MG Siegler:
For things like video-editing, photo-manipulation, and programming, traditional computing will remain the work-horse. But it will increasingly remain at home or at work.
The iPad is the computer for most people, most of the time. If people purchased things within their needs, the iPad would be seen as this. But it won’t be for a while, for the same reason some people in cities still buy SUVs.
The Macalope was supposed to be on vacation this week, but it looks like the punditry circle was dumber than usual:
And then Rowinski finishes off by inviting readers to fill out his totally scientific online poll, the two extremes of which are “Apple Can Do No Wrong” and “Android For Life.”
The poll has a margin of error of infinity.
Stefan Fatsis writes about the recent Scrabble scandal for Slate:
That’s why the media storm over the cadged blanks feels so cheap, and so unrepresentative to those of us who love Scrabble so much. “Is the cheating incident really seen, even by us, as more noteworthy than one of the most amazing tournament finishes ever?” a top expert, Jim Kramer, posted Friday on the Yahoo listserv Crossword Games-Pro, where the posts have been about the cheating incident and media fallout, and little else.
Indeed, it was a spectacular tournament, but you wouldn’t know it from the coverage.
Susan Decker reports for Bloomberg:
Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility unit said it filed a new patent-infringement case against Apple Inc. claiming that features on some Apple devices, including the Siri voice-recognition program, infringe its patents.
The complaint at the U.S. International Trade Commission claims infringement of seven Motorola Mobility patents on features including location reminders, e-mail notification and phone/video players, Motorola Mobility said today. The case seeks a ban on U.S. imports of devices including the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers.
Just as Apple v. Samsung wraps up, Google sued Apple. This is happening, and it’s going to be messy. I’d be very surprised if all of this nonsense doesn’t spark some change in the way technology patents are issued, and how their licensing must be conducted.
Update: Neither Motorola nor the Trade Commission have confirmed which patents are at stake. Based on what Bloomberg is reporting, however, I would make an educated guess that the following are potential candidates:
In addition, Motorola Mobility has a lot of patents related to voice recognition and voice control. Siri could be in violation of any of these.
Finally, a patent for location-based information has been applied-for, but not granted yet. This seems to be related to their claims, but as it hasn’t been granted, it cannot be used in the suit.
Of course, the mysterious Kontra summarized this news the best:
Google: We don’t believe in patents, they kill innovation.
Google to Samsung: Stop copying Apple so much.
Google to Apple: You’re sued.
I sincerely hope this leads to patent reform. It this doesn’t, nothing will.
Look, here’s the thing: I’ve had a long, crap-filled day. I’d love to think of something clever to write when linking to Henry Blodget’s letter to Facebook employees, or Paul Haddad’s response to Twitter’s API changes.
I can’t, though, so here’s a link to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” as sung by movie characters.
Marco Arment reads between the lines. He interprets well, but his best point comes at the end of the article, where he responds to the comparison of Twitter’s API rules against Apple’s App Store guidelines:
Many uses of Twitter’s platform compete with Twitter on some level. Twitter doesn’t need a lot of its nontrivial apps, and in fact, they’d be happier if most of them disappeared. Twitter’s rules continue to tighten to permit developers to add value to Twitter (mostly “Share on Twitter” features) but not get nearly as much out of it (e.g. piggyback on the social graph, display timelines, analyze aggregate data).
By comparison, Apple needs its apps much more than Twitter does, and Apple’s interests conflict much less with its developers’. Even its famous anticompetitive rules, such as the prohibition against “duplicating existing functionality”, have been minimally enforced and have actually diminished over time.
Apple has another big advantage over Twitter: the latter is very transitory, and therefore replaceable. Yes, we will all bemoan the crapping out of a used-to-be-good service, but we’ll get over it. But if Apple were to shut down the App Store tomorrow (or were to severely restrict the abilities of developers), we’d see a huge backlash (remember section 3.3.1?). Apple needs their developers. Twitter would have an easier time if they lose their developers and control the entire stack.
