Month: April 2013

iPad Mini Trademark Registration Saga ⇥ avstrademark.com

Eric Adler updates us on the numbingly-stupid iPad Mini trademark non-story:

Apple needs to file a one-sentence disclaimer with the USPTO. Apple does not need add any fine print to its advertising. The disclaimer means, in essence, that Apple will own the trademark to “iPad mini” but not to just “mini.”

No shit. What’s to bet Patently Apple ignores this because it lacks the drama of their initial post?

Meanwhile at 9to5Mac, Ben Lovejoy doesn’t understand the disclaimer:

The disclaimer requirement may be an attempt to bring some sanity back to trademark wars: while Apple already holds the trademark to iPad, it’s unclear what benefit there is in trademarking ‘iPad mini’ specifically.

Because it’s a distinct brand, Mr. Lovejoy. It’s why “Mac Mini” and “Mac” are both trademarked.

While it’s possible this was entirely intentional, Apple has been left in a worse position than if it hadn’t applied for the trademark in the first place with the USPTO punishing what it sees as a pointless application.

In what way is this a worse position? Unless, of course, you think that Apple must add the following to the bottom of the iPad Mini box:

iPad Mini™ is a trademark of Apple Inc., but the USPTO would like us to remind you that the word “mini” itself is not a trademark of Apple Inc.

In which case, you need to re-read the letter the USPTO sent to Apple.

JC Penny CEO Inventory Apparently Out of Stock ⇥ gigaom.com

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. — Warren Buffett

No surprises here, given JCP’s disastrous year. I recently re-watched Ron Johnson’s rebrand presentation from January 2012, and it still makes sense to me. The lesson here is that people are more willing to pay $4 for a towel if it has been marked down from $10 than if the same towel is always four dollars. The perception of a bargain is a stronger purchasing motivator than the actual price.

This news has brought the inevitable speculation that Johnson could return to Apple in the still-vacant SVP Retail spot:

Granted, that’s partly why he left; to find a new challenge in the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple. But funny enough, Apple hasn’t found anyone to fill the position (at least anyone that would accept the job) that could live up to Johnson’s legacy. It certainly made an effort. But that effort involved hiring John Browett away from the U.K. discount electronics retailer Dixons, and it was a total bust.

Apple doesn’t need Johnson — the retail operation appears to be humming along just fine without him. But he was a good fit at the company, and it’s important for them to have someone in charge of retail as the chain expands.

I copped the excellent post title from MG Siegler’s tweet.

Apple Kicks AppGratis Out of the App Store ⇥ allthingsd.com

John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:

At the time of its disappearance, word on the street had it that Apple banished the app for violation of an App Store Review Guideline clause that states:

2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

And that was indeed the case — partially. Apple confirmed to AllThingsD Monday that it removed AppGratis from the App Store for violating clause 2.25. But it said that the app also violated clause 5.6.

5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Great. With any luck, they’ll start booting out some of the other apps that send spammy Push Notifications.

Ads in the Form of Articles ⇥ nytimes.com

Tanzina Vega, New York Times:

Articles in a series on Mashable.com called “What’s Inside” looked for all the world like the hundreds of other articles on the digital media site. But journalistically, they were something very different.

The articles, about technology topics in a wide variety of products, including modems and the Hubble Space Telescope, were paid for by Snapdragon, a brand of processor chip made by Qualcomm, and the sponsor of the series. Most were even written by Mashable editorial employees.

Take a look at one of these articles — say, for example, the Google Glass one. Notice that nowhere in that article does it say that it is sponsored by Qualcomm, until you get down to the tiny-ass tags at the bottom where you’ll find “Snapdragon” and “Sponsored” mixed in with other topics.

Mashable isn’t exactly the epitome of journalistic excellence, but this is basic stuff. If a website or publication is running ads or sponsored content, it is ethically dubious to not identify it as such.

Fast Churnalism ⇥ fastcodesign.com

The headline:

Construction Delays and Budget Cuts: Is Apple’s New HQ In Peril?

The subsequent two words:

Probably not

Way to get those page views, Fast Company.

How a Banner Ad for H&R Block Appeared on Apple.com ⇥ arstechnica.com

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:

Robert Silvie returned to his parents’ home for a Mardi Gras visit this year and immediately noticed something strange: common websites like those beloning to Apple, Walmart, Target, Bing, and eBay were displaying unusual ads. Silvie knew that Bing, for instance, didn’t run commodity banner ads along the bottom of its pristine home page — and yet, there they were. Somewhere between Silvie’s computer and the Bing servers, something was injecting ads into the data passing through the tubes.

