Month: May 2012

What If the Dolphins Had Thumbs ⇥ muleradio.net

In this, the premiere episode of The Talk Show on Mule Radio Syndicate, John Gruber is joined by special guest John Moltz, who was recently released from prison and is writing at his brand-new Very Nice Web Site. They discuss Mozilla’s antitrust concerns regarding Windows for ARM’s iOS-like restrictions on third-party apps, new reports that the next iPhone will sport a 4-inch display, Android device fragmentation, and dreamboat actor Ashton Kutcher.

The Talk Show has left 5 by 5 and Dan Benjamin behind. That was unexpected.

Four Years of App Stores ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci has a massive feature reflecting on the past four years of the iOS App Store, as well as the recent Mac App Store.

The Facebook Offering: How It Compares ⇥ nytimes.com

The New York Times compares Facebook’s $104 billion valuation against a number of other IPOs. The second graph is the most visually shocking representation of how it stacks up on day one. The fifth graph is interesting due to the vast number of failed companies, and how they compare to the few that have been enormously successful three years later.

Why I Lost My Faith In Facebook Advertising ⇥ forbes.com

Ryan Holiday, for Forbes:

People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google. People go to Google to find something they need, possibly ready to buy, which a good percentage of the time can in fact be solved by someone’s ad. Facebook ads, on the other hand, annoy users. They yield no real value, and thus no profits.

Blogging Is Not a Thing, It’s an Attitude ⇥ loopinsight.com

Jim Dalrymple:

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

A-goddamn-men.

It’d Be a Shame if Something Happened to Your Nice Operating System ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, for Ars Technica:

Preinstalled trial versions of useless software have been slowing down new PCs for years, and Microsoft is finally offering a solution: bring your PC into a Microsoft Store and pay them $99 to install a clean copy of Windows.

Isn’t this a little like paying a car dealership to wash a mud-caked car after they sell it to you? A hundred bucks to remove things that shouldn’t be installed in the first place.

Flickr’s Larger, More Liquid Photo Pages ⇥ blog.flickr.net

Yahoo may not be doing Flickr any favours, but at least they’ve kept some of the team on. The giant photo pages look great. Put your browser window into fullscreen mode and give it a try.

This change also ensures that photos on the new iPad look really crisp.

The Best of Twitter in Your Inbox ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Starting today, you can discover the best of Twitter in a weekly email digest delivered to your inbox. This summary features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter.

If only there were another way to keep up with Twitter, other than via email.

WSJ: Next iPhone to Feature at Least a 4-Inch Screen ⇥ 9to5mac.com

The fact that both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting this with their own sources is enough to lend credence to it. This will be the biggest form-factor change since the iPhone debuted.

Felidae ⇥ xkcd.com

Of course I have to link to today’s xkcd. I think Apple’s solution is simple: they can call OS X 10.9 “Cougar”, and it will only install on the youngest Macs.

Dell Apologizes for Hiring ‘Shut Up Bitch’ Moderator ⇥ wired.com

“Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologizes for these comments,” Dell wrote Monday in a post to its Google+ account. “Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events.”

This obviously shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but it’s much better than the non-apology they offered earlier.

In Praise of Pixels ⇥ shawnblanc.net

Shawn Blanc:

When it comes to pixels I can’t get enough. Ditto my need for a huge desk. I want a lot of pixels on my screen and I want a lot of space on my desk.

It’s not because I want to use these spaces to store application windows and external hard drives. Quite the opposite: I want to use this space for nothing. I work well when I’m sitting at a large and oversized desk that has little on it beyond a big glowing screen and a clicky keyboard. The same goes for my computer monitors. I like a lot of pixels available so that I can not use them.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet ⇥ gizmodo.com

Mat Honan takes a look at how Yahoo destroyed “almost certainly the best” photo sharing site:

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

I like Flickr a lot, but it used to be better.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ⇥ peternyc.tumblr.com

Peter Nguyen:

The home release of the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured DVD art that resembled a bootleg disc. This was to pay homage to Lisbeth Salanders’ hacker background.

