wow. so late. so, after you finish?wow传家宝是什么么意思
Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:
Apple has changed the wording for free games in its App Store, and
the app purchase buttons that once read “Free” for apps with no
cost now read “Get” instead. The change has been implemented on
both the iOS App Store and the desktop App Store. […]
It is not entirely clear why Apple has decided to replace Free
with Get, but it may have to do with the growing sentiment that
apps with in-app purchases are not free. Earlier this year, the
European Commission
to implement changes to
the way they sell apps, to avoid misleading customers about “free”
games that are not actually free.
90-second supercut of Kubrick’s use of the color red, by Rishi Kaneria.
(, of course.)
David Smith:
Today Apple unveiled . I am very pleasantly surprised by
how capable it is. In my
outlined that I thought we’d see a two phase roll-out of the
platform. Starting with pretty limited capabilities that would
then be expanded at next year’s WWDC. It turns out that I was only
half correct. It is two phase but the first phase is much more
capable than I was expecting.
In the first phase we will be able to build Glances, Actionable
Notifications and iPhone powered apps. The last of which has me
most excited.
Good summary of WatchKit from Serenity Caldwell. Or rather, a good summary of this initial release of WatchKit. As she points out, Apple even stated , “Starting later next year, developers will be able to create fully native apps for Apple Watch.” The long and short of this initial WatchKit SDK is that the Watch acts as a remote display, with limited interactivity, for code that runs in an extension on your iPhone. Apple Watch’s system apps are not limited like that — they run natively on the watch itself. Eventually, third-party apps will too.
In a sense, this is like 2007 all over again. The native APIs almost certainly aren’t finished, and battery life is a huge concern. But with the Watch, Apple is ahead of where they were with the iPhone. This initial SDK is limited, but it’s way better than
we got for the original iPhone at WWDC in 2007.
Ryan Whitwam, writing for Android Police:
Smart Lock in Lollipop encompasses both trusted face and trusted
devices, but a new option is joining the party — trusted places.
The latest Google Play Services for Lollipop devices is adding
this option to the menu automagically. Just choose a trusted
place, and your phone will remain unlocked when it’s in that
geographic area.
Cool feature. I can’t find it, but I recall suggesting something like this as an iOS feature a year or two ago. Touch ID mitigates the need to some extent, but I still think it’d be nice to have my iPad remain unlocked while it’s in my home. (And it’s going to be a few years until most iOS devices in use have Touch ID.)
where I wrote about it, vis-à-vis an Apple patent filing for location-based security.
Federico Viticci:
Right now, old tweets can be found in search by switching to the
All tab of the Twitter app, and Twitter supports a basic syntax to
filter down tweets for users and dates. I was able to use two
different search operators for usernames and dates:
from:username — load all twe
since: until: — load tweets from
specific days.
Search operators can be used in the Twitter app and combined with
hashtags and text to look more precisely in search results and
find a tweet you’re looking for. You can even save advanced
searches you come up with and reuse them at any time. And this
makes for a convenient way to delete old tweets as well: find the
tweet, and use the Delete button in the app to remove it.
What a great feature, and great technical achievement. The entire Twitter archive must be incomprehensibly big.
(Sure would be cool if Twitter made this available to third-party clients.)
Just gorgeous. This is why they made the iMac 5K Retina Display. (.)
Pamela Ribon reviews the children’s book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. You know this book is going to be bad. You know it’s going to contain dreadful, harmful gender stereotypes. But it is so much worse than you (probably) expect.
I’ve been waiting to link to this piece all day, but Ribon’s website (the excellent ) has been down all day because this has gotten so much attention.
Thanks to , I figured how to get Google Analytics to show me the split in screen sizes for mobile devices visiting Daring Fireball. Just counting “mobile devices” for the last 7 days:
% Mobile Sessions
320×568 (iPhone 5/5S/5C)
768×1024 (all iPads)
375×667 (iPhone 6)
414×736 (iPhone 6 Plus)
320×480 (old iPhones)
Those percentages are only for mobile device sessions. (Mobile devices account for 44 percent of all DF sessions.) Two points of interest to me:
This is more confirmation
between the 6 and 6 Plus. As many readers have pointed out, the 6 Plus is still supply constrained, so the split might tilt back toward the 6 Plus once both of them are available everywhere for immediate purchase.