This is nothing less than asinine.

“Is That a Feature or a Threat?” ⇥ networkworld.com

Yoni Heisler:

For instance, Facebook writes of its chat heads feature:

With chat heads you can keep chatting with friends even when you’re using other apps. When friends send you messages, a chat head appears with your friend’s face, so you see exactly who you’re chatting with. Messages reach you no matter what you’re doing – whether you’re checking email, browsing the web, or listening to music.

Is that a feature or a threat?

Here’s the thing about apps, and on a larger scale, technology that people love – no matter how much someone is into something, they don’t want it thrust in their face 24/7.

As someone who owns a cellphone with text message capabilities, and a frequent user of an IM application, I can categorically state that this sounds horrible. I like chatting with friends — who doesn’t? — but the constant bounce of the dock icon or the vibration of my phone can be so distracting that an otherwise enjoyable activity can feel like a chore.

Extracting Audio From Pictures ⇥ mediapreservation.wordpress.com

The media preservation initiative of Indiana University, Bloomington:

… some other very old gramophone recordings have come down to us only in the form of prints made on paper,like the one on the fourth floor of Wells Library. This isn’t a unique situation. Many important early motion pictures that didn’t survive in the form of actual films were nevertheless preserved as paper prints deposited for copyright registration purposes with the Library of Congress and later retransferred to film for projection and preservation. Similarly, I’ve found that paper prints of “lost” gramophone recordings can be digitally converted back into playable, audible form.

Astonishing.

Facebook’s ‘Phone’ Is Another Triumph of Mediocrity ⇥ wired.com

A few more articles regarding Facebook Home, because I know how much you and I would love to have streaming ads on our home screens.

First up, Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by Steven Levi of Wired:

It’s only available on Android phones. Isn’t it ironic that your mobile strategy is now tied to Google’s operating system?

We have a pretty good partnership with Apple, but they want to own the whole experience themselves. There aren’t a lot of bridges between us and Google, but we are aligned with their open philosophy.

Google and Facebook are ostensibly competitors, but it’s hard to see the extent to which they are actually competing. Google+ doesn’t anywhere near the social traffic that Facebook does, and Facebook’s email addresses aren’t really used (at least, not by anyone I’ve ever met).

Tim Carmody wrote about the two companies’ uneasy relationship for The Verge:

Facebook Home already inverts the system-level relationship between the social network and the launch screen. It already strips away nearly all of the chrome and UI features that make Android look like Android. Facebook just put the entirety of the core Android experience inside a blue-tinted, ad-sponsored wrapper, and then hid the wrapper as an app inside Google’s own store.

It’s not a phone, and it’s not an app — it’s a clever way to shoehorn Facebook into the existing ecosystem in a very powerful way. As Zuckerberg said in his interview with Levi:

We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.

Dan Frommer thinks it’s a great strategy:

Facebook isn’t likely to MySpace Android or iOS any time soon. But this is a smart, ambitious project for Facebook. I like it.

But Mat Honan thinks it’s lazy:

Facebook simply needed to show something that makes it easy to connect, consume and share more content with your friends. It did that. That dive-into Facebook home screen is the only thing that matters — you don’t even have to unlock your screen to dig into social. So who cares if Facebook Home makes its debut on mediocre hardware? Certainly not the people who made Facebook a hit.

It’s an incredibly polished product which — as it runs on existing platforms — requires little investment from Facebook. Yet it’s mediocre. Good enough.

The future might be much more interesting, though. Louie Mantia tweeted:

Motorola ROKR : HTC First :: iPhone : ???

I wonder.

What the Internet Owes to Roger Ebert ⇥ cnn.com

Gene Seymour, for CNN (via Coudal):

As the lights went down one last time, Ebert would have loved it if all those people sitting in the dark and hoping for the best understood that his approach to movies was big enough, openhearted enough to embrace far more than the movies he’d loved all his life.

There are very few deaths of public figures and celebrities that have ever affected me the way the death of Roger Ebert has. He will forever be one of my most favourite writers, for such precise reviews as this:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The Making of Medium.com ⇥ teehanlax.com

As we were getting on-boarded we began to see who we would be working with. There were so many recognizable names. At one point, Chris, one of our developers, said:

“Hey! Dustin Diaz… I know this guy… He wrote the book on JavaScript… like he LITERALLY wrote a book on it. I own the book. Fuck me.”

Jon Lax replied “Welcome to the NFL.”

