Month: August 2013

How the iPhone and Bad Decisions Killed BlackBerry ⇥ newyorker.com

Vauhini Vara, the *New Yorker:

BlackBerry, founded in 1984 by a pair of engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, was for years one of the world’s most innovative builders of communications products like two-way pagers and e-mail devices. But the story of its past six years has been one of missed opportunities. First, the company failed to recognize that the iPhone could hurt it. Then it overlooked the threat of low-cost competitors in Asia. Finally, and most recently, executives threw the company’s little remaining energy into a new line of high-end smartphones that failed to resonate with consumers, having arrived far too late with too little to offer.

It is genuinely incredible that it took until this year for BlackBerry to release something in the vein of the iPhone or Android phones, with the Z10. It’s disappointing to see the tail end of the biggest splash any Canadian company has made on the technology scene.

Hyperloop ⇥ teslamotors.com

If this progresses to a point where it can be constructed — and I sincerely hope that happens — I hope for one between Calgary and Vancouver. We are living in the future, ladies and gentlemen.

BlackBerry’s for Sale, but Who’s Buying? ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Omar El Akkad, the Globe and Mail:

“Google, Apple, Microsoft – I don’t see them doing that,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis. “They each have their own platforms. Amazon? I doubt it. Samsung? Maybe, but I doubt it.”

Samsung might have reason to look in BlackBerry’s direction in part because the South Korean company is becoming concerned about its reliance on Google Inc.’s Android operating system, which now powers virtually all of Samsung’s best-selling smartphones, Mr. Gillis said. However he is still skeptical that there’s enough reason for Samsung to seriously consider making a run at BlackBerry.

The iPad Is Like the iPod, Not the iPhone ⇥ stratechery.com

Ben Thompson nails it again:

Most folks seem to instinctively compare the iPad and the tablet market to the iPhone and smartphone market, and it’s easy to see why. They share the same OS, the same competitor, many of the same apps, and, of course, the same time period — the present.

But in reality — and this touches on many of the themes of this blog — an overt focus on product similarities misses many crucial factors that, in my opinion, make iPhones and iPads very different. In fact, I believe the business we should be looking at to understand where Apple might take the iPad is the iPod, not the iPhone.

Open Letter to Jeff Bezos ⇥ allthingsd.com

Kara Swisher, AllThingsD:

In other words, make it clear that it is possible to do great journalism in an Internet way — even more possible because you’re freer and, most of all, readers want to read it that way. That entails inspiring the staffers of the newspaper to create content that is — as it has been — accurate, ethically sound, of high quality, but also much more compelling, and delivered in a way that modern customers want to consume it. Formulate those big stories primarily on the Web, and allow a conversation with readers to bubble up from there.

I usually hate open letters, but this is truly spectacular.

The Problem Exists Between Nerds and Normal People

Last week, Marc Scott published a very earnest critique of the current state of the broader public’s understanding of computers, based on the premise that it’s necessary for people to understand how to replace a hard drive and dick around at the command line for them to more accurately be able to isolate computer issues. Only one problem: that premise is completely misguided.

People aren’t trying to use computers. People are trying to get shit done, and a computer is simply a tool for that — a means to an end.

This is similar to the way in which people use their cars. Most drivers simply want to get from their house to the grocery store and back. They want to know how much gas they have left, how fast they’re going, and what song is playing on the radio. The niche group of enthusiasts, on the other hand, are interested in tinkering with the mechanical aspects of the engine.

Through the hard work of engineers in the past hundred years, cars have become more reliable than ever before. As parts which were once regarded as owner-serviceable have been improved to the point where necessary repair or replacement was a rarity, these parts have migrated under layers of plastic or tucked into nooks at the bottom of the engine bay. The only intervention required of the owner of a modern car is to add fuel, and occasionally top-up the windscreen washer fluid. Any greater issues are dealt with by a mechanic.