There are already slightly more DF readers using one of the iPhones 6 than the iPhone 5/5C/5S combined. You’re my people.
Bonus Stat #1: iPhone 5 Adoption Back in 2012
There’s no way to use screen resolutions to look at last year’s 5S and 5C launch, because their displays were the same size as the iPhone 5 from 2012. But we can look at 2012 and see the uptake for 4-inch iPhone 5 six weeks after it debuted.
% Mobile Sessions
768×1024 (all iPads)
320×480 (older iPhone)
320×568 (iPhone 5)
In other words, two years ago, 26.2 percent of mobile-device-using DF visitors were using a brand-new iPhone 5. This year, for the iPhones 6 combined, that number is 30.7. Higher, but not drastically so. This could be one of those things where DF readers are very unlike the public at large — I suspect DF readers have always been the type of people who buy new iPhones as soon as they come out.
What’s more interesting is this. In November 2012, “mobile devices” only accounted for 32.7 perce as stated above, today that’s up to 44 percent. In 2012, the iPad (all models combined) accounted for about 12 percent of DF today, 13 percent. So it’s roughly flat. (DF traffic overall is roughly flat too.) iPhones accounted for about 19 percent of all traffic to DF back in 2012; today that number is 29 percent. The growth in mobile usage among DF readers over the last two years is almost entirely from the iPhone.
Bonus Stat #2: OS Usage
While I’m looking at DF’s web stats, here’s the OS usage for all sessions (not just mobile) for the last week:&
% Total Sessions
“Linux”
Windows Phone (sad trombone sound)
Ben Smith, Buzzfeed:
A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should
consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on
its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of
the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the
The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation
he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement
through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that
they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.
Whose views do they represent then, if not his own or Uber’s?
Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million
dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four
journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back
against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your
families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.
Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy,
the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes
combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of
“sexism and misogyny.”
that she was deleting her Uber app after
that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I
don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply
doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.
I’m sure this will change Lacy’s mind about Uber. She’s probably re-installing the app right now.
At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the
one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.
Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”
There is something very wrong with this company. It’s like Richard Nixon came back from the grave and is running a startup.
There are shameless rip-offs, and then there are shameless rip-offs. (But my son pointed out that Nokia’s speaker grills at the bottom have three rows of dots, not two, so that’s original.)
WatchKit has dropped, including the . There’s much to digest, but a few quick thoughts:
The displays of the two watch sizes have different pixel dimensions: 272 ×&# for the 38mm Apple W 312 ×&# for the 42mm.
The system font is named San Francisco. That . There are two versions: San Francisco Text, for sizes 19pt and smaller, and San Francisco Display, for sizes 20pt and up. Di Text has bigger punctuation marks and larger apertures on glyphs like “a” and “e”.
From the Watch HIG: “Avoid using color to show interactivity. Apply color as appropriate for your branding but do not use color solely to indicate interactivity for buttons and other controls.” Can we get this HIG guideline on iOS next year? Update:
Apple means “use color not just for interactivity”, not that you shouldn’t use color alone to indicate interactivity.
A lot of WatchKit is about offloading processing to the iPhone — the Watch is effectively a remote display for an extension running on your iPhone. This should be good for Watch battery life, but limiting when you’re not carrying your iPhone. This is not going to be a “leave your iPhone at home” more like “leave your iPhone in your purse or pocket.”
Christopher Mims, writing in the WSJ, “”:
Everything about apps feels like a win for users — they are
faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all
that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very
openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the
most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.
I can’t believe someone is still writing this in 2014. Users love apps, developers love apps — the only people who don’t love apps are pundits who don’t understand that apps aren’t really in opposition to the open Internet. They’re just superior clients to open Internet services. Instagram didn’t even have a web interface for years, but native app clients for iOS and Android didn’t lock Instagram into anything. Their back-end is just as open as it would have been if they had only had a web browser client interface. They just wouldn’t have gotten popular.
