Month: April 2013

Let the Rumours Begin ⇥ branch.com

Yours truly:

While I’m excited to see what Ive can do with both OS X and iOS, I’m hesitant to think anything significant will happen to the design or appearance of either this year. It’s a slow change necessitated by not wanting to disorientate the hundreds of millions of users of both.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when Gruber posted this in the linked Branch thread:

Word on the street is that iOS engineers with carry privileges all have some sort of polarizing filter on their iPhone displays, such that it greatly decreases viewing angles, thus making it difficult for observers to see the apparently rather significant system-wide UI overhaul.

Rene Ritchie chimed in:

Ive’s work is apparently making many people really happy, but will also apparently make rich-texture-loving designers sad.

Very interesting. Disappointingly, the rumours also suggest that OS X 10.9 is getting a little less love after some engineers have been moved from it to focus on iOS 7. In some ways, I’m more excited about a new version of OS X.

Lots of other tasty nuggets from some well-connected people in this thread. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Used Car Dealer Logic ⇥ theverge.com

Adi Robertson, The Verge:

Tesla has seen strong sales of its Model S electric car, but Elon Musk is now hoping to bring in more buyers — and to do so, he’s rolling out a new sales plan that promises to give potential owners a Model S for a mere $500 a month.

Five Benjamins a month? Great. What’s the catch?

Either way, though, you’ll be paying $1,199 a month for the $72,400 85-kWh model, or $1,051 a month for the $62,400 60-kWh one. So how does Tesla get that number down to $543, as it prices the 85-kWh plan? It rolls in the savings you’ll get from owning an electric car. […]

By default, for example, it counts $100 in “time savings” from avoiding gas stations — using the somewhat dodgy metric that you’d spend one hour a month refueling and your time is worth $100 an hour. It also assumes buyers will deduct the car’s operating costs as business expenses, removing a corresponding $227 a month.

April Fool’s Day was yesterday, Elon.

Mosaic ⇥ mosaic.io

A brand new framework for developers to extend an app’s display area over multiple iOS devices. Marvellous.

Google Privacy Policy Faces Legal Challenge in Europe ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Lori Hinnant, of the Associated Press:

Google’s new privacy policy is under legal attack from regulators in its largest European markets, who want the company to overhaul practices they say let it create a gold mine of data at the expense of unwitting users.

Led by the French, organizations in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy agreed Tuesday on the joint action, with the ultimate possibility of imposing fines or restrictions on operations across the entire 27-country European Union.

The EU has an uncanny ability to bring on a legal shitstorm. They did it (and are continuing the fight) with Microsoft’s marketplace dominance, and now they’re ensuring that Google takes responsibility for the amount of users they have.

Housekeeping: RSS Feed Issues

I recently mucked around with the settings for the RSS feed here, and I must have messed something up. The feed URL was, for some reason, invalid or not found. I have fixed this, so it should work as expected now. You may need to unsubscribe and resubscribe in your reader, though. Please let me know if you have any ongoing issues.

Thanks for reading.

Regular Audio Human ⇥ randsinrepose.com

Where Stephen Hackett set himself a maximum price of $100, Michael Lopp has reviewed three different headphone sets at vastly different price points:

For my selection of headphones, I wanted to test the Apple-supplied earbuds against both a high-end in-ear selection as as well as a set of full-sized headphones. For the full-sized headphones, I asked Marco for his recommendation, since he’s obsessed a lot more about headphones. He suggested the Sennheiser HD 380 Pro (~$170.00). For in-ear, I went to Twitter for recommendations, and the good people at Klipsch provided me with a pair of their X10i model, which retail for around $349.00.

I’ve never spent $170 on a pair of headphones, and $349 seems otherworldly to me.