Automotive enthusiasts were dismayed by this changing ownership paradigm.1 “How will people know the reason for the metallic grinding noise coming from their engine bay?,” they cried. But most people don’t care why there’s a metallic grinding noise coming from their engine; they just want to get their milk. And, in modern cars, it’s exceedingly rare for major calamities to occur. And even if there were such an occurance, the driver will book their car into a nearby mechanic for them to diagnose and fix because the mechanic has the expertise.2

In this analogy, Marc Scott is the enthusiast. Take his examples of frequent issues amongst those in the school where he teaches and serves as occasional IT guy:

A kid puts her hand up in my lesson. ‘My computer won’t switch on.’ she says, with the air of desperation that implies she’s tried every conceivable way of making the thing work. I reach forward and switch on the monitor, and the screen flickers to life, displaying the Windows login screen. She can’t use a computer.

Yes, she can use a computer. The idea that the display needs to be switched on separately from the computer is an issue of poor hardware interface design — an issue which is being remedied by the increasing share of tablets, laptops, and all-in-ones amongst new computer purchases.

A teacher brings me her school laptop. ‘Bloody thing won’t connect to the internet.’ she says angrily, as if it is my fault. ‘I had tonnes of work to do last night, but I couldn’t get on-line at all. My husband even tried and he couldn’t figure it out and he’s excellent with computers.’ I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her. Neither her nor her husband can use computers.

Yes, they can use computers. This is another example of poor hardware design. Imagine if a computer had a physical switch which independently toggled the hard drive’s power — ludicrous, right?

A teacher brings me her brand new iPhone, the previous one having been destroyed. She’s lost all her contacts and is very upset. I ask if she’d plugged her old iPhone into her computer at any time, but she can’t remember. I ask her to bring in her laptop and iPhone. When she brings them in the next day I restore her phone from the backup that resides on her laptop. She has her contacts back, and her photos as well. She’s happy. She can’t use a computer.

Yes, she can use a computer. This is another example of a convoluted user experience. She just wants her stuff on her phone (and this is why it’s so critical for iCloud Backups to work properly every time).

I am an enthusiast, too. I think people would be better off if they knew their way around the annals of Stack Overflow, or the more labyrinthian quarters of OS X’s networking settings. But people shouldn’t have to know this stuff. Things should just work. Trying to get seven billion people to know their way around a Terminal shell is impossible. But it’s possible to get the few-million tech-savvy people who make all of this stuff to reduce its complexity to the point where nobody has to manually fiddle with network settings ever again. Make no mistake — we would all benefit from a reduction of complexity.

Last year, I bought a new wireless base station to replace the older one as the primary station, with the older one to be used as an extension. Imagine my surprise when AirPort Utility migrated all my settings from the old one to the new one; then imagine how delighted I was that the old one defaulted to extending the network. It took less time for me to set this network up than it took to purchase the base station.

Stuff like this is beneficial to everyone. I don’t care how much of an enthusiast you may be — you may use Terminal for everything from checking email to reading Hacker News — nobody delights in configuring a wireless network. Surely nobody loves spending time setting up their email accounts on a new computer, or working around permissions errors. Normal people shouldn’t have to think of a permissions error. That’s why the iPad is so popular through a cross-section of technical abilities.3

That’s why designers of all stripes — interface, graphic, product, or whatever — need to get this stuff right. Take Bradley Chambers’ article on the iPhone’s convoluted photo management:

The kids born 2010 and beyond (when the iPhone camera actually got good), will have a ton of pictures taken of them. Parents largely don’t have a digital workflow that allows for backup, usability, and long term storage. Apple has always prided itself on making technology for regular people. This is a problem that regular people need solved. Photo storage and backup needs to be automatic and so easy that it’s nearly impossible to screw up.

Replace “photo storage and backup” with “everything”, and you’ll get the gist of what I’m trying to say here.

One of the problems that Mr. Scott reveals is not that people lack knowledge of how their computer works. Rather, it’s that critical, analytical thinking is not formally taught. Most of the time, it’s merely implied, without any consideration of what analytical thinking should entail.

Picture this scenario: a CD player is connected to an amplifier, connected to a pair of speakers. You press play on the CD player, and hear nothing. What do you do?

An analytical thinker will be able to troubleshoot this scenario, even if they have no idea of the inner workings of a CD player or amplifier. They’ll probably start by checking that there’s power, that there’s a CD in the player, and that the volume is somewhere in the middle. Then it’s a simple process of isolation and verification.