I spoke about this four years ago at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference, in a talk titled “”. The gist of it being that native iOS apps (and native apps for Android, Mac OS X, Windows, and everything else) aren’t in opposition to the “web”. They live on top of the web. A new layer. They are alternatives to websites that run in web browsers. They’re just better clients. There are two big four-letter “H” acronyms that powered the web from the beginning: HTML (client) and HTTP (networking protocol). Native apps are just an alternative to HTML running in a web browser (and many native apps still use HTML web views embedded within the apps themselves to render parts of their interface). Almost all native apps use HTTP/S for networking, though.
It’s just a conceptual simplification. Instead of a web app running inside a browser running as an app inside an OS (three levels of abstraction), we just have apps running within an OS (two levels). Simpler, easier, more elegant.
Mims continues:
Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting
credit cards.
made its debut on the Web, it had to
pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes
30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its
app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand
that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at
Andreessen Horowitz.
That’s patently false. Even with Mims’s own example, Amazon. Just a few minutes before sitting down to write this piece, I used Amazon’s iPhone app — the one distributed through Apple’s App Store — to buy some stuff. I added items to my cart, signed in with my getting-close-to-two-decades-old Amazon account, and I was done. Apple won’t see one penny of that transaction. Not one.
If Amazon started using Apple Pay in their app, Apple would have gotten a fraction of a penny of each dollar I spent — but those pennies would have come from my credit card company, not Amazon.
Retailers who sell through native apps do not pay Apple anything, let alone 30 percent. What Apple charges 30 percent for are purchases for in-app digital content. I can’t buy Kindle books in the Kindle app, or Amazon MP3 music, because of this — but I can buy everything else from Amazon.
The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to
sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for
things — something some of its early architects regret to this
day, since it forced the Web to .
Says the guy writing for the site with a rather strict paywall.
And exposing information, freely, is where the web continues to thrive (says me, the native app proponent who publishes everything I write on a freely-accessible website). If something works great as a web app, let it be a web app. (There are some great web apps, perfectly suited for what they are.) If something works better as a native app, let it be a native app.
The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people
could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to
build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible
with competitors’ technology. Microsoft’s Web browser had to
faithfully render Apple’s website. If it didn’t, consumers would
use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has
since taken over.
So let me get this straight. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer “was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology”. I can’t wait until Jeffrey Zeldman reads this. :
This concept may seem obvious today, but during the Browser Wars
of the 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape each claimed close to
50% of the market, and their browsers were almost entirely
incompatible. It wasn’t uncommon to type in a URL and find that
the site didn’t work. Companies eager to open their virtual doors
had to invest in multiple versions of their sites. In short, it
was a bad situation for businesses and consumers alike. Yet the
browser makers were behaving as many software companies do — by
trying to out-feature the competition with the introduction of new
proprietary technologies.
Back to Mims:
“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the
way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,”
says Mr. Dixon. “If you go to any Internet startup or large
company, they have large teams focused on creating very high
quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web
by comparison.”
Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an
independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance
of apps as the “natural state” for software.
Ruefully, I have to agree. The history of computing is companies
trying to use their market power to shut out rivals, even when
it’s bad for innovation and the consumer.
How has the rise of native mobile apps been anything but a renaissance of innovation? I’d argue we’ve seen far more innovation in the iPhone era () than from . I can’t see how anyone would argue that we’ve seen less innovation. We used to print driving directions f now we get audible turn-by-turn directions on our devices. The pre-mobile web was largely about consumption for most people: reading articles, watching videos, buying stuff. In today’s world, everyone is creating and sharing their own content — everything from photos to videos to their thoughts and observations. Mims claims native mobile apps are “bad for innovation and the consumer” while consumers around the world are doing remarkably innovative things using native mobile apps.
That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google
still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be
accessed from within their apps. But even the Web of documents and
news items could go away. Facebook has announced plans to host
publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing
but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.
Here is where Mims most betrays his conflation of client software and “the Web”. For the sake of argument, imagine a world where all native apps went away. A world where we do everything through web browsers like Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, and IE. In that world, Facebook could do exactly the same thing — “host publishers’ work within Facebook itself”. Exactly the same thing. The control Facebook is exerting here has nothing to do with native mobile apps in particular. They’ve always locked non-Facebook users (like me) out of most content posted to Facebook. Now they’re just talking about hosting even more Facebook-only content.
