Month: July 2012

The Real Reason Marissa Mayer Left Google: She Had To ⇥ venturebeat.com

Jolie O’Dell has a big scoop for VentureBeat:

At Google, Mayer had become a bit of a figurehead. While we’re sure she continued to work maniacally hard on her projects (she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop), she was passed up for an important promotion in the spring of 2011. Google had put Mayer in charge of local products in 2010, but the company tapped Jeff Huber to head up local products and commerce as a senior vice president the following year. […]

Mayer told press that the title didn’t matter to her and that she really only cared about the products she was working on; however, Google stopped showing off Mayer’s work as well.

Ouch.

Apple Improves iPhone 3GS Support in iOS 6 ⇥ macrumors.com

Eric Slivka, over at MacRumors:

Apple has improved feature support for the iPhone 3GS, adding shared Photo Streams and VIP mail filtering. The change was noticed by a number of iPhone 3GS users, and Apple has confirmed the removal of those restrictions on its iOS 6 preview page.

A number of commentators noted that the omission of these features on the iPhone 3GS seemed odd. Nice to see this consistency of the feature set, rather than artificial limitations for older hardware.

Evening Edition ⇥ weblog.muledesign.com

Jim Ray announces the launch of a new project from Mule Design:

Now, we’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like “updates”, in between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff?

To help answer that, we built Evening Edition. It’s a summary of the day’s news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day. It’s optimized for your phone or iPad so you can read it on the train home or on the couch. It can be the starting point for a deep-dive or just enough so you sound erudite at your next cocktail party.

Stellar quality. I’m looking forward to reading this at the end of every day.

The Sad State of Office 2013 Touch Support ⇥ arstechnica.com

From the “fire is hot” department, putting a veneer of touch support on top of the UI of desktop applications isn’t effective, according to Peter Bright:

Unfortunately, as soon as one ventures beyond mere reading, the experience becomes unsatisfactory. Finger users attempting to make edits will find themselves regularly dumped into interfaces simply not designed for imprecise input, and even if they stick to the “main” user interface (the ribbon and pop-up toolbars), that interface works poorly. The interactions with the on-screen keyboard are frustrating and the interface is cluttered, leaving too little of the working area actually visible.

It’s almost as if a keyboard and mouse interaction model should be treated differently than a touch-based model.

Yellowcake, Yellow Journalism and Android ⇥ counternotions.com

The ever-elusive Kontra delivers a sharp blow as only it can:

Indeed, if you read about the Kindle Fire around that time in any number of print or online publications, the unmistakable impression you’d get was: the Kindle Fire was selling in record numbers. So well in fact that same journalists would soon start telling Apple to come out with a 7″ tablet of its own or lose the iPad head-start, just like it “lost” its iPhone advantage.

And yet no journalist had any concrete evidence of the yellowcake: actual Android units sold. Not from Amazon, not from Samsung, not from HTC, not from Google… Nobody has actual Android unit numbers sold, quarter after quarter, in one of the biggest and most lucrative markets anywhere, which they’re supposed to be covering.

What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable? ⇥ powazek.com

Derek Powazek:

Every community-based site in the history of the web has essentially been a stab at creating a social network. Most of them fail as businesses, with the rare exception of small, lucky communities that become self-sufficient but not exactly prosperous. What if that’s just the way it is?

Everybody Hates Windows Phone

Imagine you’re in Vegas, playing roulette. Apple, betting on black, is using a vertically-integrated business model. They develop the OS, engineer the hardware, and get it built on contract. They dictate the terms under which any carrier can sell it, too. Google, betting on red, is using a looser development model. They develop the OS, but they’ve open sourced it, so there are a bunch of manufacturers using whatever hardware they want to build a thousand phones a year, which any carrier can sell if they want.

Microsoft, given the choice of betting on red or black, is betting on the stool they’re sitting in. After every spin, they shout “hit me!”, and wonder why everyone looks at them. They’re not even playing the game because Windows Phone 7 is terrible for every party involved.

Hardware manufacturers hate Windows Phone because they’re locked into a single display resolution, and have barely any variation in other key specifications such as processor or RAM. Due to these constrictions, every OEM is producing effectively the same phone in slightly different bodies. The exception to this is the Nokia Lumia series, but that’s a tiny slice out of all Windows Phones sold.

This mess of effectively identical devices must leave consumers stumped. In the second quarter of 2011, Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile had a combined smartphone market share of 9%. Not great, but they still had skin in the game. But in the past year, that number has shrunk to a measly 3% of the smartphone market.