Roger Ebert Dies at 70 ⇥ nytimes.com

Yesterday, Roger Ebert wrote that he would be reducing his review workload while treating a new cancer.

Today, he passed away from that same cancer.

He was my favourite critic — not movie critic, but favourite critic, full stop. He seemed to write things in such a particular way that his opinion was counted for more than just that, almost rising to the level of fact. He penned skillful yet readable rhetoric. He wrote great reviews of great movies, but equally great reviews of absolutely dreadful films.

If you want to know what an impact his life had, note that you may need to try a few times to access the above links. The Chicago Sun-Times server is struggling to cope with the traffic.

Update: BuzzFeed has a collection of “13 things Roger Ebert said better than anybody else”.

Facebook Home ⇥ facebook.com

Called it:

… live, streaming Facebook content on the home screen, just a tap away. And, knowing Facebook’s monetization and mobile strategy, ads on your home screen.

That’s pretty much what this is: a replacement launcher for Android with Facebook content pushed to the home screen. With ads.

As with anything driven by user photos, the interface is only going to look as good as the photos your friends take. It’s unlikely that this is what you’ll see — this is more like it — which rather spoils the efforts from the designers who worked hard on this.

The press photos show a font that appears to be Helvetica Neue, which you may recognize from iOS. Its use will highlight the drabness of Roboto, used almost anywhere else on Android.

This — the launcher, carrying ads and tracking — is unlikely to come to iOS, though, given the current state of that platform. This is another reminder of why it’s sometimes better for a platform to be less open.

The Real Reason Windows Phone Is Failing ⇥ readwrite.com

Brian S Hall, ReadWrite:

The real reason why Windows Phone has failed because there is no good reason for it to exist.

Bold statement, but think about it: Windows Phone is as good as its competitors, and that’s simply not enough.

Apple’s iMessage Encryption Trips Up Feds’ Surveillance ⇥ news.cnet.com

Declan McCullagh and Jennifer Van Grove, CNet:

An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNet discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, “it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices” even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

Apple has lately been having a tough time with security for their online products. This is refreshing to hear, if simply as a demonstration that Apple can get their web security right.

Work Less ⇥ medium.com

Kyle Bragger:

The idea that, without “hustle”, without throwing away nights and weekends, without putting your life on hold for your work, you’ll somehow be more successful, more productive, is ridiculous to me, yet continues to be pushed by participants in our industry left and right. This is, quite simply, insane.

Well said. The oft-mocked French have this right: spend time doing other things, including nothing at all. It doesn’t matter how much you love your work; spending twelve hours a day, six days a week doing it is absolutely ridiculous.

Google Forks WebKit and Launches Blink ⇥ techcrunch.com

April 3, 2013: the day of big browser news. Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch:

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

As someone who yearns for better performance across the web, this is fantastic. As a non-Chrome user, this doesn’t really affect me. As a front-end web developer, I’m holding back frustration. But, hey, Blink doesn’t add a vendor prefix. Steve Streza:

No more vendor prefixes, though. -webkit-no-more-vendor-prefixes. -moz-no-more-vendor-prefixes. -ms-no-more-vendor-prefixes.

It’s one more thing to test for, and one more thing to debug. And it’s based on the same fifteen-year-old code that WebKit is based on, so it’s not nearly as ambitious as Servo is. Still, this is beneficial to Google in the short term.

Update: Looks like Opera will be using Blink, not WebKit, as originally stated.

Twenty Awesome Covers From the US Space Program ⇥ space.kinja.com

I’m partial to the “NASA/Grumman Apollo Lunar Module” cover. Via Jim Coudal.

Servo ⇥ blog.mozilla.org

Speaking of new browsers, here’s one that’s a reality. Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla:

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.

Fascinating stuff. While WebKit is, by far, the dominant rendering engine right now, it’s built on a nearly fifteen-year-old project. A new rendering engine which is secure and optimized for today’s plethora of uses of web browsers is desperately needed.

Paul Rouget has a little more information on Servo.

Helm: A Browser Concept ⇥ dewith.com

Sebastiaan de With:

Last year I thought of an idea for a browser that would be minimalist. Not necessarily in an aesthetic sense; I’d just like a browser that gets out of the way. Like the new (and unloved) design for Quicktime X introduced in Snow Leopard, I’d love to see a browser focusing solely on content, and generally offer a more visual approach to browsing the internet.

These mockups will only stay as mockups, but they’re a sublime vision of the evolving function of the browser. The file saving tray is a particularly slick addition.