Francis Pedraza:
To simplify, do not eliminate for elimination’s sake. Do not take away features, remove buttons from the screen, go to less meetings, seek fewer friendships, give away possessions, let go of employees, and shut down programs. Less, for the sake of less, is not more.
Simplicity lies on the other side of complexity.
Horace Dediu pokes around with Apple’s 2012 capital expenditures and finds a $2.3 billion in overspending, compared with their forecast. There’s nothing unusual about the difference itself, but Dediu has some interesting ideas as to where that money went.
Two of my favourite companies make news together, as Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo announced today:
I am delighted that Eddy Cue, one of the main driving forces behind Apple’s range of revolutionary products, has now joined our board. His huge experience in the dynamic, innovative world of the Internet will be of great assistance to us.
Cue has been a Ferrari owner for five years. Things are coming up great for him.
Randall Munroe:
Nate Silver flippantly posted his ‘tie’ question on Twitter during the tallying of the extremely close 2012 Republican Iowa Caucus results. In that case, an exact tie was averted — Santorum ended up winning by 34 votes out of 121,503. And since it was a non-binding nominating vote, the Iowa Republican Party could handle a tie any way they wanted.
But since it’s Election Day, let’s apply his question to the current contest. What will happen if there’s a tie?
There’s math, but it’s all done for you.
Alex Beecher:
So I have confession, and I hope you’ll indulge me: I like some things that you do not. And even the things we both like, I may like differently, or slightly different variations thereof. I like things that are wrong to like, things that would earn me derisive looks and perhaps sneers from the elite of whatever particular subculture we’re talking about.
Welcome to the fast world of technology, where the just-released iPad Mini has already been expunged from our minds as we consider the future of the product. Thomas Verschoren thinks that slapping a larger-cut iPhone retina display into the Mini is a tricky proposition:
The downside: the iPad mini with a 326dpi display have a far better retina quality than the iPad at 264dpi. Selling the retina iPad as retina wouldn’t really be justifiable I think.
The difference between my 264 PPI iPad and my 326 PPI iPhone is only noticeable when I hold both very close to my face. I think that the display quality difference is small enough when the pixels are that dense that Apple can get away with selling both at the same time. It’s certainly more probable than the other scenario Verschoren proposes. Via The Beard.
The masked Kontra:
The current meme of [Jonathan] Ive coming on a white horse to rescue geeks in distress from Scott Forstallian skeuomorphism is wishfully hilarious. Like industrial design of physical devices, software is part form and part function: aesthetics and experience. Apple’s software problems aren’t dark linen, Corinthian leather or torn paper. […] To paraphrase Ive’s former boss, Apple’s software problems aren’t about how they look, but how they work.
Probably the smartest look at what Ive’s new role should, or will, be at Apple.
Adam Satariano et. al. have an interesting report for Bloomberg:
As handheld devices increasingly function like PCs, the engineers working on this project within Apple envision machines that use a common chip design. If Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook wants to offer the consumer of 2017 and beyond a seamless experience on laptops, phones, tablets and televisions, it will be easier to build if all the devices have a consistent underlying chip architecture, according to one of the people.
Rumours of this nature have been flying around since Apple shipped their first custom silicon in the original iPad, at least. I guess Bob Mansfield’s “Technologies” group really does have “ambitious plans for the future”.
Mo Racca for the Times:
Todd Oldham is a renowned American designer. After I invited him to look over some ballots from across the United States, he was dismayed. As he points out in this video, when it comes to the simple task of casting our votes, extreme confusion calls for an extreme makeover.
Spoiler alert: as they note in the video, us Canadians have a standardized ballot coast to coast to coast (not a typo), and a truly independent adjudication committee.
Dan Frommer spent his first weekend with the iPad Mini:
With the exception of screen sharpness, everything about it is better than the bigger, “classic” iPad — and screen sharpness won’t be a deal breaker for the vast majority of people. […]
The big question, which I won’t know the answer to for a few weeks or months, is how the iPad mini will fit into my gadget routine. Where will I use my iPhone instead of my iPad mini if I have both? Where will I bring my retina iPad?