This test seems thorough, but I have an issue with the song Lopp chose: “Titanium” by David Guetta. Like most pop music made since the mid-1990s, it is a victim of the loudness war. It’s not the most extreme example, but it’s not clean:

A more accurate test would be to use a song like Rage Against the Machine’s “Take the Power Back” — the kick drum and funk bass at the beginning are fantastic tests for clarity and range. However, “more accurate” does not necessarily mean “better”. As I noted, most contemporary pop and rock is mixed far too loud. But, since this is now the norm (unfortunately), Lopp’s test is probably more representative of actual use.

The iMac G5 ⇥ 512pixels.net

Jordan Merrick, guest-writing for Stephen Hackett’s 512 Pixels:

The iMac G5 was far more mature in comparison to its predecessors. This machine was simply a neutral white rectangle, less than 2” thick, held aloft by a single piece of aluminum. Gone were the cutesy colors and childish nature of the infant iMac G3 as well as the nose and lip piercings of the teenage iMac G4 that made sure it stood out of a crowd. The iMac G5 had finally grown up, moved out and got a job.

Despite the professional look of the late 2009 iMacs and crazy thinness of today’s, the G5 is still my favourite generation of its industrial design. It’s warm, but not fuzzy; svelte, but not sharp. It’s very humanistic.

Size Matters for Connected Devices; Phablets Don’t ⇥ blog.flurry.com

Mary Ellen Gordon of Flurry Analytics:

The ‘Is it a phone or is it a tablet’ devices otherwise known as phablets have attracted interest, but currently command a relatively small share (2%) of the device installed base, and their share of active users and sessions is also relatively small.

Keep in mind that this is just the sample from one analytics service, albeit a popular one. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, though.

Court Rules It Is Illegal to Resell Digital Music ⇥ arstechnica.com

According to the judgement:

Here, a ReDigi user owns the phonorecord that was created when she purchased and downloaded a song from iTunes to her hard disk. But to sell that song on ReDigi, she must produce a new phonorecord on the ReDigi server. Because it is therefore impossible for the user to sell her “particular” phonorecord on ReDigi, the first sale statute cannot provide a defense. Put another way, the first sale defense is limited to material items, like records, that the copyright owner put into the stream of commerce. Here, ReDigi is not distributing such material items; rather, it is distributing reproductions of the copyrighted code embedded in new material objects, namely, the ReDigi server in Arizona and its users’ hard drives. The first sale defense does not cover this any more than it covered the sale of cassette recordings of vinyl records in a bygone era.

In other words, the statute that ReDigi was relying upon only covers exact articles, not duplicates thereof.

It’s a different law altogether, but it reminds me of the decisions against music piracy. In those cases, despite a physical copy never exchanging hands and only duplicates being made, it was (and still is) treated as stealing — the equivalent of shoplifting a CD. But when that argument does not favour the labels, digital music files are suddenly (and correctly) duplicates, subject to different rules.

These laws effectively need to be rewritten to comply with digital terminology and structures. It’s now possible to pirate physical objects, albeit in a limited sense. How does that fit into the current legal framework? (Hint: it doesn’t.)

Patently Apple Strikes Again ⇥ patentlyapple.com

Jack Purcher of Patently Apple reports that Apple’s trademark application for the “iPad Mini” brand has been refused by the USPTO. There’s only a small problem with that: it isn’t actually true, according to Nilay Patel who tweeted:

To be clear, the USPTO has not denied Apple’s iPad mini tradmark yet — it’s flagged issues for Apple to correct.

Patel also retweeted this from Eric Adler:

@reckless taking care of the iPad mini office action should be ~3 hours of atty time. Or maybe 10 hours from a 2nd year associate.

Patel is a former attorney, though he doesn’t practice any more. Adler is a current IP attorney for Adler Vermillion & Skocilich. Jack Purcher isn’t.

As with most Patently Apple stuff, I expected this to disappear into the depths of the day’s news, never to be seen again. But, weirdly enough, it was picked up by the BBC, TechCrunch, the Atlantic Wire, and PC Magazine. Hell, Forbes ran it with a particularly stupid headline, “Apple Loses the iPad Mini Trademark”. Yes, Apple is now losing things it didn’t have in the first place.