True Detective as a seven hour film would be just as amazing as the television show is, but it would be very hard to watch. Attention spans aside, it’s hard to sit through anything for seven hours straight. The genius of True Detective is using the traditional television format of “episodes” to break up the content into easier-to-consume pieces. The sum of those parts is equal to — or perhaps even greater than — the whole if it were one continuous entity.
It’s an interesting point to contemplate, particularly in the wake of the second season of House of Cards, released all on the same day. I didn’t watch all thirteen episodes of the latter on the same day — I spread them over three days — but watching about four hours a day of drama is still overwhelming. True Detective and House of Cards share a high-drama, high-tension format, but the latter’s release format offered viewers the opportunity to overdose on it.
Thomas Beller for the New Yorker (via Jason Kottke):
Listening to the song with my son, I noticed an abandon that was childish in its total commitment. You can hear it in the force with which Grohl hits the drums, in Krist Novoselic’s playing, and, most of all, in the release in Cobain’s voice, which is a somewhere between a wail of despair and a delighted squandering of the moment.
Everything was going along fine in our living room until the song got to the break—the low, murky part—at which point Alexander called out to me, “Daddy! It’s scary!”
Nirvana’s music, in its anguish and energy, is scary. “Nevermind” is scary. But the break in “Drain You” is especially scary. I either had to turn it off or find a way to make this work. I didn’t want to turn it off.
I remember the first time I heard “Drain You”: it wasn’t on Nevermind, but rather the still-totally-killer version from MTV’s “Live and Loud” that I downloaded via some shitty P2P application (in fact, I’m pretty sure the linked copy is exactly the same rip I downloaded). While I prefer In Utero over Nevermind any day, “Drain You” remains one of my all-time favourite songs because of the breakdown Beller references.
One final tidbit about iOS 7.1 (for now): the incoming call screen now shows a small portrait in the upper-right; previously, it was a full screen portrait. Why the change? Well, if you’ve looked at many of the screenshot galleries, you’ve probably noticed that most of them don’t show any portrait at all, because the phone owner hasn’t added photos to their contacts.
Even if you’ve ensured that all of your contacts do have photos, those photos probably don’t have the beautiful focus and smooth depth of field of a stock photo. It’s the same problem that Facebook Home faced: you probably don’t have a lot of professional photographer friends, so most of your friends’ photos probably have lousy lighting and poor focus wrapped in a low-quality image.
This is probably the impetus for the change to the lock screen layout. I have no special insider knowledge or anything, but it seems like the most pragmatic reason.
Steven Troughton-Smith found a way to enable a (very temporary) version of CarPlay in the iOS Simulator in the 7.1 SDK. It’s currently intended only for Apple’s internal use, though, so this isn’t necessarily an indication that CarPlay will be open to third parties.
There’s a rule of thumb — especially in the institutional or corporate IT world — that it’s advisable to wait until the first “point” update or major system pack of an operating system before upgrading. That release typically includes a host of bugfixes, performance improvements, and various refinements. In the case of iOS 7, with its major interface overhaul and app rewrites, this guideline seems especially pertinent. And, indeed, iOS 7.1 includes a bevy of significant improvements.
Left: iOS 7.0; right: iOS 7.1. Hallelujah.
For starters, iOS 7 introduced a bug with the display of italicised 400-weight Helvetica Neue: a noticeably heavier weight was used compared to non-italicised text. As the operator of a website with italicised 400-weight Helvetica Neue, you can imagine how happy I am that this has been fixed, and that I can remove my stupid em{font-family:'Helvetica';}hack.
Most intriguingly, there are a bunch of little graphical changes to the overhauled iOS 7. The design team has furthered their use of circles, with a crazy new phone notification screen, small changes to the phone dialer, and a new shutdown slider. This seems arbitrary at first, but it creates consistency between the buttons in the Phone, especially. These buttons are broadly the same size as the iPhone home button which creates a connection between them all (and remember: the home button on an 5S is flat, too). This continuity between individual applications and between hardware and software has been the goal of iOS 7 since its earliest days.
Then there’s the shift key. Look at the screenshots above, and try to guess which of those shift keys are active, from iOS 6 at the top, through iOS 7.0 in the middle, and iOS 7.1 at the bottom. Would you be surprised if I told you that this wasn’t a trick question, and that the activated shift key screenshot is always in the righthand column?
