Month: July 2015

Left and Leaving ⇥ brooklynvegan.com

I’ve been fearing this day for a while now, and it’s arrived. The Weakerthans are over. Drummer Jason Tait:

Word is getting out that The Weakerthans are done. Here’s the song we used to take the stage to for years. Bye bye.

I’ve liked a lot of bands and artists over the years, and listened to a shitload more, but the Weakerthans have stuck by my side for everything. I’ve seen them live four or five times, the last time being a few years ago, and hearing the double snare hit at the beginning of “Psalm for the Elk’s Lodge Last Call” still gives me chills. For my money, they are the best band Canada has ever created. I will greatly miss seeing them live.

They’re on Apple Music, if you have no idea what this post is all about. I’m sure you’ll find something you like, though my recommendations are the aforementioned “Psalm”, “This is a Fire Door”, “Leash”, “Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist”, and this post’s title, “Left and Leaving”.

The World’s Biggest Startups Are Growing Up ⇥ wsj.com

In business terms, if not in behaviour. Alistair Barr, for the Wall Street Journal:

With revenue growth ebbing, profit margins shrinking and shares flat, Google is curbing hiring and seeking ways to run its sprawling empire more efficiently, according to recruiters, venture capitalists and others familiar with the matter.

[…]

For many years, Google teams assumed they could add staff each year. Now, Google executives are selecting which groups can hire, based on the company’s strategic priorities. Since late last year, many Google teams have had to submit plans describing how additional employees will produce specific business objectives, such as increased revenue or more users.

For example, Google last year capped hiring at the struggling Google+ social-media division, while the Nest connected-home unit was given more leeway to grow, according to people familiar with the changes.

Graham Lee quoting John Gruber (via Michael Tsai):

At just 20 percent of unit sales, Apple isn’t even close to a monopoly. At 92 percent profit share, they have a market dominance that rivals any actual monopoly the tech industry has ever seen. We don’t even have a term for this situation, it’s so unusual.

[…]

The thing it’s important to remember about monopolies or monopsonies is that they are not inherently bad: badness happens when an entity uses its dominant position in a market to set prices or other terms that are not considered fair, and that’s a pretty woolly situation. When the one buyer in your market decides that your contribution is “amateur hour” (sucks to be a hobbyist, I guess), or that your content is “over the line”, and doesn’t want to buy your product, you have no other vendors to sell it to: is that fair?

These companies aren’t little any more. They’re huge, and have the kind of influence over our lives that their market cap implies. Sometimes, though, we forget that. Whether that’s because they both project an image of friendly youthfulness or because the law is having a hard time keeping up with rapidly-changing technology, I’m not sure. It sure is interesting to watch this era take shape.

It’s Time for Flash to Die ⇥ hotforsecurity.com

Graham Culey:

If Adobe Flash is ever going to be kicked to the kerb (as it seems it should be) then a date clearly needs to be declared to drive the push to a Flash-free world. It’s not just important for browsers, of course, but also for companies whose websites and in-house applications might rely heavily on the technology.

The problem is that perhaps Adobe doesn’t feel happy acknowledging that securing Flash is beyond them, and so is unwilling to drop the product. The truth is that the company would probably gain a lot more respect from the internet community if it worked towards this ultimate fix for the Flash problem, rather than clinging on to the belief that it might be able to one day make Flash secure.

It’s long past time for Flash to die. To begin with, Google should stop bundling such an enormous security hole into Chrome, which has been the world’s most popular web browser for a while now. If they were to do this publicly, with some fanfare, Adobe would likely feel compelled to respond. And there’s no way they’ll actually secure Flash.

News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever ⇥ mondaynote.com

Frédéric Filloux:

Two major industry trends should force us to reconsider the way we build our digital properties. The first one is the rise of ad blockers that pride themselves at providing faster navigation and at putting less strain on computers. Users made publishers pay the hard price for giving up browsing comfort and speed: in some markets, more than 50% of visitors use ad-blocking extensions.

The second trend is the rise of mobile surfing that account for half of pageviews in mature markets. And, in emerging countries, users leapfrog desktops and access the web en masse through mobile.

Interestingly, because of the way AdBlock is built and the number of iframes that are on popular websites, AdBlock often slows down browsers, though Filloux found otherwise. Apple’s new integrated content blocker doesn’t have this issue. But that’s something of an aside.