So clever. Tools 4 Movies has a high-res photo of the DVD package.

Why We Need to Keep Talking About Women in Tech ⇥ news.cnet.com

Molly Wood got an official statement from Dell about Christiane Vejlø’s story:

We contacted Dell for comment, and here’s what Kelly McGinnis, Dell’s vice president of global communications, had to say about the matter:

We can tell you that the moderator’s attempted humor does not reflect Dell’s values, or its strong record on and commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.

Then why did you hire him?

Christensen, meanwhile, clarified in the Danish press that he thought IT pros should be saying “shut up, bitch” to their wives, not female co-workers.

Why did Dell ever think this misogynist should speak at a conference that they sponsored and organized? Via Jim Dalrymple.

The New 15″ MacBook Pro ⇥ marco.org

I agree with everything Marco Arment wrote, especially this bit:

I’m not sure I’d want a Retina MacBook Pro yet. I suspect that adoption of Retina assets among Mac apps will be slower than we saw with Retina iOS devices, and more importantly, Retina graphics for websites will likely take significantly longer.

Since non-Retina graphics look worse on Retina screens than on older screens, Retina MacBook users would have significantly worse-looking web browsing for a while — probably years, not months. So I don’t think I’d rush out to get a Retina Mac, but I wouldn’t necessarily avoid a Retina screen when it comes time to upgrade for other reasons.

Nilay Patel at The Verge has apparently “confirmed” the Retina display and Joanna Stern is corroborating that statement.

This is the most glaring problem I’ve noticed with the new iPad that isn’t as obvious on the iPhone: graphics look dismal on such a large, high-resolution display. I’m going through the slow process of upgrading the assets on the websites I control to high-quality versions, but these things take time. Even after I’m finished, I suspect I won’t have upgraded all of the graphics, but rather just the global images.

I think Arment is right: this is going to be a transition period measured in years.

Fact-Checking Digitimes ⇥ techland.time.com

Harry McCracken, for Time:

But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up.

Some people will rush to the defence of these rumour-mongers if these things eventually become true. That’s nonsense. Digitimes has a terrible track record, and that’s probably because they print any rumour that comes their way. Via Brian X. Chen.

Nokia’s Last Stand ⇥ wired.co.uk

Peter Kirwan, in a great dissection by Wired UK:

Offloading OS development to Microsoft has saved Nokia a substantial amount of money. But doing this only makes sense if you believe that owning an operating system matters a lot less in the mobile realm than it did in the PC industry. Ben Evans believes that what really matters is getting operators to stock your phones and building up apps. “Nokia and Microsoft don’t yet have an app ecosystem,” he explains. “But as a developer, if you come to them from Android, it feels great.”

It’s a hugely complicated issue for Nokia, because they rely on Microsoft to bake the core features into the OS, something with which they have been struggling. Evans is right, though: a fresh ecosystem on a new operating system is exciting for developers, especially if they know they can make money. However, apps on iOS and, to some extent, Android are making money for developers. What’s the incentive to bet on a very small section of the market?

As if Push Ads Weren’t Bad Enough ⇥ androidpolice.com

Liam Spradlin:

SellARing’s ad network essentially allows associated apps to replace the familiar “ring ring” sound you hear after dialing a number with a selection of 10-second audio ads.

Remember: Android’s totally open platform is best for the consumer.

Security Patches Will Be Made Available for CS5.5 ⇥ blogs.adobe.com

Remember how Adobe wasn’t going to ship a “critical” security update for CS5 and 5.5 customers, because it was fixed in CS6? Even that was too dickish for Adobe:

We are in the process of resolving the vulnerabilities addressed in these Security Bulletins in Adobe Illustrator CS5.x, Adobe Photoshop CS5.x (12.x) and Adobe Flash Professional CS5.x, and will update the respective Security Bulletins once the patches are available.

There’s a pivot I can get behind.