In iOS 6 and 7, the shift key was outlined in an inactive state, and filled in an active state — iOS 7 simply lost the glow effect. In iOS 7.1, this has been changed to a filled look for both states, and you get to guess each time you glance at your keyboard whether the shift key is active or not. The only reason I can think of for this to be changed would be for those with vision problems who can’t see the thin outline of prior keys. Improvements for accessibility reasons are fine, but this is confusing for — and I may be overreaching here — everyone. While I’ve supported many of the changes made in iOS 7, this is a huge step in the wrong direction. At least it’s not as bad as it was in the third beta.
Accessibility options, as a whole, have also been improved in this release. The parallax effect can now be turned off for wallpapers, and you can now enable shapes around buttons. The latter is clearly a feature designed for people who need it, not those who are miserable with the way iOS 7 looks. There’s also a new view in the Calendar app, but you should probably use Fantastical instead — it’s just better. Serenity Caldwell, Dan Moren, and Dan Frakes of Macworld have published a full rundown, if that’s more your speed.
There are some really tiny changes, too. The systemwide light grey has been tweaked to a more grey-blue, which looks far better. The green gradient for Phone, Messages, and FaceTime has changed from lime-like to a more leafy colour. The paging dots on the Springboard are now, blessedly, centred.
I’ve heard that 7.1 runs way faster on an iPhone 4, and it seems way more stable on iPads and 64-bit systems, like my Retina iPad Mini. Animations are generally faster, though I suspect that’s not a code optimization thing but rather a simple duration change. And, of course, there’s the usual slew of security refinements.
I’ve been using the betas of 7.1 since November which, incidentally, was a mistake for the first couple of releases. The changes are subtle and relatively minor, but when I used a friend’s iOS 7.0.x phone recently, I realized how significant these improvements feel. From the faster animations to the slight tweaks, I’m very impressed with the progress that has been made. If you have an iPhone 5S or 4 or any iPad, and you’ve waited to update until the bugs get worked out, I think you’ll be happy with the stability of 7.1. If you’re already running 7.0 on any product, this release makes it that much better.
Of course, if you hated iOS 7’s aesthetic from the start, this won’t interest you in the slightest. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes reported on data brokers like Acxiom and Epsilon. Nobody at Acxiom would talk to him for the report, but Epsilon did, and it’s a load of horse shit:
Bryan Kennedy is chairman and CEO of Epsilon, which claim to have “the world’s largest cooperative database” including more than 8 billion consumer transactions, combined with an extensive network of online sources. He doesn’t like the term “data broker,” and says Epsilon is a marketing firm that uses data.
Steve Kroft: Can I go on your website and see everything you have about me?
Bryan Kennedy: You can go on our website today and we offer a method by which we can show you the kind of information that we have about you.
Indeed, they do. The process requires you to fill in a form and mail it with a blank, void cheque for verification, requiring a separate form for each name combination you may have (for example, if you go by your maiden name and your marital name separately).
There is no way to do this via the internet because Epsilon believes that “more consumers will have an opportunity to make a/this Marketing Data Summary request”, which is a crock of shit.
Steve Kroft: You’re saying that any kind of regulation on this could cripple the economy?
Bryan Kennedy: I am.
Steve Kroft: And this should be left to industry groups? To self-enforce?
Bryan Kennedy: We think that self-regulation has been very effective. What we’re hearing today is a lot of discussion in Washington. We’re not hearing a lot of discussion, frankly, from consumers. It’s one of the odd things. So, consumers are rushing to the Internet to provide more information about themselves than, you know, we would’ve ever imagined.
Steve Kroft: That surprise you?
Bryan Kennedy: It does surprise me. I don’t do it myself. I’m a consumer, like, like you are.
This is the crucial point of Kroft and Kennedy’s exchange because it’s the most revealing about Kennedy’s habits and what he thinks of his own industry. Kennedy himself points out that more people are handing over more information than ever. Let’s assume Kennedy is of average suspicion of corporate interests — a charitable assumption, I think, given his attitude towards self-regulation. As the CEO of a data brokerage firm, he’s fully aware of the ways his data is being used and has taken steps to limit it. Does he really think consumers are cognizant of how much of their information is being collected and how it is being used?
Meanwhile, self-regulation doesn’t work in cases where it is against the interests of the industry. The less aware consumers are of how their information is being used, the more information they’ll willingly provide and the better the industry will do. Conversely, if consumers were made more aware of how much information is being collected and how it is used, the industry would suffer.