Students need to be taught these critical skills. When I was in high school, this was something that was a byproduct of cross-referencing sources and refining thesis statements. But it’s a skill that needs to be a class itself.

Last week, I linked to an article about kidergarten students learning to program. These students weren’t writing Python or PHP, but rather dragging blocks of instructions together, similar to the way in which Automator works. This requires just as much critical thought as writing Ruby while keeping it approachable, un-scary, and fun.

Marc Scott closes his post with a plea for smart public policy decisions:

I want the people who will help shape our society in the future to understand the technology that will help shape out society in the future. If this is going to happen, then we need to reverse the trend that is seeing digital illiteracy exponentially increase.

I agree — I want the people who make laws governing the use of technology to have an understanding of that technology. But there is already a framework for this: lobbying.

I’m not kidding.

Before the days of entire industries using lobbying as a means to write laws enabling them to destroy all that is good and decent in the world, lobbyists existed to inform policymakers on unforeseen implications or industry nuances of proposed legislation. Most politicians aren’t farmers, or bankers, or programmers; they’re ill-equipped to be making laws regulating these industries. Yet, paradoxically, they are expected to do just that. The people who are better-equipped to make these laws — the farmers, the bankers, and the programmers — are too busy contributing to their respective industries.

We need nerd lobbyists. We need people who can clearly communicate why the UK’s new porn filter won’t work. We need people who can articulate the expected standards for broadband internet and cellular providers. We need people who can clearly explain to laypeople the extremely technical issues which matter to consumers.

Mr. Scott has revealed a much broader issue than I think he realizes. There’s a lot to unpack in what he’s written, and I urge you to read it in its entirety. But I think what he’s written is from a backwards perspective. Normal people should not be required to know Python; people who know Python should be required to know normal people’s expectations.

We’re slowly getting to a point where things simply work as expected. WiFi networks are more robust than they ever have been, and email accounts automatically configure themselves. This philosophy needs to run even deeper through this industry. We — the people who write and build and compile and design all this really futuristic stuff — are in charge of ensuring that general-purpose computing is available to everyone. General-purpose is, after all, general-audience. Design for your grandfather and your friend’s new baby at the same time. We all like code which is self-documenting, so make the product of that code self-explanatory. We all benefit from this approach. We are part of the general audience.

  1. If you doubt this, I have a decade’s worth of back-issues of Road & Track to show you. ↥︎

  2. Like other specialized professions, all mechanics have had to deal with significant skepticism because of asshole mechanics who take advantage of broader ignorance. The latter will want to replace parts that don’t need replacing, similar to unscrupulous computer technicians who will charge for software diagnostics of a scratchy-sounding hard drive (clearly, a hardware issue). Unfortunately, there will always be people who use their specialized knowledge to prey on the ignorance of others. ↥︎

  3. The iPad is derided amongst the hacker community for being almost entirely closed-source and proprietary. In theory, open source software can do many of the same things; in practice, this tends not to be the case. John Gruber’s excellent “Ronco Spray-On Usability” article further fleshes out this argument. ↥︎

The New Instapaper Web Beta ⇥ blog.instapaper.com

Betaworks:

When the [Betaworks] team sat down with Instapaper’s creator, Marco Arment, back in April to get a download of his ideas and to-dos for improving Instapaper, the first thing on his list was to update the Instapaper website. Well we’ve done it, and it’s now ready for you to check out and test.

The old Instapaper site was clearly the lowest priority of all of the platforms. This new web experience is sublime.

Secret Court Battles ⇥ wired.com

Kevin Poulsen of Wired, quoting Lavabit’s Ladar Levinson:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. […]

Reading between the lines, it’s reasonable to assume Levison has been fighting either a National Security Letter seeking customer information — which comes by default with a gag order — or a full-blown search or eavesdropping warrant.

I understand the imperative for secrecy when dealing with sensitive national security matters, but this is madness. The NSA is fighting in the dark against people who have only ever worked in darkness, and they’re fighting with crude tools which collect information in the aggregate. And nobody can do anything about it.

Well, except the US president:

“It’s right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “It’s not enough for me, as president, to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well.”

It’s more complex than that — the programs may not target US citizens (though they’re getting caught in the crossfire), but they do target anyone who lives in any other country and has data passing through US networks; owing to the way in which the internet is structured, that applies to nearly everything. It doesn’t matter whether those countries are allies or not, because this whole operation is, scarily enough, legal.

