my apps, documents and even keyboard shortcuts can easily be synced right back to the device, all over the air. Or if my phone gets stolen, I can possibly remotely pinpoint its location with the Find My iPhone service. So cool.
Harry Marks at his best.
“A better title would’ve been, “DEAR APPLE: I wish I knew how to quit you.””
A fascinating read from 2009, describing how a group of astronomers is attempting to locate Earth-like planets outside of our solar system.
“RV shifts are how the vast majority of extrasolar worlds have been discovered, but only because these planets, called “hot Jupiters,” are extremely massive and in hellishly close orbits around their stars. Their stellar wobbles are measurable in meters per second; seeing the much smaller centimeters-per-second wobble of an Earth twin is orders of magnitude more difficult. For the Alpha Centauri system, the feat is akin to detecting a bacterium orbiting a meter from a sand grain—from a distance of 10 kilometers.”
Add it to your Instapaper queue and enjoy sometime.
Tina Brown:
“We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.”
About time a news organization had the guts to do this. I think this is a smart move and I'm looking forward to what this might mean for the printed news industry.
Helpful tip by David Smith, showing web developers how to show an iAd-style banner at the top of their mobile sites that point to their companion app, rather than using a popup message that has to be dismissed.
“That’s it. Anyone visiting your site will now get this clean and context aware banner. If you are an app developer please take the 2 minutes needed to implement this. Gaudy popups promoting your app were detestable before but are now downright inexcusable.”
Hopefully more companies will start using this method of advertising and quit doing this:
