Month: April 2016

Improving the Apple Watch Through Better Software ⇥ minutestomidnight.net

Tim Schmitz has some terrific suggestions, particularly for the ways in which Apple could improve the “smart” part of smartwatch.

Meanwhile, the hardware “side button” being permanently mapped to Digital Touch features has always seemed awkward, like the Watch’s version of the Zune’s “squirting” feature. It feels like an attempt at trying to grow the user base through exclusivity, but it ends up creating a button on the side that nobody really uses for that purpose.

I still think the Watch needs to be faster, whether through hardware or software, but these suggestions would do the Watch well.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

White House Reportedly Declines to Support Encryption Legislation ⇥ reuters.com

Mark Hosenball and Dustin Volz, Reuters:

The White House is declining to offer public support for draft legislation that would empower judges to require technology companies such as Apple Inc to help law enforcement crack encrypted data, sources familiar with the discussions said.

[…]

The draft legislation from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the Republican chair and top Democrat respectively of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is expected to be introduced as soon as this week.

The bill gives federal judges broad authority to order tech companies to help the government but does not spell out what companies might have to do or the circumstances under which they could be ordered to help, according to sources familiar with the text. It also does not create specific penalties for noncompliance.

This isn’t necessarily as positive or welcoming as you might imagine — the White House certainly hasn’t turned around to become pro-privacy and pro-security overnight. This bill will almost certainly not pass, especially so close to an election and with a deadlocked Congress.

What remains constant is that a precedent appears to have been set by a New York magistrate judge: the All Writs Act was ruled to not be capable of obliging a tech company to provide law enforcement access to encrypted data. The other thing that remains constant is that the FBI has become the new Genius Bar for law enforcement. As Apple will likely be hunting for the bug that enables the FBI’s newfound powers and is constantly improving the security of their products, future cases will likely sway the direction in which the law must go. And you know perfectly well which way I hope the winds blow.

iTunes Metadata Suggests Forthcoming Ability to Hide Stock Apps on iOS ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The additions to the internal API include keys for ‘isFirstParty’ and ‘isFirstPartyHideableApp’. In our testing, we could verify the existence of the boolean fields, but could only ever find them with a false value. This makes sense given that the App Store to date only hosts third-party apps offered as optional downloads. […]

Unfortunately, the iTunes metadata leak cannot reveal any info about how Apple plans to use these keys. Speculating, it could mean that Apple stock apps will start being listed in the App Store. For example, if a user hid the Stocks app but later decided they wanted to restore its position on their Home Screen, they would visit the App Store and re-download the app … mirroring the experience for third-party apps.

Several years ago, Apple began showing built-in apps when searching the App Store for particular keywords. I wouldn’t be surprised if these first-party results were to simply gain a “show” button — or similar — if the app were hidden on the user’s home screen.

Yahoo’s Financials Reveal a Meltdown ⇥ recode.net

Recode’s Kara Swisher got her hands on the financial disclosure “book” — it’s unclear if it’s a physical book, or just a folder full of documents — that Yahoo is distributing to potential buyers, and it reveals a treacherous situation:

In one slide showing expected results from 2016, Yahoo is estimating that revenue is dropping close to 15 percent and earnings by over 20 percent. Those revenues, backing out traffic acquisition costs (TAC), are expected to decline from $4.4 billion in 2014 and $4.1 billion in 2015 — already down from previous years — to $3.5 billion in 2016; meanwhile, earnings before depreciation, taxes and amortization are moving from $1.4 billion in 2014 and just below $1 billion in 2015 to $750 million in 2016.

That’s dire, and a little sad — Yahoo has always been a part of my time on the web, as I’m sure it has yours.

Apparently, there’s hope:

While some are scared by the numbers, everyone I spoke to plans to make a bid of some sort, largely because even as financially precarious as it has become, Yahoo remains one of the biggest properties on the Web and it is hard to be able to buy that kind scale easily.

Their stock price is nowhere near as low as it was after the Dot Com bubble burst, nor is it as bad as it was between 2008 and 2013. These days, they own Flickr and Tumblr, both of which could be exciting for potential buyers. This slow motion car crash never seems to end.

Medium-Sized Publications to Move to Medium ⇥ digiday.com

Lucia Moses writing for Digiday:

Eight small independent sites will fully migrate to Medium Tuesday, including The Awl and The Hairpin, sibling sites of The Billfold, which already migrated over last December; plus Pacific Standard, The Black List and Femsplain. Four others are in the pipeline, including Monday Note and NewCo Shift, a new business media brand from John Battelle’s NewCo. Medium also named several sites that will start putting original content there, including Time Inc.’s Money and Fortune and Atlantic Media’s National Journal.

