Month: July 2013

Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow ⇥ sealedabstract.com

This is the longest and most thorough article about the differences in performance between native and web apps that you’ve ever read. Grab a coffee; it’s about 10,000 words and very, very technical.

Microsoft Revamps Structure and Management ⇥ nytimes.com

Is this the big reorganization everyone’s been waiting for, and that Microsoft executives have been fretting? Well, let’s read the press release:

Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.

That says nothing. Maybe a little further on?

The bedrock of our new strategy is innovation in deep, rich, high-value experiences and activities. It’s the starting point for differentiated devices integrated with services. It’s at the core of how we will inspire ourselves all to do our best work and bring to our customers the very things that will make a difference in their lives.

More corporate speak. Perhaps Steve Ballmer’s email to Microsoft employees will provide a better, plain-English explanation:

Most disciplines and product groups will have a core that delivers key technology or services and then a piece that lines up with the initiatives. Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports. The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative’s success.

Does anyone at Microsoft speak English?

The New York Times’ Nick Wingfield is an expert in decoding corporate speak:

Microsoft said it would dissolve its eight product divisions in favor of four new ones arranged around broader themes, a change meant to encourage greater collaboration as competitors like Apple and Google outflank it in the mobile and Internet markets. Steven A. Ballmer, the longtime chief executive, will shuffle the responsibilities of nearly every senior member of his executive bench as a result.

You should read Wingfield’s article. This is a big change, positioning Microsoft to be a collaborative company internally, while projecting themselves as coordinated to us, consumers.

YouSendIt Is Now Hightail ⇥ blog.hightail.com

Brad Garlinghouse:

With a name that strides like a giant across a landscape of Boxes, Syncs and Shares alongside an audaciously elegant look that contrasts with the endless dreary blues of the cloud space, Hightail leads by example.

Can’t spell “Hightail” without “high”.

Or, well, “tail” for that matter.

Apple E-Books Ruling Won’t Do Much for Consumers ⇥ allthingsd.com

John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:

In other words, the DOJ’s victory today over Apple is largely a symbolic one. Its antitrust pursuit of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster already ensured competition in the industry. If there truly was harm done to the market, it has largely been undone. And if there are other players mulling moves similar to those that landed Apple and the publishers in hot water, they’ve likely been deterred. Otherwise, as Forrester analyst James McQuivey observes, the e-books business will pretty much remain as it is.

Judge Rules Apple Conspired to Raise Prices on E-Books ⇥ reuters.com

Judge Denise Cote (PDF):

The question in this case has always been a narrow one: whether Apple participated in a price-fixing scheme in violation of this country’s antitrust laws. Apple is liable here for facilitating and encouraging the Publisher Defendants’ collective, illegal restraint of trade. Through their conspiracy they forced Amazon (and other resellers) to relinquish retail pricing authority and then they raised retail e-book prices. Those higher prices were not the result of regular market forces but of a scheme in which Apple was a full participant.

Given the mountain of emails between key Apple executives and book publishers citing specific prices, this isn’t a surprise.

It doesn’t matter that Amazon had a 90% market share pre-iPad. It doesn’t matter that this enabled Google and Amazon to be on a level playing field. It doesn’t matter that Amazon’s business plan involves artificially depressing the price of e-books to at (or below) cost, reducing the ability for others to compete. It doesn’t matter that an agency model might, in the long run, be a more stable way to create competition.

The question that this trial was tackling was always whether Apple played a role in getting publishers to collaborate to assign prices. This was clearly the case, from day one. Whatever the effects of horizontal price fixing are — higher or lower prices — it’s morally, ethically, and (most important to this case) legally wrong.

Effecting Change From the Outside ⇥ marco.org

In the wake of The Great Stroke Thickening of 2013, Marco Arment has some thoughts on how much this decision was affected by bug reports and commentary:

Apple isn’t a waterfall dictatorship. It’s a company full of many smart people at all levels, and while those people are generally in agreement on high-level philosophies and priorities, they often have different ideas that need to be resolved through experimentation, debate, or executive order. […]

We can’t participate directly in those debates, but we can provide ammo to the side we agree with.

From which Business Insider troll bottom feeder “writer” Nicholas Carlson expanded:

Blogger Declares Victory Over Apple Design Boss Jony Ive, Claims Deep Influence At Apple

Meanwhile, Mark Gurman doesn’t think bloggers had anything to do with it:

iOS 7 beta 3 was already floating around the week of WWDC. CC @marcoarment

Will Strafach chimes in:

@markgurman @marcoarment it wasn’t called that, obviously, but mark is absolutely right. devs got an older but more stable build.

While a newer build of iOS 7 existed at WWDC, why would use a different weight for the first two builds (and all web mockups), then switch it? If they knew they were going to use the regular weight all along, why did they demo it with the lighter weight?

But that’s a silly aside. John Moltz agrees with Arment:

[T]his isn’t the first time bitching about something has caused the company to reconsider something (see: transparent menu bar in OS X).

Indeed. This is the biggest UI makeover to an Apple operating system since the transition from OS 9 to OS X, and the process appears broadly similar. Consider, for example, the difference in the Dock between Mac OS X 10.0 DP2 and the 10.0 public release. There was probably an internal debate, but it was no doubt informed by developer feedback.