Arguments about “open” and “closed” often devolve into unresolvable cross-talk where the two sides have different definitions of what open and closed really mean. But the weird thing about a truly open platform is that its openness allows closed things to be built on top of it. In broad strokes, that’s why GNU/GPL software isn’t “open” in the way that BSD software is (and why Richard Stallman
the term “open source”). If you expand your view of “the web” from merely that which renders inside the confines of a web browser to instead encompass all network traffic sent over HTTP/S, the explosive growth of native mobile apps is just another stage in the growth of the web. Far from killing it, native apps have made the open web even stronger.&
Sony Corporation today announces the commercialization of the
Exmor RS IMX230 for smartphone cameras and other devices requiring
increasingly sophisticated image-capture functionality. With 21
effective megapixels, this stacked CMOS imaging sensor features
compact size, higher image quality, and improved functionality.
This is the industry’s first CMOS image sensor for smartphones to
be equipped with an onboard image plane phase detection AF signal
processing function to achieve excellent focus tracking of
fast-moving subjects. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) function, which
captures both backgrounds and subjects clearly and vividly even in
high-contrast scenes such as backlit locations, now supports
high-resolution still images and 4K video recording. This new CMOS
image sensor will ship in April 2015.
Looks impressive — and Apple has long used Sony sensors for iPhone cameras. (Sony’s specs only list video frame rates going to 120 FPS — the iPhone 6 supports 240. Not sure if that’s only for HDR video, though.)
My thanks to Igloo for once again sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed. Most “intranets” suck. They’re ugly, badly designed, and people wind up avoiding them by just emailing file attachments back and forth.
Igloo bills itself as “an intranet you’ll actually like”. I’d say they’re the intranet that doesn’t suck. You get all sorts of cool features, like Twitter-like microblogs, file sharing, comments on everything, and the design can match your brand across all devices. It’s easy to use, and easy to setup, with no technical expertise required.
Still need convincing? . Amazingly, Igloo is free to use for up to 10 people.
and see for yourself.
[Update: The site has been taken offline, , which includes all the good stuff. It’s just missing an image or two.]
this yesterday, and still can’t stop laughing about it. It’s a counterfeit iPhone 6 being for $250. So many gems on this web page:
This phone is the same as the Apple iPhone 6 without the Apple
logo on the back of the phone or the iPhone 6 text on the white
box (sometimes the phone comes with an Apple like logo). The
internals of this phone are the same as the Apple iPhone 6.
Do NOT pay $600, $700 or even $800 for the same phone.
The quality, finish & performance of this phone is the same as the
Apple iPhone 6.
From the specs list:
Video recording: Yes
E-book format: Excel, PPT, Word
Screen resolution: 854 ×&# pixels
Gravity Sensing System
Who hasn’t enjoyed reading a good .xls novel? But it gets better: they embed an unboxing video from someone who specifically emphasizes in the video just how bad the performance of the phone is. The people selling this phone chose to embed that.
I think my favorite thing, though, is the photograph of a warehouse at the very bottom of the page. (, .) There are no words to accompany it, but the implication is that this enormous, airy, well-lit, clean warehouse is where they’re selling these phones from. Convincing!
I’m half-tempted to buy one of these on a lark.
Who else but very special guest John Moltz to ring in The Talk Show’s centurial episode. Topics include iPhone display sizes (and in particular, our mutual preference for the old 5S 4-inch size over the 4.7-inch iPhone 6); the new book Moltz co-wrote, ; writing tools, including word processors and M shopping for gaming PCs as a M Microsoft Office going free Twitter’s stilte President Obama’s statement on Net N and Tim Cook’s eloquent essay announcing that he’s gay.
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I really enjoy reviews like this one by David Ruddock at Android Police. It’s often very interesting to read something from the point of view of someone more deeply attuned to another platform. This, from the list of “cons” for the iPad, caught my eye:
Is an iPad, will result in some people thinking you’re an Apple
sycophant / the kind of person who lingers at coffee shops for 8
hours a day.
I often need reminding just how weird some people’s ideas are about Apple and Apple users.