Of course, Kennedy couldn’t really say any of this. Epsilon is part of the crazy huge Alliance Data company, and is publicly traded. Admitting that the industry needs regulation would send the stock tanking. Yet, for all of the flack 60 Minutes deservedly received for their atrocious NSA/Snowden story, this marks a significant improvement for them. Hopefully, this report will make consumers more aware of this industry.
I’m sure the sort who will pay €700 for an 11 cm spherical crystal or $695 for a USB cable would love to pay $400 for a music player that is conceptually broken. Selling audio woo to the gullible is easy.
If you’re looking for a moderately educational way to waste away a weekend, you could do a lot worse than playing a few games of GeoGuessr. For those uninitiated, the premise is very simple: you are presented with a Street View of somewhere in the world, and you have to guess on a map where this is in the world. There are five rounds in a game, and you receive more points the closer your guess is to the actual location.
As far as I can figure out, GeoGuessr has no official rules. These are mine.
You can take as long as you feel like on each location.
You can move around as much as you like.
You must discern everything about where you are based on what you see via the Street View area. You cannot use any outside resources — no Google, no texting your Russian friend for a translation.
If you’ve figured out what city or town you’re in or near, you may search that online to get a rough idea of where in the country you are. I find this helps speed up needless wandering through Poland or Northern Canada.
Those are the rules I play by. I find they keep the game challenging while remaining playable.
For a more difficult game, you can toss in these rules, too:
Each round has a set time limit of one, five, or ten minutes.
You cannot move around in the Street View. You may use the zoom control, but nothing else.
Finally, here are a few tips:
Pay attention to your compass.
Most of Northern Europe has similar looking highways.
If it looks like sub-Saharan Africa, it’s probably Western Australia.
If it looks vaguely Central or South American, it’s probably somewhere in Brazil.
If it looks sparse but still treed, it’s probably the Yukon.
If the signs are Cyrillic, it’s likely in the Westernmost third of Russia.
Pay attention to the text on the sides of commercial vans and trucks.
Pay attention to the scale of the map.
This game has been out for a year, but it’s still as much a challenging timesink as it ever has been.
[T]he responsible thing to do, from Newsweek’s perspective, would have been to present a thesis, rather than a fact. For instance, when Ted Nelson attempted to reveal Satoshi’s identity last May, he put together a video where he put forward a theory which he said was “consistent, plausible, and, I believe, compelling”. He then took a step back, and let the bitcoin community more generally come to their own conclusions about whether or not to believe him; in the end, they (generally) didn’t.
Newsweekcould have done that. It could have said “here’s a theory”, and then let the world decide. Many people would have believed the theory; others wouldn’t. And lots of us would probably have changed our minds a few times as we weighed the evidence and as Dorian’s own words came out.
But Newsweek didn’t want a theory, it wanted a scoop. And so, faced with what was ultimately only circumstantial evidence, it went ahead and claimed that it had uncovered Satoshi — that, basically, it was 100% certain.
For their part, Newsweek is standing by their story, while the Associated Press is confident in Satoshi’s denial. The dust hasn’t settled on this chaos yet, but, so far, it looks like Newsweek made some guy in Los Angeles hounded and miserable.
On Friday, antivirus software company Avast announced it has detected another bad app(le): Cámara Visión Nocturna, a night-vision video recording app that has been snooping on users’ address books, scraping phone numbers, and automatically signing them up for a paid messaging service.
Softpedia notes that this app was installed by 10,000–50,000 users. Not only that, but it’s a fakey night vision app which includes Play Store screenshots showing a woman in a shower. How fucking creepy is that?
Great profile of AeroPress and Aerobie frisbee inventor Alan Adler by Zachary Crockett (via Shawn Blanc):
After a few weeks in his garage, he’d already created a prototype: a plastic tube that used plunger-like action to compress the flavors quickly out of the grounds. He brewed his first cup with the invention, and knew he’d made something special. Immediately, he called his business manager Alex Tennant.
Tennant tasted the brew, and stepped back. “Alan,” he said, “I can sell a ton of these.”
For all its brilliance, it’s really quite a simple product. It has no mechanically moving parts, and the only things which will likely require replacement are the filters, and the rubber plunger end (after a long time). It’s an inexpensive little thing which allows virtually anyone to brew a fantastic cup of coffee. It’s how I start my day, every day.
Speaking of CarPlay, Wes Miller has a question (sic):
It is yet another Apple walled garden (like Apple TV, or iOS as a whole). Apple controls the UI of CarPlay, how it works, and what apps and content are or are not available. Just like Apple TV is at present. The fact that it is not an open platform or open spec also bothers some.
