Month: July 2012

Today, in RIM ⇥ brooksreview.net

Ben Brooks has pulled together some of the best quotes from articles reporting on today’s RIM shareholder meeting. Juicy.

Twitter, Twitter 4.3, and The Mixed Message ⇥ macstories.net

Cody Fink nails the new Twitter experience in his piece for MacStories:

Twitter’s focus shifted to answer two questions, “How do we retain users who leave because they don’t get Twitter, and how do we make money?“ The Twitter app exists not to serve people who want to mange their timelines, but for people just joining the service.

Reverse-Engineering a Movie Poster ⇥ blog.alexlikesdesign.com

Alex Griendling:

My first job out of school was designing movie posters in LA. You can read a bit about that experience here.

When starting out, what helped me more than anything was digging through the photoshop files of guys who had been making posters for years. I’d like to pay it forward by making available a couple of my own layered Photoshop files in the hopes that someone else may benefit from picking through them.

These working comps will only be up for a couple of days, so I’d hurry and check them out if I were you. Via Rob Sheridan.

Let’s Try to Think This iPad Mini Thing All the Way Through ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber, as usual, has the best commentary on what a smaller iPad might entail:

All that matters is whether a smaller iPad would actually be good. If Apple ships it, it will be judged on its own merits, regardless what Steve Jobs said 18 months ago. That’s it.

It would be enough to link to for this quotation alone, but there’s also something else that he wrote last week that has cropped up again (quoting from the previous link because it has the best explanation):

Displays aren’t manufactured at their finished size; rather, they’re made on big sheets, and then cut to size. I believe the iPad Mini (or whatever it’s going to be called) uses the same display as the iPhone 3GS. So instead of cutting these sheets into 3.5-inch 480 × 320 displays for the iPhone 3GS, they’ll cut them into 7.85-inch 1024 × 768 displays for the smaller iPad. Same exact display technology, though — display technology that Apple has been producing at scale ever since the original iPhone five years ago.

This is something I doubt, if only because Apple has been touting the benefits of IPS displays since the iPhone 4 was introduced. All recent new products—iPad, displays, unibody iMac, and new MacBook Pro—have used IPS displays. The iPhone 3GS doesn’t have an IPS display. I’d be willing to bet that an iPad Mini would gain a panel with the same pixel density as the 3GS display, but built with IPS technology, not a twisted nematic panel.

The only exception to this, where a new product hasn’t gained an IPS display, is with the fourth-generation iPod touch1, but it’s constrained by its price tag. Another possibility, one that I haven’t seen anywhere, is that Apple might use the panel from the iPod touch, and cut that to a 7.85-inch diagonal size. It would be a Retina display, but it would be cheaper than that used in the iPad or iPhone because it’s a TN panel.

  1. I don’t count the recent MacBook Air/Pro refresh because that was a spec bump, not a new product. The next generation of MacBook Airs will gain Retina displays, and therefore almost certainly gain IPS panels. ↥︎

50 Things I’ve Learned About Publishing a Weblog ⇥ shawnblanc.net

Shawn Blanc has been writing his site for five years now (congratulations!), and he’s made a list of things he’s learned. One of the best items from that list:

Modern Art: “I could have done that.” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”

Blogging: “I could have written that.” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”

I’ve been writing this site, in its present form for a little over a year now, and I hope I can stick with it for four more.

“Not As Cool” ⇥ theverge.com

Neither party can really celebrate this ruling. Apple was not victorious, and Samsung was beat down. It’s the perfect result.

Apple Cracking Down On Sites Selling Access To iOS Betas ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci of MacStories:

After noticing several of the sites mentioned in Baio’s article had become unavailable in recent weeks (activatemyios.com, iosudidregistrations.com, activatemyudid.com, udidregistration.com, instantudidactivation.com), we reached out to some of them asking whether Apple was behind the takedown of their “services”, which infringed on Apple’s developer agreement. While most of our emails bounced, we heard back from one of the site owners (who asked to remain anonymous), who confirmed his hosting provider took down the site after a complaint for copyright infringement by Apple. Similarly, the CEO of Fused tweeted in a reply to Andy Baio that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to UDID-selling sites hosted on their network.

In the email, the site owner said that their website made $75,000 since last June, when Apple released the first beta of iOS 6 to developers.

I am in the wrong business, man.

Apple’s Fix for Corrupt Binaries ⇥ marco.org

Marco Arment updates yesterday’s corrupt App Store binaries shitstorm:

• All reviews for the “current version” are reset, since there’s a new current version.