Medium also is announcing new incentives to entice publishers to get on board by making it easy to migrate to the platform, keep their branding intact and generate revenue through memberships that readers would pay monthly through Medium.

All of those publications — the Awl, Monday Note, the Black List, and others — are leaving their own content management systems, many of which they run themselves, for Medium’s proprietary and controlled platform. I imagine this is bittersweet for them — managing and patching a CMS at a large scale can be a daunting task, and the ongoing expenses can be pretty hard to swallow for the fiscally arid media industry.

In many ways, this is similar to WordPress.com’s VIP offering: a managed, hosted, bulletproof platform for publishers who just want to put up their latest listicles. But, while WordPress VIP allows for significant customization on a per-site basis, Medium does not. If you thought that every media website looked the same before, just wait until you see the updated versions of the Black List, Femsplain, and Pacific Standard. Medium says that they’re giving publishers tools for branding their new sites, but I’m not seeing a lot of variation.

And that’s without getting into the very real issue of control. Both Automattic — which offers WordPress VIP — and Medium are VC-backed and, as far as I can tell, are not yet profitable. Propping the struggling news industry up with the support of completely unprofitable Silicon Valley startups seems like it could wreak havoc in the not-too-distant future. But what do I know? Last year, Pixel Envy turned a profit of — and I’m not making this up — thirty-six dollars and seventeen cents. Canadian.

But that’s still more than Medium makes in a year.

HP Has a New Logo Maybe ⇥ theverge.com

Eight years ago, HP worked with Moving Brands on a handsome new logo, which — sadly — ended up not being used.

Until now, that is. They just launched a laptop named after a ruthless fictional criminal enterprise and have splashed that redesigned logo all over it. And I think it looks terrific. Unfortunately:

HP says it’ll be using this logo solely on its premium laptops.

This raises more questions than it answers. What defines a “premium” laptop? Why is HP selling non-premium laptops? Why is this branding not being used across the company? Isn’t it confusing to have multiple, distinct logos for a single brand?

Nestitute ⇥ recode.net

It’s hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Tony Fadell. Mark Bergen, Recode:

To keep [Nest] employees from leaving after [their] acquisition, Google created a vesting schedule that prevents Nest’s executives from cashing out their shares before a certain date — that date could come as soon as this year. In addition, according to sources, as part of the acquisition, Nest and Google agreed on a sales target for the company: $300 million annually.

Two years later, Nest still could not hit that target alone — it did it only after adding sales from Dropcam, which Nest acquired for $555 million six months after joining Google. […]

Once the vesting period sunsets, some key executives could feel free to depart, something that several people close to the company said is very possible given the growing crisis. And Alphabet, whose execs have spoken regularly about controlling costs at the non-Google companies, may become less charitable.

There’s someone on Reddit (via Ryan Jones) who claims to be a current Nest engineer. I’ve asked this person for proof, but I have no idea if they’re even checking that Reddit account any more. I will update this if they do provide some verification that they are who they say they are.

Let’s pretend for a moment that internet commenters can be trusted, though.1 Their comment mirrors much of what has been indicated so far: Nest has a major talent retention problem due to a toxic work environment, and it’s going to get worse as acquisition terms expire.

And then there’s this:

[…] this company is already on deathwatch. Once that happens, most people will quickly have shiny paperweights because it’s a constant firefight keeping these systems up.

Boy, does that ever sound familiar.

  1. Even if this person is not who they say they are, their comment isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Similar allegations appear in both Bergen’s article and Reed Albergotti’s piece for the Information. ↥︎

The Making of Amazon’s Echo ⇥ businessinsider.com

I’ve heard great things about Amazon’s Echo products lately. It seems to be vastly more than a conduit for buying stuff from Amazon; it sounds, to me, like what Siri is trying to be.

Eugene Kim, Business Insider:

To succeed, the Echo and its built-in Alexa virtual assistant would need to be very responsive and conversational. It really had to feel like talking to a human being. […]

The test involved a human “wizard” sitting in a separate room and responding in real-time to any voice query a human testing subject would make to the Echo, often without telling the tester in advance. For example, if the subject asked Echo, “What’s the weather like in New York?” the wizard in the other room would quickly type and send out an answer through Echo’s voice.

Bezos also reportedly set the Echo’s latency goals at one second, with exceptionally good speech interpretation. It had to be — it has no screen to fall back on. As Apple is to hardware and Dropbox is to cloud service reliability, Amazon now is to virtual assistance: they’re the high watermark.

Alphabet’s Nest to Brick Revolv Products ⇥ medium.com

Arlo Gilbert writing on Medium:1

17 months ago, Google acquired Revolv, a very cool home automation hub. It is a small circular device about the size of a small container of hummus that uses a variety of common home automation radios to communicate with light switches, garage door openers, home alarms, motion sensors, A/C controllers etc. […]

On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest.

