Month: July 2013

Telus Sky ⇥ telussky.com

I’m beyond impressed by this tower. Designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group, this tower will be replacing a two-storey building which, while historic, is a bit dull. The new tower is anything but, however:

The 750,000 square foot vibrant mixed-use tower will incorporate office, retail and residential space. There will be 430,000 square feet of office space, of which 155,000 square feet will be for TELUS.

According to the official Twitter account, it’s going be rather clever:

It’ll also feat a storm water system to recycle rain, saving millions of litres/year.

I’m very excited for this to be completed.

Why iOS 7’S Design Is Bold but Flawed ⇥ macworld.com

Christa Mrgan, for Macworld:

The use of Helvetica Ultralight as the system font is a mistake.

Especially at the small home screen size, yes. You’ll have noticed that most font sizes across the system are slightly larger. This is to compensate for the choice of the lighter Neue Helvetica weights,1 but it doesn’t quite work.

  1. Despite the assurance of Mrgan and others, I’m certain it’s Neue Helvetica Light, not Ultralight, across most of the system. The clock on the lock screen is the only place that I can think of where the Ultralight weight is used. ↥︎

Motorola Moto X’s Customization Options ⇥ abcnews.go.com

Joanna Stern, ABC News:

Through a website, buyers will be able to select from a palette of different colors. One color can be used for the back case and another can be selected for the trim of the phone. Users will also be able to engrave a name or message on the back cover as well as upload a personal photo through the site to be used as the wallpaper on the phone’s screen, according to people familiar with the rollout.

This comes in the wake of Pew’s research showing 56% of American adults owning a smartphone. They haven’t been business devices for a long time, but they have — for the most part — continued to look like they were. Between this, Nokia’s line, and the apparently-leaked plastic iPhone, it seems smartphones are becoming more tailored towards a market where everyone owns a smartphone.

Looks like Motorola won’t be setting any records for most SKUs assigned to a product, though.

Lockdown ⇥ marco.org

In December, “grandpa” Anil Dash reminisced about the web we lost:

This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.

Marco Arment is also questioning that paradigm, with the shutdown of Google Reader:

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything. While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.

We log into some services now with Facebook or Twitter instead of a unique user name and password combination. We share with little buttons to social networks rather than to our blogs, or via email. All of this is easier to implement than the older methods (“just link to this Javascript and magic happens”), but at the expense of lock-in. That’s a big price to pay for the future of the web. It doesn’t have to be this way, though.

iWork for iCloud ⇥ qz.com

Remember this part of the WWDC keynote?

Don’t lie — this was the part everyone forgot because web apps like this simply aren’t as interesting as new versions of the operating systems you use all the time. That’s rough competition, especially considering the amount of work the teams behind this product have clearly put into it.

Christopher Mims of Quartz is blown away by the trio of web apps, though. He thinks this is Apple’s attempt to compete with Office web apps and Google’s productivity tools, and that it’s such a big step up over those two that it will force their apps to improve.

I don’t doubt that Microsoft and Google will be looking at iWork for iCloud as an example of full-featured aren’t-you-surprised-they’re-only-web-apps. But I also don’t really see the point of these — much like the rest of iCloud.com, they’re clearly built for supplementary use, and are not intended to be used full-time. If you have your Mac, you’re going to be using the desktop iWork apps; if you’re on your iPad or iPhone, there are iOS versions available, too.

I suppose this is a really clever way of putting iWork in the hands of Windows users so they can edit their iOS iWork documents at their desk. Perhaps this will be great in dire case scenarios, too — imagine you need to give a presentation, but your MacBook is dead, and nobody has an A/C adapter. But I can’t think of many reasons why these apps exist; perhaps there’s simply a perceived imperative for Apple to compete with Google’s and Microsoft’s attempts to put productivity software on the web.

Motorola Rolls Out First Ad for Moto X ⇥ adage.com

Text-dense full-page ad that’s more conceptual than a sales pitch, revolving around a “U-S-A, U-S-A” vibe — where have I seen that before?

This ad is interesting for shedding some more light on the mysterious Moto X:

[This is the] first smartphone that you can design yourself. Because today you should have the freedom to design the things in your life to be as unique as you are.

To what extent this can be customized remains mysterious; is it just a bunch of colours, or is this going to be a phone in a range of screen sizes, storage capacities, and so forth, in a perverse attempt to set the record for the most SKUs assigned to a single product?

This is Motorola’s big push, though, and it’s far more exciting than any product they’ve released since the original RAZR. I’m very hopeful for its success.

How to Keep Edward Snowden From Leaking More NSA Secrets ⇥ washingtonpost.com

The editorial board of the Washington Post:

The best solution for both Mr. Snowden and the Obama administration would be his surrender to U.S. authorities, followed by a plea negotiation. It’s hard to believe that the results would leave the 30-year-old contractor worse off than living in permanent exile in an unfree country. Sadly, the supposed friends of this naive hacker are likely advising him otherwise.

Guess they figured out that they didn’t get the exclusive.

Mavericks’ New Wave ⇥ eggfreckles.net

Thomas Brand:

The public unveiling of each new version of Mac OS X has brought a new default desktop picture, and a new hunt to find a full-res copy of that wallpaper before the official release. The introduction of OS X Mavericks was no different, only this time instead of a space-themed galaxy or nebula, Apple decided to bring Mac’s default look and feel back to earth.

I think the default desktop picture that ships with Mavericks is the best since the Tiger abstract image. While the space-themed images are interesting, they’re of a super low quality and therefore never lasted for me. The longest I ever used one was the Mountain Lion version for about a week; it was replaced with Javier Ocasio’s much higher-quality variant. But with the wave image in Mavericks, I might be sticking with the default for much longer.

HP Still Plotting a Return to Smartphone Market ⇥ allthingsd.com

John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:

Asked by the Press Trust of India if HP is indeed developing a new smartphone, Yam replied: “The answer is yes, but I cannot give a timetable. It would be silly if we say no. HP has to be in the game.”

Considering the mobile space for the foreseeable future, why would HP even bother to compete? I will be surprised if their next smartphone effort recoups its development costs.

How Google is Killing Organic Search ⇥ blog.tutorspree.com

Aaron Harris, on Google’s burying of organic search results below paid and sponsored results:

The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local” business – or think you’re competing with Google – Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera” or “Buy a Dress Shirt” gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local” searches. Nearly everything leads back to a Google product except for an ever-decreasing amount of “Organic” real estate.

It’s Google’s world, and from now on, you’ll have to pay to play in it.

Dirty. Google may just be one of many search engines, but it is the most popular by a very large margin. Great power requires great responsibility.