• The fixed binaries will show up as “Updates” in the App Store app and iTunes.

The latter is a big deal. Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store.

Smart. As far as I know, this didn’t change the version string in any way (contrary to the Hacker News discussion)—it’s just a forced redownload if the app was updated within the past day or two.

The Talk Show ⇥ david-smith.org

David Smith reviews the Talk Show:

It is a running joke that the show is buried with 1-star reviews in iTunes. The most common adjective used in these reviews is unfocused. I think calling The Talk Show unfocused is a bit like calling Jackson Pollock messy. It totally misses what the show is and more importantly what it isn’t. Assuming that because it is hosted by a prominent tech journalist that it should be a formulaic run-down of the week’s news just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t understand why many people assumed that the Talk Show would (or should) be a news program. It’s right in the title: talking.

Speaking of which, there’s a new episode out today:

Merlin Mann joins me for a quick two-hour holiday-week chat on America’s favorite two-star podcast.

And speaking of Merlin Mann, I was listening to an old episode of You Look Nice Today yesterday, entitled “Known for His Reach“. You should listen to it, or listen to it again.

iPad, or Giant iPod Touch? ⇥ macstories.net

Gabe Glick, for MacStories:

It took me a long time to come to terms with this because for a long time I thought a smaller iPad would never happen, but between the increasingly strong rumors, the plausible mockups, and knowing that Apple wants, nay, expects the iPad to become the computing platform of the near future, it just makes too much sense to ignore.

Stack Ranking ⇥ youtube.com

From the Vanity Fair story:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

Via W. Ian Blanton, on Twitter.

“MG Siegler Can’t Be Trusted” ⇥ massivegreatness.com

Earlier this evening, MG Siegler replied to Marco Arment on Twitter:

I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites.

For some strange reason, Betabeat decided to make that tweet into a full story:

The headline: Unreliable Narrators! TechCrunch Blogger Inserted ‘Random Information (Sometimes Even False)’ Into Posts

The sub-head: MG Siegler can’t be trusted.

Siegler comments:

I mean, that’s seriously a story. A full story. On a site that purports to report about technology. (And congratulations: your click will undoubtedly lead to other stories just like it!)

Ridiculous.

The Google Nexus Q Is Baffling ⇥ pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

David Pogue, on the Nexus Q’s social features:

In practice, there’s a lot of spontaneity-killing setup. You have to go into Settings to turn on the feature. Then you have to invite your friend to participate by — get this — sending an e-mail message. Then your friend has to download the Nexus Q app.

If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in your online Google account, it starts playing immediately, rather than being added to the queue as you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist; you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it.

Woohoo! Let’s get this party started! Via Chairman Gruber.

More From Vanity Fair ⇥ betabeat.com

The full article isn’t online yet, but Kelly Faircloth picked up a physical copy for Betabeat, which contains this gem:

Here’s what [Steve Ballmer] told an engineer who left for Google in 2004, after hurling a chair:

“Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy!” Ballmer yelled, according to the court document. “I’m going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.”

Steve Jobs threatened to go “thermonuclear”. Steve Ballmer did, in an office, on a chair.

How Terrible Shots of Olympians Went Viral ⇥ slate.com

Heather Murphy for Slate, sorting out some of the rumours from these particularly terrible photos:

And it’s sweet that in an era with few shared national heroes, even cynical bloggers care deeply about how our Olympians are portrayed. But poor Joe Klamar does not deserve to be treated like a bumbling visual terrorist.

After all, Klamar is an award-winning Czech photographer. So it’s worth trying to understand how he came to turn in such amateurish work. And let’s debunk some of the now-widespread Internet myths about his atrocious photos.

The photos are pretty horrible, but there are good reasons for the most egregious errors.

As an aside, any time someone says that they (or their kid) could do better, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

“Oh Look,” He Said, “I Can Quote, Too” ⇥ appleinsider.com

AppleInsider couldn’t be bothered to do their own research, so they just copied and quoted Marco Arment’s article about recent app corruption:

According to the developer, “lots of anxiety and research” helped him discover that the problem was a “a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in some regions.” The U.S. and U.K. were hit with the unusable file, while Australia appeared to remain unscathed.

Ironically, this comes a single day after Arment linked to Matthew Panzarino’s piece regarding ripped articles burying their source with this comment:

But the bigger problem is the practice of news sites rewriting articles from source sites while adding little to no original value. In those cases, where they put the source link doesn’t matter, because as I wrote a few months ago, they replace the need to view the source article.