The Chooser, From Dropbox ⇥ dropbox.com

This looks like an elegant solution for developers who want really slick, reliable cloud storage. Easy for users, too.

Then again, remember that Dropbox was cited as a future possible PRISM data source; if you’re worried — and it’s good to be a little cautious — this isn’t exactly comforting news. You could encrypt your stuff or run your own cloud storage (I call that “FTP”), but it’s all for nought — treat anything that’s available on the internet as if it’s nearly public.

Some Thoughts on an Entry Level iPhone ⇥ macstories.net

Cody Fink, MacStories:

The press will try to spin the launch of an entry level iPhone as Apple’s way of fighting back against cheaper Android phones, as a way to gain ground over a competitor that’s supposedly winning the smartphone market. I think Apple isn’t interested in this, but rather in making an affordable phone that meets people’s expectations of quality in an Apple product.

The more I think about this, the more I’m in agreement. The business advantage for Apple is that a plastic-backed iPhone should be slightly cheaper to produce than the steel-and-glass 4 and 4S, thereby increasing margins by at least a little bit. That might placate some investors while delivering a better product for users. That’s what Apple does best, after all.

Exploring iOS 7 Rounded Corners ⇥ mani.de

Manfred Schwind:

Many things have changed in iOS 7, but one little detail attracted my attention and that’s what this article is about: rounded corners. Apple is very obsessed about every little detail; in my opinion that’s one of the secrets why they make so beautiful and successful products. Usually a rounded corner is just a quarter of a circle, one might think. But Apple changed the form factor of rounded corners in iOS 7.

It’s not a superellipse; it’s its own beast. Crazy stuff.

Webber Goes From Start to Finish With Grace ⇥ nytimes.com

Brad Spurgeon, New York Times:

When [Mark] Webber, now 36 and a driver at the Red Bull team, leaves at the end of the current season after 12 years at the top, his contribution to the series may long be remembered as a dream.

Webber’s announcement last week that he was retiring from Formula One hit the paddock like a thunderclap. It was not the end of a world champion’s career, but it was the end of something equally as great: A driver who on a human level has few equals in modern Formula One was leaving the series.

I’m going to miss his presence on the grid next year. A class act.

The Verge Attempts to Explain a Plane Crash ⇥ theverge.com

Asiana Flight 214 crash landed at SFO earlier today. Chris Ziegler rightly points out that it was a Boeing 777 and includes a summary of the only other crash landing by a 777:

The cause of the accident is unknown and will likely take some time to investigate, but it’s notable that the 777’s only other major failure — a downed British Airways aircraft at London Heathrow — crashed under similar circumstances on final approach, resulting from a clogged fuel filter that has since been redesigned and retrofitted on existing aircraft using Rolls Royce’s Trent 800 series engines.

He then includes this teaser line:

It’s not immediately clear what type of engine Asiana is using on its 777 fleet.

I don’t understand why that was in there. This is unlikely to have any relationship with the fuel/oil heat exchanger, as publications report that the tail came off moments before the plane was to hit the tarmac. Why use a plane crash as click bait?

The fact that plane crashes are becoming increasingly rare despite a sharp increase in the number of flights annually is a testament to the incredible safety of aircraft. This crash had no fatalities because of some great work by the pilots and flight staff.

Update: KTVU now reports that two people were killed in the crash, and 61 were injured. Awful news.

Kanye West’s Assaultive New Album ⇥ newyorker.com

While I’m on a hip-hop binge, Sasha Frere-Jones, for the New Yorker:

West complains about massages and cars, culminating with a command that makes me smile every time I hear it: “Hurry up with my damn croissants!” The line, like his tweets, is something that only West could deliver with conviction.

While I’d pick either “Blood on the Leaves” or “Send It Up” as the standout track from Yeezus, I completely agree on Frere-Jones’ premise: it’s one hell of a great album. The reason Kanye West can get away with lyrics like “I am a god” while Jay-Z struggles with “I’m the modern day Pablo Picasso” is because West sounds like he’s desperate to prove it. Jay sounds like he’s just reminding you. I don’t buy it.

Marketing Magna Carta Holy Grail ⇥ nytimes.com

Jon Pareles, New York Times:

It’s telling that Jay-Z — who boasts regularly about his millions of sales — and Samsung didn’t simply trust fans to post or tweet on their own. Sure, Jay-Z probably isn’t the only one offering apps that treat personal relationships as mandatory marketing tools. But with more than half a million downloads, that’s a lot of artificial status updates.

Since the record is being given to Samsung smartphone owners for free,1 I’d suspect that many people wouldn’t see it as morally wrong to simply stream the songs on YouTube or wherever. I’d wager that’s what people would do anyway.

The album itself is frustrating, if you’re interested. The production on some tracks (“Tom Ford”, “BBC”, and “Holy Grail”) is absolutely stunning, but it’s often a lyrically weak album. There are far too many retreads of the same concepts of previous records — “Part II (On the Run)” is like a weaker version of The Blueprint’s “Ain’t No Love”; similarly, “Picasso Baby” offers the same ambitious plot as The Black Album’s “Public Service Announcement” without the magnificent arrangement.

When Magna Carta is good, it’s really good — “Oceans” is a masterful achievement. It simply lacks the conviction of previous Jay-Z records. He’s powerful, and he knows he can phone one in.

  1. In shitty 160 kbps MP3s, I’ll have you know. ↥︎