Dieter Bohn for The Verge:
Google is dropping consumer support for the Exchange ActiveSync protocol soon as a part of a “Winter Cleaning,” the company has announced. As a replacement, Google is recommending CalDAV for calendar, CardDAV for contacts, and IMAP for email — though obviously iPhone owners will also likely use the new Gmail app for that.
This probably wasn’t very popular, but it’s yet another reminder that Google can pull the rug out from the services you love. I liked Wave, for instance, but I had to — ahem — wave goodbye to that.
Please direct all pun complaints to my hate mail address.
You’d think that with just three tracks and the initialism “EP” in the title that this would be a short jaunt. Ah, but this is Burial, so it’s a good half-hour of music. The title track opener sets the tone, and it’s aptly named: Burial’s signature vocal samples over beats. It sounds like much of 2010’s Untrue, if the entire record were condensed into an eleven-minute concentrate.
As apt as “Kindred” is named, so bluntly is “Loner”. It’s probably the most club-oriented track by Mr. Bevan. Its tempo is brisk, with each first and third beats delivered in steady thumps. There’s a driving arpeggiated synth melody that flutters overtop, but don’t think it’s lost any of the cold, solemn feeling that you’d expect from a Burial track. It belongs in the nightclub confined to your head.
The album closer, “Ashtray Wasp”, is perhaps the best thing Burial has created. It echoes the synth stylings from “Loner” at the beginning, but using an almost-ephemeral flute, with a sampled vocal pleading “I want you”. As the track passes through desperation, it morphs into a darker, more visceral experience, becoming disturbingly sparse in the last four minutes or so of the 11:45 piece.
This is the soundtrack for two o’clock in the morning, when you’re awake and staring through your window at a streetlight illuminating nothing. It’s properly haunting.
Lukas Mathis isn’t buying the dramatically simplified nature of the iTunes 11 interface:
Sure, iTunes 11 looks as if it was way more friendly than previous versions of iTunes. But while those previous versions were at least honest about their complexity, iTunes 11 isn’t. iTunes’ user interface used to promise a complex application, and then deliver one. iTunes 11 promises a simple app, but delivers the opposite.
He cites a number of examples whereby switching views is inconsistent, such as between the store and library, or within different portions of your local library.
But he forgets that it has always been this way in iTunes, despite acknowledging the following:
Compare this to how iTunes 10 used to work. To jump to a different screen in iTunes, select it from the sidebar. To change how the screen is shown, select one of the options in the toolbar. The basic organization of iTunes 10 can be explained in two sentences.
But this is incorrect. The “jumping to a different screen” aspect of the sidebar included switching between different kinds of local media, switching to an online store, or switching to groupings of local media (playlists). I could easily stretch the same complaints about the inconsistent views in iTunes 11 to questioning why I was able to switch to a musical playlist from the Movies view in iTunes 10.
Of course, I’m not implying that iTunes 11 is perfectly usable. There are a number of legitimate complaints here, chief among which is the library/store switching button which changes sides. But it’s a significant improvement all around. By segregating different kinds of media into unique sections of the app, it has isolated them into more appropriate categories and views, rather than assuming that all are equally relevant all the time.