As expected from Pentagram, this looks like ass. Why not use the beautiful Microsoft Store logo, or even a modernised version of Microsoft’s Windows logo from 1985?
This logo has no soul. The window is wrong from a perspective standpoint, and looks like an entirely separate element. The circular dot over the “i” looks stupid in such a close proximity to the oval “o”. The numeral isn’t even in Segoe.
Melissa Martin, writing for the Winnipeg Free Press:
The bill, otherwise dubbed the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, would give police access to Internet subscribers’ private information without a warrant, among other increased powers.
Outrageous, right? This is the Canadian equivalent of SOPA combined with elements of DCMA. It’s insane and ridiculous, and us Canadians have had enough:
Robert Jensen, a Prince Edward Island man and regular critic of the Harper government, came up with the idea on Thursday morning and urged his followers to spam [Member of Parliament Vic] Toews’ official Twitter account with useless personal trivia.
Jensen later faxed his grocery list to Toews’ Ottawa office; but by then, the Tell Vic Everything movement had become a bona fide sensation. Only eight hours after Jensen’s original Tweet, there were thousands of messages in the Tell Vic Everything pile — and the momentum was still picking up. “I’m killing myself laughing,” Jensen wrote on his account. “Now this is what we call peaceful, democratic protest, Canuck-style.”
Steve Streeting, for the Atlassian blog:
Fundamentally, sandboxing is a good idea. Asking applications to be specific about what they need to do, and exposing that to the system and users for validation is a good idea for security.
The trouble is, the sandboxing implementation currently in place on Mac OS X Lion doesn’t allow for all the behaviours that real Mac applications do right now, behaviours which are not at all contentious, are approved in the Mac App Store already, and indeed are very much appreciated by users.
There are, unfortunately, trade-offs in any decision. So far, the consequences with mandatory sandboxing for Mac App Store apps are not worth the benefits for many developers. Hacker News user “tzs” notes that refinements in 10.7.3 might help, quoting the Apple Developer sandboxing requirements:
Starting in Mac OS X v10.6, the NSURL class and the CFURLRef opaque type each provide a facility for creating and using bookmark objects. A bookmark provides a persistent reference to a file-system resource. When you resolve a bookmark, you obtain a URL to the resource’s current location. A bookmark’s association with a file-system resource (typically a file or folder) usually continues to work if the user moves or renames the resource, or if the user relaunches your app or restarts the system.
In an app that adopts App Sandbox, you must use a security-scoped bookmark to gain persistent access to a file-system resource.
Simple enough, right? The problem is that this is more of a workaround than a solution, according to developers. It requires some major rewriting for some apps, and for others, it’s simply not complete or thorough enough.
Kirby Ferguson just finished up his series of phenomenal, persuasive and engaging videos entitled Everything is a Remix with its fourth, and final, episode. He’s now started on his next project entitled This is Not a Conspiracy Theory:
It’s a multi-part series that will explain the major ideas, events and human quirks that have shaped where we are right now politically. It will center on the United States, but the stories will cover the world and I think it’ll have strong relevance regardless of where you live. It will be a series with huge scope, but it’ll be rooted in solid storytelling. I’ll use history, science, psychology and economics to tell this story and I’ll make it relevant, accessible and seriously entertaining.
I hope this is as good and as rational as I think it’s going to be. I’m a backer.
Steven Frank, of Panic:
To me it’s a great sign that they’re aware and at some level sympathetic to our concerns, while remaining committed to a high-security experience for users.
Further cementing this feeling is the fact that we were invited to a private briefing at Apple about Gatekeeper a week before today’s announcement. Cabel was told point-blank that Apple has great respect for the third-party app community, and wants to see it continue to grow — they do not want to poison the well. I think their actions here speak even louder than their words, though.
A thorough overview of Gatekeeper for human beings, what it means to developers, and what users can expect.
This is better than Growl, insomuch as it offers a layer “underneath” the desktop for missed notifications. The execution leaves much to be desired, however, due to its strange mix of Helvetica (used in the Centre) and Lucida Grande (used in banners). I have a hunch that the final version will ship with Helvetica Neue as the default system font. It looks better on high-resolution displays, anyway.
2¢: I figured Apple would go Mac App Store-only. Gatekeeper is an investment of time and effort to ensure the opposite: secure indie apps.
Very well said. I, too, was convinced that ever-increasing amounts of OS X would be cordoned off for use by Mac App Store applications. This is a good move to ensure broad distribution, yet keeps the OS secure.
By default, Gatekeeper is set to only allow apps from the App Store, and apps that have been signed by Apple. This is a good setting that balances security and availability of apps. If the user can’t find this non-hidden, very obvious preference in order to run unsigned apps, they probably shouldn’t be running unsigned apps.
John Gruber, with a massive scoop:
And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule. This year’s update is scheduled for release in the summer, and is ready now for a developer preview release. Its name is Mountain Lion.
This isn’t speculation, nor leaked insider information. This is from a one-on-one presentation given to him by Phil Schiller. Apple has put up its promotional pages and it looks fantastic. They haven’t gone to Helvetica system-wide yet, but it’s making its slow march across many of the apps.
Dwight Eschliman on how he photographs Apple products for the promotional images:
The most challenging aspect of shooting store panels for Apple is the balance between the size of the file and the depth of field. Often the products small enough that our depth of field is very narrow. In order for the product to appear entirely in focus, we have to shoot a number of focus zones, which are stitched together in post.