Like the screen sharpness issue, I don’t see this as being a deal breaker. Jimmy Kimmel’s fake iPad Mini ad tackles it, too, but I don’t see most people as purchasing both an iPad and an iPad Mini. I laughed pretty hard at that ad, though.
It’s called the “32 GB Microsoft Surface RT”. Microsoft:
Surface with Windows RT comes with either 32 GB or 64 GB of internal storage space (hard disk space). However, not all of this space is available for your music, photos, videos, and other content.
Here’s how much hard disk space you have available out of the box:
The 32 GB version has approximately 16 GB free hard disk space.
The 64 GB version has approximately 46 GB free hard disk space.
The Windows recovery tools take up around 5 GB of space. For comparison, the hidden OS X recovery disk partition is about 1 GB, and iOS’ recovery options are built into the approximately 1 GB OS package. Why can’t Windows RT use internet recovery options? That’s a lot of space to take up with tools that the user should rarely have to use.
With the release of iBooks 3.0 comes the ability to turn on a scrolling reading experience, rather than the paginated one. This has caused a bit of a disagreement as to which is better. Dmitri Fadeyev and Dr. Drang argue that scrolling is better, respectively:
The scroll interface suits the variable nature of the digital content that it holds, but more so, it gives the user more fine-grained control over the reading experience. It feels more natural to scroll the page on a tablet because it creates the illusion of the physical medium, of a page sliding under your fingers.
Paging is clearly an artifact of the technology of paper books, a technology I love deeply, but one that doesn’t make a lot of sense in an ebook reader.
Lukas Mathis has written a decent rebuttal to these points. In some cases, Mathis makes a lot of sense:
If you use iBooks author, you design individual pages that perfectly fit the iPad’s screen. This means that you can ensure that paragraphs that belong together are on the same page. You can make sure that illustrations and pictures are next to the text they belong to.
But others make less sense. This is the closing statement of that same paragraph:
And your users can identify things by their position: “look at the image at the bottom left of page 35!”
This is, again, a relic of the analog page. We now have hyperlinks which allow referential objects to relate to their context in a new and in-line fashion.
In some sense, it’s very similar to the idea of creating inline citations to references, then providing a list either in the footnotes or at the end of the piece with the list of works cited. In the printed medium, citing “(Smith, 328)” makes sense. But in the digital world, merely providing a link — whether it is directly to the work, or to a popover with the citation — makes more sense, and can be read more fluidly.
It obviously isn’t so black-and-white. Mathis makes the smart distinction between automatic pagination and manual pagination, with the latter being a deliberate choice. I agree that, in some cases, pagination is a necessity. But for text-heavy novels, scrolling can be just as effective.
Zack Whittaker, a journalist with CNet, joins Emil Protalinski in accusing Apple of deliberately hiding their Samsung judgement statement below a non-existent fold with a piece of Javascript that is used on all Apple sites except their US one. And, like Protalinski, he cites Reddit. While he did go so far as to check with a web developer whether that Javascript does, indeed, resize the page, Whittaker didn’t bother fact-checking any other claims. Instead, he assumed it was some nefarious scheme.
Emil Protalinski of The Next Web:
Apple today posted its second Samsung apology to its UK website, complying with requests by the UK Court of Appeal to say its original apology was inaccurate and link to a new statement. As users on Hacker News and Reddit point out, however, Apple modified its website recently to ensure the message is never displayed without visitors having to scroll down to the bottom first. […]
This code essentially ensures that the iPad mini advertisement takes up the whole page. In other words, no matter your resolution, you won’t see the statement without scrolling down the page. It’s no wonder that it took Apple so long to post the second apology; the company was likely looking for loopholes.
The proof provided for this is a small Javascript snippet which resizes the big iPad Mini image (the “hero”, in advertising parlance) to perfectly fill the height of the window, along with the four smaller links below it. The footer content then gets bumped “below the fold” (though there is no page fold on the internet) for the purpose, according to Protalinski, of hiding the Samsung judgement link.
This is utter nonsense.