As much as I complain about JavaScript trackers and the like slowing the web down, I can’t help but think that part of the problem with news sites, specifically, is the number of them that try to bring the print experience online. Web fonts are slow to render, but really popular, especially with news sites. The same goes for very complex dynamic layouts. News sites seem to take the slowest elements of the web and bundle them together into one tedious package.

A Watch Expert Reviews All of the Apple Watch Bands ⇥ watchaware.com

I’ve been using the 38mm Sport with a Classic Leather Buckle for a while now. While the white Sport Band that came with it is comfortable, it’s fairly informal. The combo I’ve settled on looks great, and it’s the lightest-weight combination you can make.1 That Ariel Adams agrees that these are two great band options is relieving to hear, particularly when there’s considerable choice.

One thing that struck me when I my Classic Leather was its edges and sides. Watch the linked video closely or check out the photos and notice how the sides are smoothly cut and sealed, with crisp edges. There’s something about it that looks artificial, but Adams says that this is an indication of better construction, and not cheapness. A lot of the tech review sites are adamant that Apple’s watch bands are of a lower quality, but appearances are deceiving. Apple isn’t kidding around when they say these are really great straps; Adams seems impressed, at any rate.

  1. The watch I was wearing previously was made of titanium, so increased weight is noticeable. ↥︎

iTunes 12.2.1 ⇥ support.apple.com

It includes a fix for a crappy situation in which iTunes Match (read: DRM-free) songs were swapped for Apple Music (read: DRM’d) songs. Jeremy Horwitz over at 9to5Mac explains the delicate procedure for remedying this, if you were affected:

If you want to restore a downloaded, Apple Music DRM’ed track to normal, DON’T just delete the DRM’ed version of the song from your iTunes library. Try to do this, and the dialog box above will pop up. Hitting return or the blue-highlighted button will obliterate the track from both your library and Apple’s servers, such that you might not be able to get the track back.

Instead, Apple says, you should control-click and choose “Remove Download” for all tracks that were incorrectly downloaded as Apple Music. Then control-click again and choose “Make Available Offline” to re-download them correctly, without DRM.

Let me get this straight: the bug could taint portions of a local library with DRM, and the removal procedure requires exact steps that are counter to what you may be expecting, and that following the steps you may expect instead will nuke the track almost entirely unless you use another workaround explained by Horwitz in his post? This isn’t acceptable at all.

Authors and Booksellers Accuse Amazon of Antitrust Violations ⇥ nytimes.com

David Streitfeld, New York Times:

The Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives and Authors United said in letters and statements being sent this week to the Justice Department that “Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.”

[…]

Among the destructive practices cited by the critics was Amazon’s appearing last year to engage in content control, “selling some books but not others based on the author’s prominence or the book’s political leanings”; selling some books below cost as loss leaders to drive less well-capitalized retailers — like Borders — out of business; and blocking and curtailing the sale of “millions of books by thousands of authors” to pressure publishers for better deals.

If these accusations are investigated and, ultimately, proven, this seems pretty straightforward. There’s nothing about these allegations that are the result of Amazon being a web-based business; it’s an old-fashioned abuse of power. That is, if these allegations are true.

FTC Looking Into Apple’s Cut of Competitors’ Music Streaming Subscriptions Sold Through the App Store ⇥ reuters.com

Diane Bartz and Julia Love of Reuters:

Apple recently launched a new music streaming service, Apple Music. It also provides the App Store platform for competing streaming services including Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody and others.

Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all in-app purchases for digital goods, such as music streaming subscriptions and games, sold on its platform.

While $9.99 has emerged as the going monthly rate for music subscriptions, including Apple’s, some streaming companies complain that Apple’s cut forces them to either charge more in the App Store than they do on other platforms or erode their profit margins.

I don’t know what the law is around this sort of behaviour, but it illustrates how murky it is, and how the legal system isn’t keeping up with rapid advances in technology. The closest analogy I can think of are supermarket house brands, but those are physical goods subject to vastly different regulation than electronic communications.

Reddit Is Not the Front Page of the Internet ⇥ thedailybeast.com

Samantha Allen, the Daily Beast:

But Reddit became a web destination and a traffic powerhouse by virtue of the clicking, viewing, and typing habits of a relatively narrow subsection of Internet users. Seventy-four percent of Reddit users are men, the highest of any social networking website. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all come much closer to gender parity. Describing Reddit without making reference to its gender asymmetry is akin to reporting on Pinterest, which is 72 percent female, without noting that the site caters to women.