Consumers love choice, but they don’t want too much of it because it becomes overwhelming. You can see this effect most prominently in Apple’s iPhone market share. With just a few devices, they have secured a solid 30-odd percent of the smartphone market. You walk into a retailer and ask “please can I have an iPhone”, and you get a choice of the free one, the good one, and the amazing one.

It doesn’t require a vertical market, however. Look at Android, where a small number of phone models have large slices of the market. These phones all look pretty different, and have enough differentiating features to make it easier for consumers to narrow their choices. Popular models beget increased popularity, too. But many different phones that all look identical, yet retail for different prices is a quick recipe for confusion.

So what about developers?1 Developers hate Windows Phone because they’re required to produce apps that look absolutely identical, and that’s a challenge when you’re known for an app with a very distinctive style. Take Path, for instance. It’s only available for iOS and Android, and the app has a consistent experience between them. But its UI is so incongruent with Windows Phone that it wouldn’t be a good fit on the platform at all.

The Toshl team have a few other complaints from a developer’s perspective:

Publishing apps for [Windows Phone] though, has turned out to be a very painful experience. From time to time the tale gets so surreal and horrible I sometimes wish Franz Kafka were alive to describe it instead of me.

Biting. As the Toshl team also points out, the lack of users is a further punch to the gut after a difficult app development cycle.

So, OEMs hate Windows Phone because it’s a constricting platform to make hardware for, users are turned off by how confusing it is, and developers dislike how difficult it is to make an app for nobody. What about the carriers? Since Microsoft owns Skype, carriers are reluctant to sell Windows Phones. Also, they get stuck with a bunch of phones that aren’t going to sell.

And Microsoft? They won’t give any indication as to the health of Windows Phone. But, as Nielsen’s market share data indicates, and as Reuters previews, it’s not looking up.

That’s a shame, really. I’ve stated many times that I like Windows Phone. With Google, Apple has a serious competitor on the feature side. In this case, Microsoft should be providing Apple with competition in their aesthetics and design. Windows Phone is a beautiful operating system that never gets seen.

It must be like what Kiera Knightley feels like on her days off.

  1. Developers, developers, developers. ↥︎

Pixel Envy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been debating the merits of posting under my own name, or using a different URL. The main problem with my name-based URL is that my surname is a homonym for “hear” and “here”, both of which are inaccurate. Last night, I decided that I’d be able to move things around relatively easily.

This website is now Pixel Envy, not Nick Heer.com. Its URL isn’t significantly simpler (I have to spell it out), but it’s better overall. I have updated my htaccess file and all URLs I could find from nickheer.com to pxlnv.com, but a few things might still be broken. Please let me know if you find anything that isn’t working.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The Shopping Mall Turns 60 ⇥ theatlanticcities.com

Emily Badger writes for the Atlantic Cities:

At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession.

Via Dave Pell.

My Favourite Apps at Their Smallest ⇥ 52tiger.net

Dave Caolo:

I use Apple’s 11” MacBook Air, so screen real estate is precious to me. When I saw Ged Maheux tweet this image from Gavin Nelson, comparing the relative size of three minimized Twitter clients, I wondered about other apps. With that in mind, I’ve minimized the main window of the apps I use most often. I also took a screenshot to represent how they look on MacBook Air’s small screen.

I don’t use an 11″ Air (I have a 24″ display), but screen real estate is still important. This post illustrates exactly why I love Twitterrific. (Though, Caolo did miss a little trick with it—you can hide the toolbar, too, and rely solely on keyboard shortcuts.) Via Patrick Rhone.

Backpedalling ⇥ apple.com

Apple is back on EPEAT, and Bob Mansfield wrote a letter:

In fact, our engineering teams have worked incredibly hard over the years to make our products even more environmentally friendly, and much of our progress has come in areas not yet measured by EPEAT.

Oh, snap.

People Staring at Computers ⇥ wired.com

In July of last year, Kyle McDonald revealed a beautiful piece of media art. He had installed software on the computers in Apple Stores to capture webcam photos of the faces of those who stared at it. This earned him a visit from the Secret Service:

They rang the doorbell a few times. It woke me up, and I tried to ignore it. There were always kids playing with the doorbells in our apartment building. But the kids don’t normally shout, “this is the Secret Service, open the door,” so I took that as my cue to get out of bed.

An intriguing tale, told well, and made all the more terrifying for a media artist like myself working with similar subject matter.

This Whole EPEAT Kerfuffle

Last week, it emerged that Apple wasn’t going to participate in the EPEAT program any more:

According to Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT, Apple asked the organization last month to pull its 39 certified desktop computers, monitors and laptops, which included past versions of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

“My, that’s outrageous,” I hear you say. “Why would Apple pull out of a respected authority on environmentally-friendly electronics products?” Ah, dear reader, let us explore this in more detail.