Scott Gilbertson writes for Wired‘s Webmonkey blog:
The WebKit project recently added experimental support for the proposed CSS level 4 image-set specification. Image-set is designed to offer web developers a way to target high-resolution screens, solving one of the design challenges of Apple’s Retina displays.
Both Safari 6 and Chrome 21 support image-set with vendor-prefixes and developer Jason Grigsby has put together a test page over at Cloud Four, where you can see the new image-set in action.
Quick interpolation: you read that right—incredibly, there are already CSS4 draft proposals, even though CSS3 is barely final.
It’s a really cool solution, but to explain why it’s so great, we need to back up to the current way of targeting high-res displays. Let’s use my stylesheet as an example. If you view this site on a regular display, the following CSS will be loaded to draw the Pixel Envy logo:
#logo a{
display: block;
float: left;
background: url('images/logo.png') 0px 0px;
width: 223px;
height: 61px;
text-decoration: none;
margin-left: -80px;
}This is the 1x code. If you visit this site on a high-res display, like that of an iPhone 41, the following additional CSS will be loaded:
@media (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2) {
#logo a{
background: url('images/logo@2x.png') 0px 0px no-repeat;
background-size: 221px 123px;
}
}The first line of that snippet is a media query. It looks for WebKit browsers which are reporting that they’re running on a device with a pixel ratio of 2:1—that is, any retina display. The additional rules for the logo override the background image that was already loaded.
You’ll note that there’s a required declaration of background size. This is because browsers running on a retina display automatically double the pixel measurements of every element. But since I’ve already doubled the size of the background image to compensate, it’s doubling it again. To compensate, the background image needs to be drawn at the 1x virtual pixel size, which makes it 2x-sized. Makes sense? Great.
According to this draft specification, I could avoid using that media query and additional CSS by writing it like this:
#logo a{
display: block;
float: left;
background-image: url(images/logo.png);
background-image: -webkit-image-set(url(images/logo.png) 1x, url(images/logo@2x.png) 2x);
width: 223px;
height: 61px;
text-decoration: none;
margin-left: -80px;
}Very clean, and very elegant.
There’s an even smarter component to this. Astute readers will note that retina displays are most popular on mobile devices right now. If they want to accommodate those beautiful displays, web designers have to send higher-resolution (and therefore larger-sized) images over mobile connections. It’s a small paradox with the current state of web design.
This specification is very smart, however, because mobile browsers could identify when they’re on a slow connection and automatically switch to the 1x image size. Then, when the user is back on a fast connection, the browser could intelligently switch back to the 2x images. This is helpful for web designers because there isn’t a way to target specific internet connection speeds, in the same way that we can target browser sizes or pixel ratios.
There’s a test page up at Cloud Four if you want to see this in action. It requires Safari 6 or Chrome 20+.
And you should, by the way, because I just added some responsive features which are pretty great, if I do say so myself. ↥︎
Twitter has posted their changes to the upcoming 1.1 version of the API, and it’s a surprisingly minor set (especially minor, given the recent suggestions of hostility towards developers).
Buried right at the bottom, though, under the heading “looking ahead”, is the following:
Since we announced Twitter Cards in June for twitter.com (and in July for Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android), we have seen tremendous response; more than 400 developers and publishers are participating in the program, distributing content through expanded Tweets. And over the next several quarters we will introduce new ways for developers to build content experiences and applications into Twitter, through Twitter Cards.
Read: Developers are soon going to be required to implement Twitter Cards in their apps.
Yesterday, the fine ifoAppleStore blog broke the news that VP Retail John Browett was planning on cutting the hours for many of Apple’s retail employees, and laying others off, all in the name of cutting costs:
Browett feels the stores are “too bloated” with employees, and he is willing to gamble the stores’ legendary customer experience to gain back a few points of profit margin. Browett’s decision reportedly came despite strongly-worded advice from Retail segment veterans that reducing personnel ahead of the annual Back-to-School promotion and the September introduction of the iPhone 5 could create a customer service catastrophe. Browett disagreed with his staff, and said the chain needs to learn to run “leaner” in all areas, even if the customer experience is compromised.