Substantially, these few bits stood out to me. Battery life:
Standby life on the Nexus 9 isn’t fantastic, either - I’m getting
around 15% idle drain quite reliably every 24 hours, which is
absolutely at odds with Google’s 30-day standby estimate. Even if
you don’t agree with my assessment of the usage time life,
Android’s idle drain is still an absolute embarrassment. I could
let my first Air sit for a week untouched and the battery gauge
would barely budge - maybe a few percent. Android has never been
great about this, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.
Safari vs. Chrome:
You can throw benchmarks and timed tests at me until you’re blue
in the face - mobile Safari kicks Chrome’s ass every day of the
week. The smoothness alone is evidence to me that while Google may
care about a browser’s technical proficiency, Apple cares at least
as much about its usability and consistency, if not more.
Chrome for Android’s usability is a victim of Google’s
cross-platform utopian vision, and for now, it’s just not a
fantastic touch browser. Safari may not always be faster in every
benchmark or timed comparison, but it’s smoother in all the ways
that matter.
From a smoothness and stability standpoint, iOS 8 feels so much
more refined and predictable than Lollipop does on the Nexus 9.
Apple is known for obsessing over things like animation draw times
and smooth scrolling, trying to create an experience that never
feels jarring or rough around the edges. Apple seems to toil
indefatigably to ensure those home screen swipes and launch
animations are perfect every time. Moving to the more powerful A8X
chip with three cores now means that smoothness persists even
during app installs or other background operations, an area where
the first Air occasionally would have difficulty.
This is such a huge thing, for me, from a UX standpoint. Google
has tried to instill these values in Android with things like
Project Butter, but it’s never seemed to pan out exactly in the
way I think we all hoped would. The obsession with smoothness in
iOS is almost religious. In Android, it’s always seemed like an
attitude of “hey, if you can keep things at around 60FPS, that’d
be great or whatever.” I realize animations and such things are
far more aesthetic than functional, but they can have a huge
effect on how you perceive performance and feel about a device.
Using the iPad just feels nicer, I don’t find myself getting
annoyed by it nearly as often as the Nexus.
This ties into one of my recent themes here on DF, regarding Google’s own iOS apps, and the asymmetry of the Google/Apple Android/iOS rivalries. Ruddock is clearly an Android guy, but more so than that he’s a Google guy. He can use an iPad and still have a Gmail app, still have a Google Maps app, still use Google Docs, etc. Google’s wide support for iOS makes it a lot more likely that an all-in Google platform user might prefer an iPad to an Android tablet.
Take it with a grain of salt since the numbers don’t come from Apple, but interesting if true. 3-to-1 sounds about right to me. But there was an app analytics report a few weeks ago , and .
Update: TV Pro — a TV guide app in Germany — .
While Glass may find some specialized, even lucrative, uses in the
workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near
future are slim, many developers say.
Connie Loizos, reporting for Strictly VC:
Sources who spoke to StrictlyVC and asked to remain anonymous say
Fadell has fashioned a hierarchical structure reminiscent of TV’s
“Game of Thrones.”
According to one employee, “Almost every decision, no matter how
small,” goes through either Fadell or Matt Rogers, who cofounded
Nest with Fadell and was previously a senior manager at Apple.
(Through a spokesperson, Fadell and Rogers declined to answer
questions for this story.)
“It’s always, ‘Tony and Matt want us to do this. We have to hit
this deadline because Tony and Matt want us to.’ You definitely
see people taking the path of least resistance because they don’t
want to upset Tony.”
Another employee calls it a “huge meeting culture, to the point
where anyone at the director level or up spends their entire day
in meetings, many of them duplicative meetings about the same
subject, over and over to the point where a lot of people have
complained.”
Sounds like Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam isn’t going smoothly.
Alex Epstein makes the case that Apple’s claim that its “data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources, which result in zero greenhouse gas emissions” is fraudulent:
Imagine this scenario: Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to take an ocean
liner across the Atlantic. He has a problem. Ocean liners run on
oil but Cook wants to be “green.”
What can he do?
Well, he could try his luck with a sailboat. But the wind is
volatile and unreliable — not to mention that a wind-swept voyage
across the ocean would be dangerous.
But then, when all hope seems lost, Apple Board member Al Gore
offers an idea. Use an ocean liner, but install sails on top, so
that at least part of the time the boat is at least partially
powered by wind.
