Month: December 2014

Shy ⇥ usatoday.com

Jessica Guynn, USA Today:

American companies collect and report information about their workforces to the federal government each year in a form called the EEO-1.

The EEO-1 is a standard form that breaks down race, ethnicity and gender of workforces by job classification.

Facebook, eBay, Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are among the technology companies that have made public their EEO-1s.

[…]

Chief among the companies that decided not to disclose their EEO-1s were Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.

Every company’s already-disclosed diversity figures are already so bad that I’m not certain why they’d be so shy about their EEO-1s.

Untransmitted

Cabel Sasser of Panic has written a short post officially announcing that Transmit for iOS is dropping support for send-to-iCloud Drive, and, collaterally, send-to-several-other-services-on-the-same-sheet. The gold is in the comments, though; an addendum of sorts from Sasser:

Speaking for myself: when we get a call from the App Review Bad News Guy — a very nice guy with a very terrible job — we know we’re in for a difficult few weeks. We haven’t shared, and likely never will share, most of those stories. To be clear, we always work all of the angles available to us to keep our software great, and there’s no doubt there are countless great people at Apple who are doing wonderful work and want the best for all developers. But we have to remember Apple is now a massive organization with countless divisions — the App Review team isn’t even in Cupertino, for example — and sometimes that means the wheels turn slowly or the car, well, drives backwards. It’s hard to describe the legitimate emotional toll we feel when we’re angry or frustrated with a company we love so deeply. But then we realize it’s never Apple we’re frustrated with. It’s always the App Store.

Apple is a fucking massive company; internally, though, it’s been famously described as “the world’s biggest startup”. I don’t think it’s naïvety but rather a sense of optimism that has kept it humming as a gigantic startup, but the widening gap between that and the giant company that it is has become most apparent to developers through the App Stores.

There doesn’t appear to be a common understanding of what rules the app reviewers should be focusing on, or even what rules exist — as far as I can tell, there’s no written rule that prohibits what Transmit was doing here. The lack of consistency is especially frustrating for developers. They become increasingly unsure of how much effort they should invest in features that shouldn’t be controversial. They don’t know if they’re the next ones to be rejected for some feature while dozens of other apps remain on sale with a similar feature.

In this particular case, I don’t understand what Apple gains by having Panic remove their export to iCloud Drive feature. I don’t understand what Apple or their users would lose — financially, morally, ethically, or in any other way — by allowing Transmit to retain this feature. If anything, this entices people to use iCloud Drive.

Meanwhile, there remain apps available in the Store that continue to push out notification spam or have atrocious user interfaces, both of which are explicitly prohibited by the review guidelines.1 Both of these rule violations directly impact users’ experience with the platform, yet issues of this nature are not treated nearly as seriously. Why, for example, is there no way to report apps that send excessive or spam notifications?

We all want Apple to do better here. It’s not about the (bloody) ROI, nor should it be. It’s just an issue of user and developer satisfaction, both of which are being toyed with in inconsistent and frustrating ways. That’s it.

And am I the only one who wishes for a book of stories from development hell?

  1. “5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind,” and “10.6 Apple and our customers place a high value on simple, refined, creative, well thought through interfaces. They take more work but are worth it. Apple sets a high bar. If your user interface is complex or less than very good, it may be rejected”. And, arguably, “If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour”. ↥︎

Profound Stupidity, Round Three ⇥ twitter.com

Apple’s war on developers putting to use the new APIs in iOS 8 continues. Transmit for iOS doesn’t have a Notification Centre widget, but it does have a ridiculously powerful Share sheet extension. Or, well, did, because Apple has decided to neuter it by removing its send-to-iCloud Drive functionality.

The thing that PCalc, Drafts, and Transmit all have in common is that they’re power user tools. I’d wager heavily that their users are more likely to be longtime Apple supporters and very tech savvy. Never mind the silliness of going after developers who actually use the new APIs; the stupidity of taking on software used by Apple’s most ardent supporters is baffling to me.

…And Then It Got Weird ⇥ bits.blogs.nytimes.com

That iTunes/iPod/DRM/RealPlayer/blast-from-the-past lawsuit that’s been going on seemingly since the dawn of consumer technology? Yeah, it just got weird. Brian X. Chen, New York Times:

The class action seeks damages for iPods bought from September 2006 to March 2009. Apple said it checked the serial number of Ms. Rosen’s iPod Touch and found that it was bought in July 2009, months after the class period ended.

Apple’s lawyers also said the company could not verify purchases of other iPods that Ms. Rosen said she had bought, including an iPod Nano in the fall of 2007. Apple lawyers said they had requested proof from Ms. Rosen’s lawyers of her purchases.

Apple also said it had asked the plaintiffs’ lawyers for proof of any purchases of iPods by the other plaintiff in the case, Melanie Tucker of North Carolina. Apple said it verified that an iPod Touch was purchased by Ms. Tucker in August 2010, also outside the class period. In her testimony, Ms. Tucker said she bought an iPod in April 2005.

The judge overseeing the case, Yvonne Gonzales Rogers, said she was concerned about the potential issues presented by the letter. “I am concerned that I don’t have a plaintiff,” she said. “That’s a problem.”