Anyone who has visited even a semi-popular Apple store knows that the last thing they need to do is reduce the number of employees. Jim Dalrymple thought this was a terrible move, too:
This has the stench of a man looking to make a name for himself, not someone that’s doing what’s best for Apple or more importantly, its customers. To take one of the most heralded retail experiences in the world and gut it, stripping it of everything that makes an Apple store what it is, just doesn’t make sense. […]
With $100 billion or so in the bank, the last thing Browett needs to worry about is cost cutting measures to save a few pennies here and there. Instead he should be focused on how to best serve the surge of consumers that will take to the stores in the coming months to buy new Apple products.
The negative PR apparently paid off, because Apple reversed their decision today, and someone (hopefully) told John Browett that this was idiotic:
Apple acknowledged the retail staffing changes. “Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed,” said Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman. “Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”
I’m quite happy that this was reversed. If anything, Apple needs to go in the opposite direction and hire more people. There’s no reason they shouldn’t, or can’t.
On a more personal note, my local Market Mall location that was scheduled for a big move will be re-opening on August 18.
Jonathan Mitchell, and a number of his commenters, report that he managed to fix battery life issues on Mountain Lion by nuking his desktop preferences file. This seems like voodoo to me. The com.apple.desktop.plist file is just a bunch of cached paths and, as it sounds, desktop picture preferences. There’s no reason that resetting this file should actually increase battery life.
A couple of months ago, the Symbolset font was introduced, which uses OpenType ligatures to show symbols in place of words, in a semantic way. It’s a very clever use of advanced typographic features.
Now, FontFont has introduced Chartwell, along similar lines:
Using OpenType features, simple strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The visualized data remains editable, allowing for hassle-free updates and styling.
The results are very clever. Be sure to check out the video in the post to see the results.
David Coulthard drives Red Bull’s show car through the Lincoln Tunnel at 190 miles per hour. Next year, the Grand Prix of America will debut, running through New Jersey with the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop. It’s going to be a great season.
In May, I wrote an article reflecting on the then-recent surge in rumours regarding a true Apple television:
Apple, in essence, needs to become an internet cable TV provider for their television to fulfill the duties of a regular set2 in a distinctly Apple fashion.
The footnote in that sentence was elaborated thusly:
If there were standards for cable boxes, Apple could always build a decoder into their TV, but there aren’t.
This was the crux of my post. Since there aren’t any standards for the decoding of cable TV signals, Apple can’t just build a simple card in there to work with any provider.
However, Jessica E. Vascellaro and Shalini Ramachandran report today for the Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc. is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators about letting consumers use an Apple device as a set-top box for live television and other content, according to people familiar with the matter.
The talks represent Apple’s most ambitious crack at infiltrating the living room after years of trying.
If Apple manages to make this work, and they build it into the current Apple TV, it will make it an absolute killer product. If I can buy a $100 box that delivers high definition television, rentals from iTunes with the click of a button, and AirPlay support, I can’t see it being merely a hobby for Apple any longer.
TechCrunch has a collection of reports which suggests that Flickr is getting some love from Marissa Mayer. I certainly hope so. It’s still my favourite photo site.
Google still leads in mapping, and public transit is one area where Apple almost certainly cannot catch up. Google has spent a long time negotiating to make this data public. Ironically, you can bet that almost every transit app for iOS 6 is going to be using this data.
I suppose Samsung is going to argue that there’s no way to design a calendar app than to decorate it with faux leather.
Daring Fireball turned ten years old yesterday. John Gruber’s first paragraph, from his first post “Baby Needs a New Pair of Processors“:
You might think that if you were about to debut a Macintosh-oriented weblog, it would be quite a stroke of good fortune for some Really Big News to break on the very day you plan to start writing. Like, say, a brand new line of PowerMac G4’s.