Epstein is the author of a new book titled , so he’s clearly coming at this from a certain perspective.
Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting
everyone to their world via our information sharing and
distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue
generating Internet companies in the world.
That’s 220 characters. If any company should be able to fit its strategy into a single tweet, it’s Twitter. So clunky. Worrisome that they can’t express themselves clearly.
I can just see the argument. “Let’s call them platforms.” “No, products.” “Platforms!” “Products!” “Wait, I’ve got it: platform products.”
I’m sure there’s an artful way to use “world” three times in the
same sentence, but that ain’t it.
Eli Hodapp, writing for Touch Arcade:
I don’t know how many of those angry single star iTunes reviewers
read TouchArcade… But, seriously guys? It seems like the hive
mind of the App Store is continually pushing developers in to this
unrealistic corner of demanding absolutely everything but not
being willing to pay anything. The fact of the matter is Monument
Valley is an amazing game, made by real artists, working in a real
studio, getting paid real salaries, with real families they go
home to and support. They’re selling their game for a total of six
bucks if you buy both the game itself and the expansion. I don’t
fully understand what happened to get us on this horrible Biff
with the almanac timeline of Earth where this kind of thing is
unacceptable to iOS gamers.
Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5- such a , and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.
These photos from the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander are just hauntingly beautiful. Can’t stop looking at them.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Philae probe successfully landed
on the Comet 67P, a first in space exploration.
The Rosetta satellite and its probe payload arrived at the Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Aug. 6 after 10 years, five months, and
four days in space. Rosetta traveled 6.4 billion kilometers (3.98
billion miles) on its journey and orbited the sun five times.
10-year mission. 4 billion miles. Landing on a comet traveling 40,000 miles per hour. Science.
Dan Provost, Studio Neat:
Tom and I have been reading and thinking about these things for a
while, and a few months ago we had a realization. Studio Neat is
in a unique position. We are not just app developers, we also sell
physical products. Products that are meant to work with the apps
in a way that enhances both, as is the case with the Glif and Slow
Fast Slow or Frameographer. What if we make apps that are free
with “ads”, but the ad is simply for our other products? You know,
the products that actually make money?
It was an intriguing enough idea that we decided to try it, first
with Slow Fast Slow. As of today, you can
Slow Fast Slow
for free. If you are unaware, Slow Fast Slow is our app for
manipulating the speed of videos with our interactive timeline. It
works amazingly well with the new 240 fps videos on the iPhones 6.
Clever idea from John August: a deck of cards with advice, ideas, and tricks for helping writers get unstuck. Nicely illustrated and designed (including excellent use of Univers). It’s a Kickstarter campaign that aimed small and has exploded way past their original goal. But the coolest thing is they’re donating packs of the cards to youth writing programs, and the more decks they sell, the cheaper each deck becomes to produce, and the more they’ll have to donate.
The project is already funded nine times over, but if they can get a few more thousand backers
(by backers, not dollars) ever. And you can get in for just $15 — or, just $12 if you want to donate two packs to the youths.
Fred Wilson on Net Neutrality:
This is about something more simple and more important. It is
about making sure that the Internet remains open and free for
innovation. It is about recognizing that the last mile of the
wired and wireless internet is a natural monopoly/duopoly where
scale creates massive advantages, just like the electrical grid
and the water system. It is about making sure that the massive
companies that operate these last mile monopolies don’t use their
market power to extract rents from the entrepreneurs, developers,
and companies that must go through those networks to reach their
customers.
This is about keeping the Internet the way it has been operating
for the past twenty years. This is a conservative idea. Don’t
change something that has worked so well for so long. Don’t allow
the telcos to start inspecting each packet and prioritizing some
over others.
Solves the problem where people who switched from iPhone to another platform were unable to receive SMS messages from iPhone users, because iMessage still considered their phone number tied to their iMessage account. The trick was always to disable iMessage on your iPhone before switching your SIM card, but no one ever thought to do that.
When they were designing the “use iMessage instead of SMS when texting from one iPhone to another” feature, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone at Apple that someone might eventually want to switch from iPhone to another phone.
Stu Maschwitz:
We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe
you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is
that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not
one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.