AirPort Extreme ⇥ eggfreckles.net

Thomas Brand:

In the era of Post-PC computing I would like to see an AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule that do more than just desktop backup and wireless networking. A central household cache for iTunes streaming, App Store downloads, and iCloud backups would be a great start. Maybe next year we will see another vertically oriented white box that does just that.

A few months ago, I experimented with putting my iTunes library on a hard drive shared via my AirPort Extreme base station. Whether it was because of the speed of the 802.11n connection, or something else, it was an exercise in patience and frustration. While 802.11ac is much (much) faster than the previous spec, it’s only barely cracking the transfer rate of USB 2.

I desperately want a local cache for things like system updates or for loading an iTunes library wirelessly from anywhere. Imagine the benefits for something like the Apple TV, which doesn’t have much internal storage. Unfortunately, I think such a product will have to wait for the next revision of the 802.11 spec for something like this to be usable.

A New Collaboration with Nine Inch Nails ⇥ blog.momentfactory.com

Cendra Percy of the Moment Factory:

Since 2008, Moment Factory created the visual and interactive content for Nine Inch Nails. For this summer’s tour Moment Factory’s creative team once again closely collaborated with Trent Reznor, lighting designer Roy Bennett and artistic director Rob Sheridan to craft an amazing visual experience to accompany NIN’s intense sonic landscape.

Anil Dash Is, of Course, Wrong ⇥ dashes.com

Anil Dash:

There’s been a delightful debate the last few days about how to accommodate the increasing number of people who want the experience of watching movies in public theaters to fit in with the way they live the rest of their lives: Connected to others, and augmented or even mediated through digital technology.

Interestingly, the response from many creative people, who usually otherwise see themselves as progressive and liberal, has been a textbook case of cultural conservatism. The debate has been dominated by shushers, and these people aren’t just wrong about the way movies are watched in theaters, they’re wrong about the way the world works.

Shushers think water isn’t wet, and that fire isn’t hot. Golly.

This list of responses pops up all the time, whether it’s for arguing why women should not wear pants, or defending slavery, or trying to preserve a single meaning for the word “ironic”, or fighting marriage equality, or claiming rap isn’t “real” music, or in any other time when social conservatives want to be oppressive assholes to other people.

The insistence that we all paid to sit and watch a movie together is compared to slavery literally five paragraphs into this turd of an article.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a way to watch movies in a quiet theater with no other lights or screens on. I think that’s fine. It’d be easier for you to have exactly the hermetically sealed, human-free, psychopathic isolation chamber of cinematic perfection that you seek at home, but if you want to try to achieve this in a public space, please enjoy the Alamo Drafthouse or other excellent theaters designed to accommodate this impulse.

Why don’t you open a movie theatre chain for texting and talking assholes? I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, Anil, but some of us don’t have your kind of coin. Paying fifteen bucks per person for a movie is expensive for a lot of people, so it tends to be a special occasion for them (us). If you’re chatting to your friend in the middle of The Big Plot Twist, we’re going to have problems. I didn’t pay to hear you blab.

The intellectual bankruptcy of this desire is made plain, however, when the persons of shush encounter those who treat a theater like any other public space.

The difference, of course, is that you don’t pay fifteen bucks to sit on a park bench.

Let me put this in terms you can appreciate, Anil: say you’re having dinner at the Savoy, and the table next to you is full of rowdy, spoiled twenty-somethings. They’re not technically doing anything wrong by being loud, obnoxious, and drunk out of their minds, but the Savoy isn’t an Applebees. There are different expectations.

But shushers don’t respond in any of these ways. They say, “We have two different expectations over this public behavior, and mine is the only valid way. First, I will deny that anyone has other norms. Then, when incontrovertibly faced with the reality that these people exist, I will vilify them and denigrate them. Once this tactic proves unpersuasive, I will attempt to marginalize them and shame them into compliance. At no point will I consider finding ways for each of us to accommodate our respective preferences, for mine is the only valid opinion.” This is typically followed by systematically demonstrating all of the most common logical fallacies in the process of denying that others could, in good conscience, arrive at conclusions other than their own.