And, indeed, when The New York Times reviewed Pinterest in 2012, they rightly referred to it as “female-oriented,” but when the CEO of a 74 percent male social network resigns after facing intense criticism from its users—much of it laced with misogyny—they somehow forget to label Reddit, in turn, as “male-oriented.” Reddit too often passes in the media as unmarked and neutral territory while sites like Pinterest get pigeonholed as girly.

I used to browse a few specific subreddits occasionally — Panic History is pretty funny — but either it became far more hostile, or I began to notice far more hostility. In either case, the site is a cesspool of the worst kinds of human beings (read: men) with internet access on the planet, and it’s outrageous and presumptuous for them to think they are the “front page of the internet”.

On Negative App Store Reviews During Betas of iOS and OS X ⇥ macstories.net

Nobody who actually needs this reminder will see this great article from Federico Viticci:

We all have to keep in mind, though, that developers get the short end of the stick here. When it comes to App Store reviews that point out issues on betas of iOS and OS X, there is nothing they can do. They can’t respond to them, they can’t release compatiblity and feature updates for public betas, and yet they’re left dealing with the outcome of negative reviews. These are smart folks, and they know that their apps have issues on beta versions of iOS and OS X. Not only it’s not useful to leave negative reviews for those problems now – it’s not fair to developers.

This is the first year that Apple has offered a public beta of iOS which is, by far, their most popular platform. I have long argued that they should be blocking reviews written from iOS developer betas, and I think it’s ridiculous that they’re not doing it for the public beta. No, it’s not going to stop a determined jackass from being a jackass, but it will prevent people casually leaving one star reviews for apps that don’t behave correctly in the beta.

The Tidal Lie ⇥ theverge.com

The Verge’s Chris Ziegler on June 23:

Lossless streaming isn’t a gimmick. In fact, it’s the opposite: streaming services can’t entirely obviate owned music without it. Average-quality streams are great for the bulk of the market, but hardcore music lovers will absolutely pay a little more for something that sounds noticeably better. (I’m one of them.)

The Verge’s Chris Ziegler on July 7:

But what does this all actually mean in the real world? We wanted to find out, so we put a bunch of Vox Media staff in front of the camera for a blind test between Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music.

[…]

The results were very, very surprising to me. It was generally random across the board, though Spotify fared slightly worse than Apple Music and Tidal overall. In roughly 29 percent of the tests, subjects couldn’t tell any notable difference at all. Tidal — which wants you to pay more for lossless quality — most definitely didn’t take the crown, and in several cases, subjects actually identified it as the worst-sounding of the three.

Marco Arment reacted:

If you need to try really hard to identify whether there’s any difference at all, it probably doesn’t matter.

Invest your energy and money in what matters so clearly and obviously that nobody needs to strain to hear the difference: great headphones or speakers fed by great recordings of great music.

Yep.

Using San Francisco in HTML and CSS ⇥ furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry:

As a developer, there are often cases where we need to use the system font on web pages. Many times these pages are embedded in our apps and manage things like remote settings or documentation. In these contexts, matching the content to what the customer sees in their surrounding environment makes a big impact on the user experience. Think about how out of place an app feels when it displays Sparkle release notes in Lucida Grande while running on Yosemite.

We’ll soon be faced with a lot of surrounding content that’s displayed in San Francisco and will need ways to specify that same font in our CSS. It turns out that’s not a simple thing to do.

Hockenberry has a smart “hybrid” solution. What’s kind of fun about this discovery is how -apple-system-font — the self-descriptive system font declaration — renders on the current OS X/iOS releases. If you open his test page, you can see some subtle differences between Helvetica Neue (the red text) and the system version of Helvetica (the last three examples).

Photos 1.1 ⇥ sixcolors.com

A quick preview from Jason Snell. This is nice to have back:

Yes, in Photos 1.1 you can add a location to an image or batch of images that weren’t geotagged, as well as edit the location of data of already-geotagged images. To do this, you open the Inspector window. A not-yet-geotagged image will offer a section of the window labeled Assign a Location. Clicking in this area will let you enter a street address or a name of a point of interest, and Photos will search Apple’s Maps database. If that location isn’t good enough for you, you can always click on the pin and drag it around the map, placing it wherever you like.