Dr. Drang, back in March 2013:
If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in
the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle
of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for
civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without
artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour
This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation
of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current
urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go
running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.
Good bit of follow-up to the DST discussion on .
Marco Arment:
after years of Kindles being
into flimsier, lower-end devices, but I think it’s
clear that Amazon just isn’t willing or able to make a premium,
high-quality e-reader.
Amazon first made the Kindle in 2007 — it’s not like they’re new at this. The obvious answer is that they just don’t give a shit about making a truly high-quality product.
Jason Snell:
Amazon’s been headed in this direction for a while now. The
original Kindle screen was 167 the Paperwhite upped that all
the way to 212 ppi. The Paperwhite’s screen is actually quite
good, but the Voyage’s is still noticeably better. To put it in
Apple terms, this is really the first Kindle with a Retina
Unfortunately, Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved
reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it
comes to typography. The Voyage still only offers six typefaces —
many of them
— and still
force-justifies every line (with no hyphenation!), creating
variable-length gaps between words just so the right margin is
straight rather than ragged. A device that’s dedicated to words on
a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type
It’s depressing that all my typographic complaints from two years ago still stand. Amazon hasn’t improved the typography of Kindles in any way since then, other than by increasing the resolution of the display. I’ll repeat now what I wrote then:
Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print
typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only
because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon
should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product
manager for the Kindle.
They should either devise or license (from Adobe?) a world-class hyphenation-justification algorithm while they’re at it. I’ll never buy another Kindle device until they fix this.
Update: Numerous readers have pointed out that they could just use the excellent .
President Obama:
I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net
neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the
phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting
what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are
simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use
every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line
rules include:
No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or
service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be
permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those
commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your
No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow
down some content or speed up others — through a process often
called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your
ISP’s preferences.
Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and
ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some
sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC
to make full use of the transparency authorities the court
recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules
to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the
No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck
in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of
gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to
the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an
explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction
that has a similar effect.
It saddens me, and almost surprises me, that this issue has become .
“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the I the Internet
should not operate at the speed of government.
That’s just word soup. The only similarity to the Affordable Care Act is that Obama supports it. There may well be a rational, reasoned argument against Net Neutrality, but Republicans aren’t making it, and neither are the cable companies or cellular providers. Be wary of the side that can’t express their argument in clear, plain, unambiguous language.
Very special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show to talk about Comcast customer service, cable-cutting, Marlins Man (no relation) and his showboating-spectator predecessors, and the state of podcasting today. Also: daylight savings time and Roman numerals. You know, the usual stuff.
Brought to you by:
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Matt Miller ran for Congress in west L.A. this year, and wrote about the experience for Politico Magazine. Fascinating, if depressing, “this is what it’s like” perspective:
Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.
I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s. The sponsor is Meh, a new daily deal site from the founders of Woot. Here’s the sponsored RSS entry they wrote, in its entirety:
Fucking Amazon
I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I
got bored.
with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal
site — only one thing for sale each day.
Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just
for you, at . Of
course you can also just go to
The headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so bizarre that when it hit the @daringfireball Twitter account, I got about a dozen replies asking if the account had been hacked.
These guys don’t do marketing like other people do marketing. They really do have amazing prices on the products they sell, but the heart of Meh is what made Woot interesting back in the day: the writing. Click through and see for yourself. My thanks to them for sponsoring DF this week. Also:
in D Magazine from earlier this year.
Kif Leswing, reporting for GigaOm:
Even if you’re uninterested in GT Advanced Technologies, there are
a number of details about how much power Apple exercises over its
suppliers.
Squiller says that Apple did not ever really enter into
negotiations, warning that GTAT’s managers should “not waste their
time” negotiating because Apple does not negotiate with its
suppliers. According to GTAT, after the company balked, Apple told
GTAT that its terms are standard for other Apple suppliers and
that GTAT should “put on your big boy pants and accept the
agreement.”
GTAT’s take seems to be:
Apple doesn’t negotiate terms.
Apple’s terms were onerous.
We accepted Apple’s terms.
One of the best sites on the web just got better.