I’m not really bothered by the lack of an open spec, but the extent of third party support is a giant question mark right now. It appears that the auto manufacturer gets an app for various car controls, if they so choose, and a few select third parties also have support.
But are these simply built for another target platform — that is, an iPhone, iPad, and CarPlay universal app — or are they separate apps? Is the development process like that for the Apple TV, where Apple provides a comprehensive framework and it’s simply “skinned” by the third party, or is it a blank slate? Hopefully some internet sleuths can answer all the questions I, and others, have about this.
I’m not surprised: their actual CarPlay implementation looks like a cheap aftermarket accessory as it is. Remember when Mercedes was a synonym for quality and luxury?
The whole point of iCloud backups is to be easy enough for anyone and everyone to use them. They’re supposed to just work. However, Apple only provides 5GB of storage space for free. Granted, Apple doesn’t count some things, like apps, iTunes media, and Photo Stream against that storage allotment, but 5GB is still far below most peoples’ needs, and far less than what Apple’s competitors have recently been offering. What’s worse, even if you’re willing to pay extra the highest you can go is $100 for 50GB. That’s despite Apple selling devices that hold 16, 32, 64, and even 128GB of data. You literally cannot even pay to get enough storage to back up a single device much less multiple devices.
Even if Apple wasn’t able to provide free iCloud backups for every iOS device they sell — and I think that would be a huge boon — they should at least offer enough space for backups of 64 and 128 GB devices.
Watts Martin, on the bug in GnuTLS which is equal to or perhaps worse than Apple’s “goto fail” bug:
[S]oftware with few users tends to stagnate; software that becomes popular tends to keep being developed. This holds true regardless of the license and access to the source code. There are a lot of fossilized open source projects out there, and a lot of commercial products with vibrant communities. Being open source helps create such communities for certain kinds of applications (mostly developer tools), but it’s neither necessary nor, in and of itself, sufficient. And no one—not even the most passionate open source developer—ever says something like, “You know what I’d like to do tonight? Give GnuTLS a code security audit.”
The theory behind open source is that publicly-visible code ensures errors in it are also visible publicly, therefore they should be fixed faster. The reality is less encouraging.
A couple of days ago, John Gruber linked to this article from Zach Holman, reflecting on some of the crazy hacks web designers and developers had to resort to in order to have a modicum of control over the end layout of a page. Jason Kottke picked this up and added some information about the creator of the 1 × 1 pixel transparent GIF hack, David Siegel. He also linked to Siegel’s tips page circa 1997.
There’s the comically bad “Web Wonk” WordArt at the top of the page, and the banner ad asking “Are you an HTML terrorist?”. Buried in that list, though, is the famous “Single-Pixel GIF Trick” article:
HTML is a markup language, not a layout language. It isn’t meant to present a picture to the viewer. It isn’t meant to be easy to read. It is meant to be accessible. Aesthetics are not a consideration. But there are people who would like to communicate more clearly and effectively, and for us HTML is very primitive. We don’t need on-screen PostScript, what we need is a more visual flavor of HTML.
Until then, we have workarounds. My biggest workaround is the single-pixel clear GIF, which I use for spacing accurately around the page.
Designers like to talk about affordances, the property of an object that encourages a specific kind of action. Levers afford pulling, knobs afford twisting, buttons afford pushing, and so on. […]
What makes the iPad stand out from other tablet computers, and what makes it so much more appealing, is that it was designed with intimacy in mind. And I think we’re just on the cusp of discovering how that intimacy affords different kinds of behaviors, different kinds of creativity and productivity.
I’ve been reading and re-reading this piece since it was published yesterday, and I’ve been struggling to think of anything more to say. McGinley Myers nailed this one.
Kevin Roose, in a fantastic article for New York Magazine comparing the community around Bitcoin to the Seekers cult:
The uncomfortable fact for Bitcoin believers is that every major prediction they’ve made has yet to come true. And as time passes and the inevitable fizzle-out of Bitcoin becomes visible, those believers will splinter. More will drop out of the cult. And the ones who remain will only grow more convinced, more zealous, more eager to share the good news.
After all, the difference between the Seekers’ apocalyptic prediction and the Bitcoin dream is that the latter can self-fulfill. The nature of a speculative commodity like Bitcoin is that it essentially runs on hope – the more people who buy the hype, the higher the value goes, and the more firms like Andreessen Horowitz are willing to pump money into strengthening the Bitcoin ecosystem.