The same behaviour is exhibited on Apple’s Canadian site1 Apple’s French site, their German site, and their Australian site Irish site. In fact, all of their non-US sites use this behaviour because they all display a large iPad Mini promo, whereas the US site alternates between one for the iPad Mini, and another for the fourth generation don’t-call-it-the-new-iPad. And, most importantly, none of their geographically-specific sites except the one for the United Kingdom have this judgement posted, making it clear that this snippet of Javascript is not connected to the judgement.
Why did I call Emil Protalinski a jackass? Because I expected this to remain on Hacker News and Reddit where it belongs, and not be dredged up for some cheap hits on an issue that could be easily fact-checked. And he calls himself a journalist.
Updated November 5 to note that Apple has since revised their Canadian and Australian sites to use a similar style to their American site. Their European sites still use the so-called “hiding” script, though, so it’s still clearly unrelated to the Samsung decision. ↥︎
There are not many truths the Macalope holds to be sacred, dear readers, but he has heard it said that if you were to put the articles written on Forbes’s website end-to-end, you could walk across this great nation of ours touching nothing but stupid.
As promised, here’s the last of the links that were kicking around in my Instapaper queue regarding Apple’s executive team switch-up.
Don Lehman wrote one of the most insightful opinions about Apple’s new executive structure:
You get the sense that though each may recognize they are the best at what they do, they aren’t angling for more power inside Apple or elsewhere. Amazingly, they seem to know that they can do the best work of their careers and make the biggest historical impact by working together at Apple. Their individual talents and demeanor perfectly compliment each other and I think could be best summed up in this way: the Head, the Heart, and the Voice.
Matt Drance’s take was also very smart:
Apple’s insane growth has pushed the situation over the edge. Too much size and separation inevitably bring politics, chaos, dropped balls, and finger pointing. None of those things are good for Apple’s products or customers.
John Paczkowski of AllThingsD had a little more information on Bob Mansfield’s unretirement:
“It wasn’t a him-or-me situation,” one source said of Mansfield’s return and Forstall’s departure. “But, put it this way, I think Bob was much more willing to commit to two more years once he knew Scott was on his way out.”
Om Malik of Gigaom had more information about Scott Forstall’s departure, specifically calling it a “firing”:
Forstall’s firing was met with a sense of quiet jubilation, especially among people who worked in the engineering groups. Or as one of my sources quipped: there are a lot of people going for celebratory drinks, even if there is a little bit of doubt about their roles in the future.
Ryan Block of gdgt made a list of Scott Forstall’s failures at Apple:
[H]e was supposedly the guy who convinced Steve to let some iPhone 4 units run around in the wild during late testing. And we all know what happened there.
And finally, analyst Trip Chowdhry stated:
“Microsoft and Sony retail stores are much better looking than Apple Stores, which at many locations look dated and small. Further, the new Palo Alto Apple store has no restrooms for customers anymore.” […]
“Why is that Apple, the company that brought touch to phones and tablets, stopped just there and did not bring touch to notebooks and iMacs? Why is it that Apple brought high-resolution screens to some iMacs and some MacBooks and not to all devices? High-resolution screens are a commodity today.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Chowdhry, what I read was: “I’m the guy who claimed Steve Ballmer would join Steve Jobs onstage at WWDC 2010. Please ignore everything I say about Apple, because I am clearly a complete idiot.”
Nick Bilton reports for the New York Times:
In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network
Instagram isn’t about filters, but about the internal community. This seems like a bizarre place to focus the energy of the engineering team there. But, then again, Twitter has been walling themselves into an non-collaborative company for a while. Why stop now?
JR Raphael has the details for Computerworld:
The first time you install an app from a source other than the Play Store — including a third-party app market like Amazon’s app store — Android pops up a box asking if you want such applications to be checked for “harmful behavior.”
Very clever. With any luck, this will help stem the attacks of late.
I thought that the 360-degree view of Red Bull’s Formula 1 car was the best thing I’ve seen all day, but that was before I read this piece from Harry Marks. There’s a lot of setup, but it’s worth it for the punchline.
Simply the best thing I’ve seen all day. Mind you, it’s been a slow day.