Not only is this the return of a feature I’d been missing, it comes back stronger than ever. This sounds great. Based on what I’ve heard and played with so far, I don’t think that I’m going to fall in love with it yet, in the same way I did with Aperture. But it’s now the primary way I edit my photos, and I like it more each time I use it.

Update: Based on an email from Brian Kimball, I took another look at this functionality and it doesn’t seem to be up to the tasks of power users.

As he pointed out, it relies on the Apple Maps POI database, which can be a crapshoot as we’ve previously discussed. Furthermore, because it relies upon search, it’s incredibly difficult to bulk tag photos in slightly different places – that is, you must tag them all identically, or modify them one at a time, which is tedious.

So, from the perspective of an average user, I maintain that this is stronger than ever. You simply select photos, search for a location, and you’re done. But if you want even slightly more granularity in your workflow, you’re hooped.

Joshua Topolsky Fired From Bloomberg ⇥ politico.com

Dylan Byers, Politico:

In recent weeks, the disagreements between Bloomberg and Topolsky hit a fever pitch, sources there said. This week, Bloomberg finally declared that he no longer wanted to work with Topolsky and demanded that he be moved off the Digital team. Topolsky agreed to leave on Thursday, though he will stay at Bloomberg offices until next week, when the company is expected to make a formal announcement.

Joe Pompeo:

Bloomberg/Micklethwait weren’t down w/ Topolsky/Tyrangiel/Smith’s designy, splashy, photo-driven design for Bloomberg Biz, per my sources.

According to Alexa — so take it with a grain of salt — Bloomberg’s traffic skyrocketed immediately after the launch of the redesign. I’d venture a guess that these new visitors have generally been younger and less traditional. By that measure, it’s been a success, but the makeover received a mixed response:

… a vibrant, responsive design relaunch for Bloomberg Business that pulls you in as much as it spits in your eye.

[…]

Note the pinkish overlays. The strange, overlapping logotype. The pushy, flat hues. This error page. Scroll down and you’ll find a Web 1.0 gradient behind an exposé on the Islamic State.

I don’t understand the redesign, yet I’m oddly drawn to it, and I visit Bloomberg far more now than I ever had previously. But it’s jarring, and it clashes somewhat with the assumed image of a company reporting largely on economics and world politics.

Is that the entire reason for Topolsky’s outing? Probably not, and the company’s framing is pretty odd in that light:

Josh Topolsky is one of the most creative digital journalists that I have met. He has done a wonderful job for us in launching Bloomberg Business — the numbers speak for themselves — and he has remained a consistent innovator.

But:

[Michael] Bloomberg, a notorious micro-manager, had been fighting with Topolsky for months about the direction of the website, which had been relaunched under Topolsky’s leadership in January, company sources said.

Strange.

Unnatracktive ⇥ macworld.com

Glenn Fleishman, for Macworld:

No matter your feelings about ads, it’s reasonable to be worried about and want to block sites that have no business — literally, it’s none of their business — tracking you, and to be angry at those feeding us malicious software and trying to coax our secrets from us. Some balance would be nice. Without it, readers will continue to take matters in their own hands.

The only reason content and ad blockers exist is because web ads and trackers became so pervasive, intrusive, and downright creepy. It took the control away from users and ultimately put it in the hands of advertisers, largely bypassing any control from publishers. Many, like iMore, found themselves fitting with the contextual advertisement status quo. Some found an opportunity to take it into their own hands in a respectable manner; others, like the Next Web, were dicks about it.

The rise of content and ad blockers has required companies to get creative about how they show us ads. Buzzfeed has mastered the art of “native” advertising on the web, but that also kinda sucks for readers because it feels deceptive. The short sponsor posts popular among many sites feel more honest, but they’re straddling a fine line between a clearly-marked sponsor post and a native ad.

It’s a hard question: how do you get paid on the internet in a way that feels respectful to readers? Is it as simple as clearly labelling sponsored content as such? Is there a better way?

Talking About Diversity, as a White Dude ⇥ catehuston.com

Cate Hudson:

Lately I’ve been watching more men give talks about diversity. Personally I’m in favour of this, because 1) If women could fix this, we would have by now – making “diversity” a “woman’s issue” is a way of perpetuating the status quo. And 2) there is clearly a subset of men who won’t listen to women talking about this (or maybe anything), and perhaps they won’t listen to men on this topic either but it’s worth a try.

