Month: June 2012

Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable ⇥ ifixit.org

Kyle Wiens is in a tizzy over the new MacBook Pro:

We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

Says the guy who also sells upgrades and service products and fails to mention it at any point in the article.

The Kids are Alright ⇥ wired.com

Maryn McKenna for Wired:

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. […]

Well, goodbye to all that.

This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school.

“Boo, hiss”, I hear you mutter. But you must read all of the updates to this story.

Betteridge’s Law Strikes Again ⇥ autoblog.com

The headline:

Did Apple forget to tell automakers about the new Siri button?

The article:

After Apple announced plans to further integrate it’s [sic] Siri voice recognition software to a button on the steering wheel, some carmakers said they were unaware of those plans.

Audi told Fast Company, which contacted all nine carmakers mentioned by Apple, that it was not sure if the project could be completed in a year. A Chrysler spokesman said the company did not have any plans to announce anything. Toyota was equally as vague: “(T)here are no particular applications planned at this time.”

If you actually read the referenced article, you’ll find it paints a distinctly different picture. Of the nine car makers on the slide, three (Mercedes-Benz, GM, and BMW) confirmed the twelve-month timeframe promised by Scott Forstall. Another four (Land Rover, Jaguar, Toyota, and Audi) all confirmed that they were working with Apple, but couldn’t promise an estimated arrival date. Honda didn’t respond by press time. Only Chrysler, one lone automaker, couldn’t confirm working with Apple, and wouldn’t comment on future product plans.

Of the eight automakers that responded, one hadn’t heard of Apple’s plans. Nice headline.

Stop Digging ⇥ digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com

As I’m sure you’re aware, a lawyer representing FunnyJunk.com sent Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal a letter demanding a cheque for $20,000 to prevent him filing a lawsuit. Why? Because Inman wrote an article noting that FunnyJunk was stealing his comics and re-hosting them without attribution while gaining ad revenue.

FunnyJunk removed a number of those comics, and is claiming that Inman is falsely accusing them of copyright infringement. But Inman notes that the article is both old, and that FunnyJunk is still infringing copyright by hosting his content. In essence, FunnyJunk wants Inman to pay for his own comics to be copied.

Inman thought this was ridiculous, so he set up a campaign to raise $10,000 each for the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society. As of writing, the campaign has raised over $160,000 to be split equally between the two.

FunnyJunk‘s lawyer won’t be having that though:

When I reached out to FunnyJunk’s lawyer, Charles Carreon, to discuss the situation, he explained that he’d removed his contact information from his website due to the large number of people who’d contacted him after Inman’s blog post went online. […]

[H]e believes Inman’s fundraiser to be a violation of the terms of service of IndieGoGo, the website being used to collect donations, and has sent a request to disable the fundraising campaign. (The fundraising website has only responded with an automated message so far.)

What a dick.

Expanding Expanded Tweets ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Michael Sippey of Twitter:

You’ve probably expanded tweets before to play videos from YouTube or see photos from Instagram. Now, a diverse and growing group of new partners like the The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, and Time also deliver rich content inside tweets containing a link to those websites.

This is a very smart monetization strategy. It’s completely natural, doesn’t require Twitter to alter their product’s core philosophy, and isn’t intrusive to privacy unlike many advertising strategies. Via John Gruber.

Not News and Not Even Relevant ⇥ brooksreview.net

Ben Brooks on the hyperbolic shitstorm over soldered RAM:

There is an argument to be made that you could do the upgrade at a later date when RAM is cheaper, but if you know that’s what you like to do, then you already know you can’t do that with the retina MacBook Pro and will buy accordingly.

Agreed. As I said before, the Retina MacBook Pro will almost certainly last for five or more years of solid OS updates, if the past is anything to go by.

Adaptive Status Bar in iOS 6 ⇥ blog.maxthemes.com

Max Rudberg is on a roll with these UI breakdowns:

The new status bar in iOS 6 is actually not blue, which you might think from looking at Apple’s keynote, but adaptive to whichever color the app uses. It uses the tintColor set on the navigation bar.

Great post.

Growl and Notification Centre ⇥ growl.posterous.com

It looks like the developers of Growl have a good strategy for dealing with Mountain Lion’s Notification Centre. In essence, it looks like notifications normally sent to Growl will be passed along to Notification Centre if the user is running 10.8. If not, the notification will show with Growl. Smart.

Nothing to See Here ⇥ allthingsd.com

John Paczkowski:

Sources close to the company say that Ping, which still exists today in iTunes 10.6.3 and the iOS 6 beta — where it doesn’t work, will be gone with the software’s next major release, likely scheduled for this fall. And at that point Apple’s social networking offerings will shift to Twitter and new partner Facebook entirely.