Dustin Curtis on Amazon’s hardware aspirations:
It’s an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product
, they sell the product
customers, they
get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a
drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next
product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing
back. You can’t buy a phone and put it in a lonely drawer, never
to use it again, like you would with a Fire Tablet. You can’t dupe
your customers by selling them a shitty phone, because a phone
becomes a part of its user’s identity.
New today: updated Android apps
and . Both look interesting — , “Google is reworking Mail and Calendar from database displays to task-led interfaces. I wonder how far they’ll take that.”
And intriguingly, as Google’s new “ language evolves, it’s very clearly heading in a different direction than iOS. Talking about flatness is simply too superficial to be a useful discussion. Superficially, iOS and Android seemingly converged toward flatness (and Windows Phone, of course, was there already), but once you get past those surface similarities, all three mobile platforms are evolving in noticeably different ways.
But Google’s “Material Design” isn’t merely the design language for Android, it’s the design language for all the company’s software. One result of this is that Google’s iOS apps feel less and less like iOS apps with each major release. To me, they look and feel like Android apps running on iOS. Android users might disagree with that assessment, as much of what makes a good Android app Android-y is not how the software looks but the way it interacts with the system. But these Google apps certainly don’t look or feel quite like iOS apps. Their brand-new you-need-a-beta-invitation
is also interesting (I got an invitation last week), but even though it’s a brand-new app, if anything, it feels less like an iOS app than Google’s other iOS apps. For one thing, Inbox uses a blue background for the status bar, which is the system-standard cue to indicate that cellular tethering is engaged. Another example: None of the Google iOS apps I have on my iPhone (Maps, Gmail, Inbox) support the iOS standard swipe-from-left-edge shortcut to go back in the view hierarchy. That’s a two-year-old standard design pattern for iOS, and I find it downright essential with the bigger displays on the new iPhones. (In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious that Apple added this gesture in iOS 7 because they knew then that bigger-screen iPhones were in the pipeline.)
One last thought. Lost in the competition between platforms (iOS vs. Android) is the more philosophical competition between native and in-browser web apps. In the early days of iOS, say,
, it was easy to conflate these two battles in public debate, because Apple was seen as the primary proponent of native app development, and Google was seen as a proponent of cross-platform web apps. No more. Google today (like Facebook) seems all-in on native apps, at least (again, like Facebook) for post-PC devices. Just a few years ago, I used to see a lot more arguments from web-app proponents that native apps’ dominance on mobile devices would be short-lived. I don’t see so much of that any more.
One reason some people argue in favor of in-browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript web apps is that it’s the last bastion for . The lament I hear most frequently about mobile development is that if you want to reach the widest possible audience, you have to write at least two apps, iOS and Android. If you include Windows Phone, now you’re up to three. My take has always been: Tough luck. The point of making apps shouldn’t be about making life easier for developers, it’s about making the best possible apps for users. If you value user experience above developer convenience, it’s easy to see why native apps are winning the war. But even on the desktop, with PC browsers, write-once-run-everywhere is often just a pipe dream.
when I try to log into the desktop web app version of Google Inbox using Safari on OS X Yosemite.
I don’t think the web version of Inbox is Chrome-only because Google wants to lock people into Chrome. I don’t think it’s about spite. I think it was just a practical decision that fell out of a desire to push the limits of the in-browser web app experience, rather than limit themselves to a common baseline of functionality available across the X top browsers. Cynics surely look at this as the second coming of Microsoft’s IE-only web technologies from the late ’90s, but my guess is that support for additional browsers is coming, that Safari is probably high on that list, and they shipped Chrome-first only because it was the fastest way they could ship. One reason Google created Chrome in the first place was to have a browser they controlled to better enable the sort of web apps they wanted to build.
In short, though, a Chrome-only app from Google — even if only temporary — is not how the world of standards-supporting web apps was supposed to work, in the aftermath of the breakup of Microsoft’s IE hegemony. But I’m not surprised. Practicality trumps idealism in the long-run, and the idea that the post-IE world of web browsers would lead to a world of universal cross-platform software is pretty much the definition of an idealistic crusade.
I see a certain irony in all this. Google is cultivating a single look-and-feel for their apps. But for mobile they’re creating them as separate native Android and iOS apps. But their latest web app for desktop PCs, Inbox, only runs in one browser, Chrome.&
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