That being said, I’m seeing some things reoccur and I think they are problematic. So, I offer some suggestions.

Smart caveats for not only talking about diversity, but thinking about it too.

Bad Ads and Content Blockers ⇥ imore.com

If you want a textbook example of an outstanding response to complaints, look no further than Rene Ritchie at iMore. Notice how I didn’t make some snarky reference to how slow it is or how “heavy” it is? They’re working on it:

Ads in and of themselves aren’t bad, and can indeed provide a service where everyone wins, which is why so many sites and so many mediums employ them. But many of the ads—and the services that deliver them—suck. We all know that.

[…]

We—and by “we” I mean the Mobile Nations design and tech teams—have done a lot to streamline the site templates over the last few months. We rolled out new review templates, new article templates, and just last week, a new home page template. All are considerably lighter and faster than anything we’ve ever had before. And it’s something we’re continuing to work on and make even better.

It’s true. The whole team there seems to have been working really hard to make their site way, way better without reducing their ad revenue, and I applaud and thank them for that.

But the fact that anything like this has to be written is a testament to just how shitty advertising is on the internet. Between ad exchanges that run bidding in real time against keywords on the page, to images, movies, and Flash animations, to the tracking scripts that live underneath, there’s far too much going on for any of it to be efficient. Furthermore, it’s detrimental to privacy, and these ads generally feel cheap.

But as Ritchie points out, Mobile Nations can’t run without them:

Mobile Nations is still an independent company, with no media conglomerate or VC funding behind us, and we still have to pay our dozens of writers, videographers, developers, designers, and support staff, and all of our expenses.

While we sell premium ads directly to advertisers, that only fills a small subset of the required “inventory” to support the network. Some 85% of ads we served last month were “programmatic”—provided by ad exchanges like Google Adx and Appnexus. Those exchanges are pretty much black boxes. We get a tag, we insert it, and ads appear.

I’m really impressed with how much they do without additional funding, almost like an old-school media company. They consistently produce some of the best Apple-centric writing on the web. So, this, to Mobile Nations, iMore, and Rene directly: sorry for making you the scapegoat. It’s just that I love the words on the site so much, but hate the underlying foundation. Sometimes I forget that the things I write might actually be read by people.

But iMore, to their credit, are taking care of this. They’re improving, where few others will. I’m not sure what it will take to convince other major sites to take another look at all the advertising and analytics scripts they use, and what impact that has on their page weight, but it’s a start. Maybe content blockers in the most popular mobile web browser will be the spark.

Reading Tea Leaves ⇥ news.microsoft.com

Microsoft announced some big changes to their smartphone hardware business (read: Nokia) today:

Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to restructure the company’s phone hardware business to better focus and align resources. Microsoft also announced the reduction of up to 7,800 positions, primarily in the phone business. As a result, the company will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services (NDS) business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.

[…]

“We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem including our first-party device family,” [CEO Satya Nadella] said. “In the near-term, we’ll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility.”

This is terrible. That’s a lot of lost jobs, and a lot of money Microsoft is spending to get rid of those jobs.

But the media coverage around this has been really interesting because of two things Nadella said: “standalone phone business”, and “first-party device family”. Vanessa Wong of Buzzfeed interpreted this in a fairly straightforward manner:

Microsoft is backing down from its attempt to become a major smartphone maker, saying today that it is moving away from efforts to build “a standalone phone business.”

Read: Microsoft won’t make phones any more.

Michael Calore of Wired read it differently:

Given that Microsoft is dismantling its “stand-alone phone business” (aka Nokia) and focusing instead on a “first-party device family” (aka Surface), it’s reasonable to expect a Surface Phone to show up soon.

Read: Microsoft’s doubling down on its efforts to make smartphones.

Only one of these can really be correct. Either Wong is simplifying the press release, or Calore is reading far too much into it.

“A Technical Glitch” ⇥ nytimes.com

Nathaniel Popper, New York Times:

Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was shut down for hours on Wednesday as the exchange tried to cope with what appeared to be a technical glitch, rather than an attack.

[…]

The first technical problems appeared soon after the opening bell rang at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, when orders for several smaller stocks failed to go through, Mr. Costa and another trader on the floor said.

These systems never go down, so I bet the inside story of this would be relatively mundane, if not for its context. Nevertheless, I’d love to know the technical details on this one.