I’m sorry, what’s being discontinued?

Ping, you say?

Never heard of it.

The New Dock in Mountain Lion ⇥ blog.maxthemes.com

Max Rudberg points out some of the changes to the ubiquitous Dock in Mountain Lion. They’re mostly subtle, but they fix the things that have been bugging aficionados of pixel perfection for years.

Really Important Customers Can Wait Another Year ⇥ macworld.com

Marco Arment, on yesterday’s Mac Pro “update”:

I bet this is the last Mac Pro. If you wanted to kill a product line, an “update” like today’s would be a good way to clear out parts and keep selling to a few desperate buyers for a bit longer without any real investment.

This is pathetic.

It is, indeed, a pathetic update. The fact that it lacks USB 3 and Thunderbolt, not to mention its weak CPU upgrade shows that Apple was more focused on getting the new MacBook Pro out.

Tim Cook heard the message, and send this in an email to a Macworld reader:

Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.

Another year and a bit until pro customers (“really important” ones, too) can get substantially new hardware. It had better be damn good.

Link updated: the Macworld version isn’t truncated.

The Mac’s Mid-Life Crisis ⇥ massivegreatness.com

MG Siegler faces the same first-world dilemma I do:

I’m at a crossroads: do I stick with the Air or go back to a Pro (which I used as my primary machine before the Air)?

My five year-old MacBook Pro is due for an upgrade. I’ve been eyeing an Air for a while, but the benefits of this new MacBook Pro are obvious. As I wrote earlier, the Pro is the computer for the next five years.

Missing the Point ⇥ cultofmac.com

Buster Heine for Cult of Mac:

The new MacBook Pro is crazy. It’s mind-boggiling. But it’s not for most consumers because not everyone is a professional who needs to wring out every last drop of performance from a computer. Most of us use our computers for storing our pictures, listening to music, surfing the web, creating documents in Word or Excel, downloading videos, and creating a short video to post on Facebook every once in a while. For those types of tasks, Apple’s MacBook Air is the perfect answer because it’s fast, dependable, stylish and cheap.

The new MacBook Pro isn’t built for today. No, it’s built for five years from now, and to last until then. The performance parts (the SSD, the RAM, and the logic board) will all certainly last for that long, and will provide a fantastic user experience for the future. The Retina display will enhance all of the standard tasks Heine lists. The claim that the MacBook Air is the computer you should buy is short-sighted. No doubt it too will get an upgraded display within the next year or two.

Don’t spend $1200 now, and $1200 again in the next year or two—if you can afford the new MacBook Pro for $2200 today, it’ll last you for a long, long time.

The App Formerly Known as Camera ⇥ thenextweb.com

Facebook changed the name of their camera application:

Instead of showing on your iOS device as simply “Camera”, the app now shows as “Camera•”

Do we pronounce it “camera dot”? How about “camera bullet”? Perhaps “camera Prince“?

May 31st Me Looks Like an Asshole ⇥ nickheer.com

Yours truly:

As the Brownlee article notes, it simply isn’t necessary for such a vast number of pixels to give the illusion of solid curves at the typical viewing distance of desktop or laptop displays. Furthermore, such an increase in pixels will have a significant effect on battery life. An increase in pixel density represents a decrease in the amount of light that will pass through any given physical area, which means a corresponding increase in the amount of backlighting is necessary. This is why the new iPad has a battery with a capacity nearly 70% greater than that of its predecessors’.

A 2,880 by 1,800 pixel MacBook would be incredible, though, wouldn’t it?

Indeed it is incredible. I take comfort knowing that what I said was technically true: the battery did have to be massively increased, and the doubled resolution wasn’t exactly necessary for a Retina display, mathematically speaking. I’m rarely this happy to be wrong.

The December 5th, 2011 me, on the other hand, looks smart and observant:

Apple has a really great grip on what makes for a superb user interface. It’s rare for them to mess up, especially in a way that mars usability. I feel that the “Store” button in iOS 5′s Music application is an egregious example of one of these rare screw-ups. […]

It has a high potential to be accidentally activated, it momentarily confuses the user in the event of an accidental selection and generally impairs usability.

I can happily report that this problem has been addressed in iOS 6. Tapping the Store button after navigating back through the screens of the Music app (for instance, returning to the list of artists from the Now Playing screen) does not send the user to the iTunes Store due to the inclusion of a delay. It takes a deliberate, longer tap.