You’d think that after ten years, something would change. But as David Smith points out, the design is almost identical. And, as Shawn Blanc notes, the writing is classic Gruber. This ten year run even got a little writeup on The Atlantic‘s blog.
There wasn’t a clear celebratory post on Daring Fireball, but Gruber’s review of the retina MacBook Pro (mostly its display, really) served that purpose just fine:
When I first started using the retina MacBook Pro, the whole thing felt fake, like I was using a demo version of Mac OS X ginned up in After Effects for shooting closeups of the screen for, say, an Apple commercial in which they didn’t want UI elements to look pixelated. Some degree of pixelation has always been part of my Mac experience.
I first found Daring Fireball in around 2004, but I began reading it religiously (like so many of you certainly do) in about 2007. The writing has remained consistently precise and honest all these years. Despite the imitators DF spawned (yours truly, included), there is one original, and it’s still as snarky as on day one. Congratulations, Mr. Gruber.
Dan Frommer cares about the same three features I do, and one of those three is not the screen:
I’d actually be happy if the new iPhone screen stayed exactly the same size. I never find myself wishing for a bigger iPhone. But if it’s only a little bigger, and it means longer battery life — or at least not shorter battery life — I’d take it. (The “longer-but-same-width” display that’s been discussed might actually be interesting for scrolly apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
The reality is that the screen won’t be getting much bigger, it’s just going to get a little bit longer. That’s alright with me because I saw another guy taking a call on his Galaxy Nexus the other day. Bigger screens are wonderful, but bigger phones are horrible. One of those things has to give.
About 400 years of user interfaces in a totally sweet infographic-y timeline.
In May of 2009, Dustin Curtis wrote about his experience at MASA:
It is supposedly one of the greatest Japanese restaurants in the world. The food there is delicately prepared. The atmosphere in the dining room is carefully designed to produce the perfect emotional experience. Even the air circulation system was built to push light amounts of air over specific tables. When you pay $500 for a meal, you expect perfection like this. But at the end of my experience, I was presented with something that […] totally sucked the awesomeness out of my meal. I was given a receipt that looks like the one below.
Curtis suggested a receipt that was engaging, special, and interesting. His suggestion pertained not just for expensive Manhattan restaurants, but for all receipts. They’re an important part of the business transaction, like a nightcap is to a meal.
I’ve never been fond of paper receipts in general. I agree with Curtis’ reflection on a receipt’s importance, but I don’t think it needs to be printed. I enjoy stores that offer to email my receipt to me, because during tax season, I can easily find all emails in a particular folder between a given date range. Expenses? Done.
Industrial designer Matt Webb thinks paper still has a place in this world, though. BERG, his London-based firm, has launched pre-orders for a tiny thermal printer called—wait for it—Little Printer. Ellis Hamburger reports for The Verge:
While factories in Asia assembled prototypes for Little Printer, Webb and company were hard at work creating BERG Cloud, a server built to handle thousands of Little Printers. It’s the “big brain” that feeds information to a small BERG Cloud Bridge that hangs out next to your router. The Cloud Bridge connects wirelessly to Little Printer, which you place near a power source somewhere in your home. BERG Cloud connects to sources like The Guardian and Foursquare, combines them all on a virtual strip of paper, then beams the paper to your Little Printer for printing. Any time Little Printer is ready to print, a light on its top pulses. With one button press, your newspaper is printing. You control it all through BERG Cloud Remote, a web app that works on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
It sounds like a 21st-century version of ticker tape, and that’s probably why I don’t get it. Notifications like these are great through email, SMS, or push notifications. I don’t understand the need for a physical copy of a Foursquare checkin.
Where I can see the use for this is in combination with Square Register. Many businesses still require expenses to be accompanied by a physical receipt, and I can see these tiny thermal printers becoming an easy way to create beautiful proofs of transactions.