As linked above, 9to5 Mac speculated that this was due to the new MacBook Pro:

Its glass display is fused with the top of the case, while the batteries are glued to the bottom, making it extremely difficult to repair or recycle.

Indeed, EPEAT’s regulations require computers to be easily upgradable with “common tools”:

All desktop and notebook personal computers shall be upgradeable with common tools, including memory drives, chips and cards that can be changed or extended.

Requirements like this led Hacker News user jws to comment:

There are thousands of design tradeoffs to be made in a laptop. Is EPEAT willing to update and republish their rules every time a manufacturer finds a better solution that doesn’t comply with the rules?

Probably not. It doesn’t matter that the RAM in a modern MacBook Pro will likely last for a decade—since it’s soldered in, it doesn’t comply, and it can’t be listed.

“But wait,” I hear you protest, “the MacBook Air’s RAM has been soldered in for, like, four years and it’s been listed for all that time.”

You’re right. If they were an independent body checking these things, that would probably have been discovered. But EPEAT is a paid membership (PDF link), for which it costs Apple $87,310 per year to put the certification on their products.

It’s a common assumption that EPEAT is some sort of regulatory body checking manufacturers against stringent guidelines. Entire cities, such as San Francisco, require all new computers purchased by the city to bear EPEAT certification. As a result, Apple’s desktops and notebooks can no longer be purchased by San Francisco city officials:

A 2007 policy requires San Francisco city agencies to purchase 100% EPEAT-certified desktops, laptops, and monitors.

“We are disappointed that Apple chose to withdraw from EPEAT, and we hope that the city saying it will not buy Apple products will make Apple reconsider its participation,” Melanie Nutter, director of San Francisco’s Department of Environment said in an interview with the [Wall Street] Journal.

I doubt that. As the mysterious Kontra pointed out on Twitter:

SF spent $45,579 on iMacs, MacBooks & iPads in 2010.

No stats are available for 2011 yet, but that’s a tiny drop in the bucket for Apple.

Which brings us to yesterday. Jim Dalrymple of The Loop got a statement from Apple explaining their reasoning:

“Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2,” Apple representative Kristin Huguet, told The Loop. “We also lead the industry by reporting each product’s greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials.”

This whole kerfuffle would have been minimized if Apple had said this in the first place, but they didn’t. Now we know that EPEAT is a sponsored badge, not an independent adjudicator, Apple thinks their regulations are outdated, and the city of San Francisco thinks their school-sized purchase of Apple hardware will be influential enough for the company to change their mind.

Update: And just like that, Apple is back on EPEAT.

The New TBR Business Model ⇥ brooksreview.net

Ben Brooks is launching a paywall for his site. Non-members can see his content a week after it’s posted, while members can pay $4 per month to see it instantly. That means he’s removing ads and sponsorship from his site.

I wish him the best of luck with this, and hope it goes well for him, but this raises a few issues. First, are people going to pay $48/year to hear one man’s opinions on the internet? I don’t know. I’m sure Brooks doesn’t know, either, and won’t until a few months from now. I’m sure there are many people who find his content irreplaceable, but I’m also certain that there are plenty of people who don’t care that much to hear what he has to say 1. It’s a rather elegant way of trimming his readership to the first group of people.

The second issue that he raises is one that I’ve noticed increasing amounts of lately. Take his reasoning for not accepting promo codes:

I want nothing influencing me. I will still be accepting beta invitations, but will always say so when writing about an app. The reason for accepting beta invites is simple: I feel I pay for a beta invite in the form of my direct feedback to the developer.

Why can’t he also clarify that he received a promo code for the app when writing a review of one? Developers should not expect a review out of every promo code, nor should they expect positive reviews. This shouldn’t taint the review in any way. But, if Brooks requires this level of crash-course unbiased reviews, that’s his call.

I said above that I’ve noticed increasing amounts of it lately. Take today’s post from Anthony Kay:

As tech blogs become more influential and replace traditional media, the writers (often individuals or small teams) need to be mindful that their suggestions and recommendations will be viewed by readers as a stamp of approval. Whether they post about a $1 app or a $10 book (many likely received for free), bloggers need to respect the fact that a recommendation to spend money on something will lead many to do so simply because they trust the site, the writer, or both.

I entirely agree, but I think an all-or-nothing approach is misguided. A review can be honest even if the product was provided for free. It’s a matter of integrity.

  1. This shouldn’t be taken as an attack on Ben Brooks. The same can be said for any site or weblog. ↥︎

Jay-Z’s 99 Problems (PDF link) ⇥ slu.edu

Caleb Mason, Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, and Assistant US Attorney:

This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.