Deleting the Evidence ⇥ blogs.wsj.com

Jeff Elder, Wall Street Journal:

When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user’s iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings, [attorney Patrick Coughlin] said. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear, he said.

Apple directed the system “not to tell users the problem,” Coughlin said.

This is yet another example of the plaintiffs in this case confusing various computer terminology. In this case, it was an iPod software update with a revised version of FairPlay. And Apple did warn users what would happen, in broad strokes:

We strongly caution Real and their customers that when we update our iPod software from time to time it is highly likely that Real’s Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods.

I’m a generally optimistic guy, so I’m a pretty big believer in Hanlon’s razor. I’d like to believe that the reason Apple didn’t tell users specifically what was going on was due to the kind of confusion that this trial has created. People don’t understand the difference between DRM formats, or even the fact that an audio file has DRM. So Apple not explicitly telling users that they’re updating the iPod to ensure the security of their own FairPlay DRM — and that this will remove songs with unlicensed or hacked versions of FairPlay — is likely borne from simplicity, not malice.

SPECTRE ⇥ esquire.com

When the Kevin McClory suit was settled last year, I got so thrilled for the prospect of bringing back the best and baddest villains in the Bond franchise, and back they are. Pair SPECTRE with a brilliant cast and crew and I’m so entirely excited for November 2015.

I’m also digging the teaser poster, with a bullet hole somewhat reminiscent of SPECTRE’s logo. Nice.

“I Can’t Breathe” ⇥ nytimes.com

Charles M. Blow, New York Times:

At some point between the moment a Missouri grand jury refused to indict a police officer who had shot and killed Michael Brown on a Ferguson street and the moment a New York grand jury refused to indict a police officer who choked and killed Eric Garner on a Staten Island sidewalk — on video, as he struggled to utter the words, “I can’t breathe!” — a counternarrative to this nation’s calls for change has taken shape.

The argument is that this is not a perfect case, because Brown — and, one would assume, now Garner — isn’t a perfect victim and the protesters haven’t all been perfectly civil, so therefore any movement to counter black oppression that flows from the case is inherently flawed. But this is ridiculous and reductive, because it fails to acknowledge that the whole system is imperfect and rife with flaws. We don’t need to identify angels and demons to understand that inequity is hell.

The iPod/DRM/iTunes/Holy-Shit-It’s-December-2014 Trial Begins ⇥ reuters.com

Dan Levine, Reuters:

Opening statements began on Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court in the long-running class action, which harks back to Apple’s pre-iPhone era. The plaintiffs, a group of individuals and businesses who purchased iPods from 2006 to 2009, are seeking about $350 million in damages from Apple for unfairly blocking competing device makers. That amount would be automatically tripled under antitrust laws.

Levine’s description of the suit is a bit off. Even the description in the lawsuit itself (PDF) is wrong:

In July 2004, an Apple competitor in the online music market, third party Real Networks (“Real”), introduced a new version of its own digital-song manager, RealPlayer. RealPlayer included a feature called Harmony. Harmony made songs downloaded from Real’s online music store mimic FairPlay, and thus made music purchased from Real playable on iPods.

Music wasn’t required to use FairPlay to play on iPods; non-FairPlay AAC and MP3 files play just fine on any iPod.

Levine, again:

In July 2004, Jobs wrote to other Apple executives with a suggested press release about Real Networks.

“How’s this?” Jobs wrote. “‘We are stunned that Real is adopting the tactics and ethics of a hacker and breaking into the iPod.'”

“I like likening them to hackers,” Apple marketing chief Philip Schiller responded.

During his 2011 deposition, Jobs displayed some of the edge he was known for, according to a transcript filed in court. Asked if he was familiar with Real Networks, Jobs replied: “Do they still exist?”

I don’t understand how this suit still exists.

Apple Tells ‘Drafts’ to Remove Note Creation Feature in its Notification Centre Widget ⇥ macrumors.com

iOS 8 feels very similar to iPhone OS 2: there are a lot of new developer goodies to play with, and apps are being rejected for seemingly random reasons from a frustratingly inconsistent rulebook. It’s not like Agile Tortoise took a big risk by putting a shortcut button in Notification Centre; there were plenty of apps already in the Store that had similar functionality before Drafts 4 was released. Yet it’s the one that’s being restricted over two months after its release for a rule that doesn’t even exist.

Profoundly stupid, take two.

I Dot Me Cloud Drive ⇥ leancrew.com

Dr. Drang:

Then came MobileMe. It was introduced with the iPhone 3G, just before Apple’s internet-connected user base was about to shoot through the roof. MobileMe will forever be remembered as the reason Steve Jobs called a special company meeting to ask two questions:

  1. “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”

  2. “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

The phrase “MobileMe” in the Jobs quote above could easily be replaced with any one of Apple’s cloud services, though at a blessedly decreasing rate. I’d wager that it’s an asymptote; whatever Apple calls their cloud service, it will never, ever reach the point of expected reliability. Part of this is because Apple is ambitious, and wants to replace most of their existing web services in one fell swoop. This is made extra complicated because as soon as the service is released, there will be tens of millions of people trying to use it immediately. But that’s really hard to see as an excuse in 2014.