Logical fallacies like, say, comparing shushers to people who think slavery is okay, or this:

Surely, those who disagree will appeal to tradition, to convention. Like the flat-earthers or the climate change deniers, they’ll wish the strength of their emotion could overcome the inexorability of cold, hard facts.

And the comparison to Indian theatres near the end is simply obtuse.

Lodsys Dismisses Frivolous Lawsuit ⇥ toddmoore.com

Todd Moore’s company won against a patent troll:

The total costs to my company would have been $190,000. And that’s just for the initial response to this lawsuit. We hadn’t even gotten to court which would have increased that amount into millions. Remember that it only cost Lodsys about $450 to file the lawsuit. This is why small businesses will usually always settle. It’s just not worth it to fight. And even if you could win and get awarded your attorneys fees and costs, which are very rare, you probably won’t see a dime of that money.

For some reason, Moore went with the following generous title:

Patent Troll Dismisses Frivolous Lawsuit and then Donates to Charity

I like Marco Arment’s title:

Shell Company Related To Cowardly Patent Troll, Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business After Law Firm Donates Nearly $200,000 Worth Of Defense

Personally, I would have gone with this:

Patent Troll Told to Go Eat a Bag of Dicks

There should be no patience for patent trolls like Lodsys and Intellectual Ventures.

Design With Windows ⇥ thenextweb.com

Ted Goas, The Next Web:

For reasons like these, I keep Windows close throughout my process. It has positive side effects in my everyday workflow, even if I’m developing on a Mac. I design and code defensively. I automatically write CSS that works in old versions Internet Explorer.

This entire article is based on the notion that you’re a web developer creating a website which will be seen by an audience with a browser share mix broadly similar to the worldwide averages.

I can tell you that this assumption is a complete joke.

I know the mix of visitors to this website; for new development projects, I like to find out what their browser share mix is as well. Less than 3% of the visitors to this site in the past week have visited it using IE 6 or 7. More people visited the site with Linux. It simply isn’t worth my time to ensure that this website works fine across every browser, because my audience doesn’t use old-ass versions of Internet Explorer.

Design for the priorities of your audience. Say you were part of the development team behind Quartz, and you were targeting mobile businesspeople (like they were). Would you prioritize testing it in the order of Chrome for desktop, then IE, and then Firefox? No — you’d test first on Safari for iOS and Chrome for Android.

Design and test with the priorities of your audience.

Science Deniers Just Don’t Think ⇥ salon.com

David McRaney, Salon:

The people who came before you invented science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what you experience is terrible. When you believe in something, you rarely seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your assumptions.

Hands On with the LG G2 ⇥ anandtech.com

This seems very much in the vein of Samsung’s Galaxy S4, insomuch as it has a bunch of features that nobody will use. Take, for example, the audio reproduction stack:

LG has made audio in the line-out sense a priority for the G2. We’ve seen a lot of emphasis from other OEMs on speaker quality and stereo sound, with the G2 LG has put time into rewriting part of the ALSA stack and Android framework to support higher sampling and bit depth. The inability of the Android platform to support different sampling rates for different applications remains a big limitation for OEMs, one LG wrote around, and with the G2 up to 24 bit 192 kHz FLAC/WAV playback is supported in the stock player, and LG says it will make an API available for other apps to take advantage of this higher definition audio support to foster a better 24-bit ecosystem on Android.

Sounds great, right? And, as I am a fan of high-quality audio, you would expect I’d be fawning over this.

But music of this resolution simply isn’t widely available. If you listen to a lot of classical and jazz, you have a fair amount of choice. But if you’re a normal person with broader tastes than that, you’ll likely be unable to find your favourite music at that quality. The only choices you’ll have are SA-CDs (which aren’t widely-produced any more) or ripping your own vinyl with an appropriate external audio card. Since the G2 only supports up to 32 GB of internal storage and has no SD card slot, you’ll only be able to fit a few albums on it at a time — Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” is about 150 MB in iTunes’ AAC format, about 250 MB in a 16 bit lossless format, but around 900 MB in 24 bit lossless.

What’s the point of including that feature, aside from checking a box on the spec sheet for something nobody else has? Did LG stop to consider why nobody else has that feature?