Great video that explains it, too. More of Eschliman’s work for Apple is in his portfolio.
Via Sebastiaan de With, via Duncan Wilcox.
Josh Topolsky busts out his inner Glenn Beck, complete with chalkboard, to determine what date the iPad 3 will be introduced.
“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
Arguably what should have been standard from day one will be required going forward. With any luck, this will be the last time I feel compelled to link to articles about this subject.
In amongst giants and heroes of the community, Daniel Wajda has posted this humble writer’s homescreen. Of note, Things has been replaced (temporarily?) by Clear.
Shawn Blanc has a good review of Clear, including this aspect of the app which I also noticed:
Also worth noting is that Clear’s bottom-most pane is an individual list — you can not drill down to an individual item. Further emphasizing the forced simplicity of Clear.
There are no alarms, there are no notes, and there are no due dates. This is the simplest, most efficient to-do app around. It’s also the most creative in a very crowded market. I’m still deciding whether or not I like the simplicity. All of the other to-do apps I’ve tried sync across my devices, but perhaps that’s an unnecessary complication. I rarely jump on my iPad to find my to-do list.
John Gruber:
The personal stuff — documentation of Jobs’s cruelty (and his talent for cruelty), his tantrums, his tendency to claim for himself the ideas of others — that’s not problematic. Isaacson handles that well, and what he reports in that regard jibes with everything we know about the man. My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.
This is the best critique of the biography you’ll read. The book was riddled with technical inaccuracies, which I can only assume were not fact-checked nor edited in order for the book to be released two weeks after Jobs passed away.
Gruber alludes to it, but I want to emphasise it: Isaacson doesn’t finish his thoughts. There are a number of instances in the book where he has used quotes or sayings related to Jobs, Apple, and the rest of the story. Yet he never contextualises nor explains the significance of those quotes. Take the Alan Kay line that Jobs quoted during the iPhone introduction in 2007:
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
This is stated in the book, but as Gruber points out, it’s never realised:
Isaacson includes that Alan Kay quote about serious software people making their own hardware, but doesn’t seem to heed it, or to recognize that it perfectly describes Steve Jobs’s career and explains the phenomenal success of Apple’s products.
Isaacson simply does not elaborate on it. The reader is left to infer their own meaning behind it, how Jobs related to it, and how it fits into the broader scope of the industry. There’s nothing wrong with leaving some space for the reader to reflect and to relate, but when quoting something that Jobs clearly saw as a mantra for the company, it was up to Isaacson to emphasise that, which he failed to do.
Great reporting and research by Dieter Bohn:
The proper technical solution is for iOS to limit access to the contacts database for all apps, so that an app must ask the user for explicit permission to access it. Apple already does this for location information. Yes, this solution is likely to break functionality for a wide swath of apps and it also brings up the earlier-mentioned problem of “alert fatigue,” but neither of those issues should be considered deal-breakers when weighed against the potential privacy issues of unfettered access to contact information. As things stand today, any one of the over half a million iOS apps currently in the market can access your address book without your knowledge or permission
As I see it, that 37 million for last quarter represented 24% of the smartphone market. There’s 3 out of 4 people buying something else. 9 out of 10 phone buyers are buying something else.
This isn’t something Apple keeps repeating because it’s something they want to believe, but rather the mantra they follow. The opportunity is huge for them.
Jim Dalrymple:
[T]he group on Monday took credit for news that Apple would have the Fair Labor Association (FLA) conduct special audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China.
The problem is that Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an email to employees four weeks ago that the company would have the FLA conduct these audits.
Four weeks ago. Nothing more than a feel-good moment for a few people, instead of targeting the companies that have even worse working conditions than Apple’s suppliers do.
Roger Martin is on the board of RIM. In this candid interview with The Globe and Mail, he notes where he sees problems with the company. But it’s clear that he has no idea of what needs to be done to improve their situation. Instead, he defends what RIM has done for the past five years.
Still, he has little patience with calls to be more like Apple. He points out that Apple dismissed its own co-founder Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s in favour of an outside marketing specialist, only to bring Mr. Jobs back, laying the foundation for its current exalted status.
“They ask ‘Why can’t you be more like Apple?’ So we should go bankrupt and fire our founders and bring in a moron? That’s what we should do?” Mr. Martin says.
While RIM isn’t going bankrupt, they’re not financially healthy and are on a downward trajectory. They didn’t fire their founders, but they left anyway, putting in charge someone who has vowed to follow the current roadmap.
RIM is broken.
Sean Buckley:
According to WPSauce, Microsoft Store India’s landing page was briefly taken over by a hacker group called Evil Shadow Team, who, in addition to putting a new face on Windows products, revealed that user passwords were saved in plain text.
I can understand being suspicious of giving sensitive information to sketchy, unheard-of startups, but Microsoft? The underlying assumption is that they will treat your personal information incredibly well. Storing passwords in plain text? This is elementary stuff.
Some are rushing to note that Microsoft didn’t actually write the store, nor do they own or maintain it. That’s true enough, but it’s in Microsoft’s name, and it’s their official store in India.
Where by “tablets” they probably mean iPads, as Dante D’Orazio notes:
It’s not clear which tablet will fill the order, though the AMC does specify that it’ll be either an iPad 2 or equivalent device.
Why the iPad 2? When a separate Air Force division announced it was buying 2,861 of Apple’s second generation tablet in December, it said that it needed something that worked with two iOS-only apps and had at least 64GB of internal memory — something few competitors can offer.