To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, rather they are advising customers that on May 15th a container of hummus will actually be infinitely more useful than the Revolv hub. […]

That’s a pretty blatant “fuck you” to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware. They didn’t post this notice until long after Google had made the acquisition, so these are Google’s words under Tony Fadell’s direction. It is also worth pointing out that even though they have my email address, the only way a customer discovers this home IoT mutiny is to visit the Revolv web site.

This is terrible, obviously. But it is sadly not uncommon — as these “internet of things” devices operate within the same sphere as other tech products, they tend to have very similar legal stipulations and limitations, particularly with the software they use.

I took it upon myself to look through Nest’s terms of service, whereupon I found this nugget, pertinent to any existing Nest customer:

1. Overview, Eligibility, Customer Service, Term and Termination

[…]

(d) Term and Termination. These Terms will remain in full force and effect so long as you continue to access or use the Services, or until terminated in accordance with the provisions of these Terms. At any time, Nest may (i) suspend or terminate your rights to access or use the Services […]

Also this, which must be serious because it’s shouting at anyone who reads it:

8. Warranty Disclaimers

[…]

(c) NEST AND OUR LICENSORS AND SUPPLIERS MAKE NO WARRANTY THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED OR THAT THE SERVICES: (I) WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS; (II) WILL BE COMPATIBLE WITH YOUR HOME NETWORK, COMPUTER OR MOBILE DEVICE; (III) WILL BE AVAILABLE ON AN UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE BASIS; OR (IV) WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED BY YOU FROM NEST OR THOUGH THE SERVICES SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY.

And this, while I’m at it, from their EULA:

3. Automatic Software Updates.

Nest may from time to time develop patches, bug fixes, updates, upgrades and other modifications to improve the performance of the Product Software and related services (“Updates”). These may be automatically installed without providing any additional notice or receiving any additional consent. You consent to this automatic update. If you do not want such Updates, your remedy is to stop using the Product. If you do not cease using the Product, you will receive Updates automatically.

The terms and conditions don’t appear to give Nest the option of terminating someone’s usage of their services for any reason — if you’re a bored lawyer who wants to work for free, why not take a look? But they do leave a lot of room for the company to say that they make no guarantees for their services or products.

Nest makes a surveillance camera, a thermostat, and a smoke and carbon monoxide detector and alarm. While it’s true that they subject these devices to federal regulations in the countries in which they operate, they’re subjected to different terms and conditions than “dumb” thermostats or smoke alarms because of the software and services they use. Bugs have already been pushed to users in software updates. Is the convenience of these products worth having the lightly-regulated software industry in control of your thermostat or smoke detector?

  1. Per Pinboard: “Can’t wait until Medium goes bankrupt and this guy’s poignant tale of not having control of his automated home disappears too” ↥︎

The Macs Apple Was Selling in 1996 ⇥ morrick.me

Very smart article from Riccardo Mori:

[…] I thought it would be interesting to offer an overview of the Macintosh models Apple was selling in 1996 and make a few related observations. In a nutshell: there was some level of organisation in what many have called the chaos of Macs available back then, and despite the long list of Mac models, the families and form factors were just a few; one of the main causes that generated confusion in the Macintosh product line was the frequent rebranding, and the progressive meaninglessness of the Performa line as the consumer choice versus the Power Macintosh as synonymous of ‘Pro’ machine.

I’ve recently criticized the current state of Apple’s branding, but it’s nowhere near as confusing as it once was. It’s definitely not as simple as the famous professional and consumer grid of the late nineties, nor do I necessarily think it should be, but any comparison to a mid-nineties Apple lineup is nonsense.

Dillan’s Voice ⇥ mashable.com

It’s Autism Acceptance Month, and Apple put together a couple of touching films about Dillan Barmache, an autistic teen who is unable to verbally communicate, but who is enabled by his iPad and various apps.

Katie Duprie, Mashable:

Conventional means of speaking — moving your mouth and activating your vocal chords in complicated ways to produce standard sounds that others can understand — was impossible for him.

“So many people can’t understand I have a mind,” Dillan says in the film. “All they see is a person who is not in control.”

But Dillan says that the use of his tablet and AAC apps has helped him not only “see” his words, but hold onto his thoughts. And it’s made an incredible impact on Dillan’s life.

The first film, “Dillan’s Voice”, focuses on some of the ways that his communication has been enabled by technology; the second, “Dillan’s Path”, is more about his life so far, featuring interviews with his mother and his therapist.

A reminder to developers to ensure their apps are as accessible as possible. Apple has guides for iOS and OS X; other platforms have similar references. For web designers and developers, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has published a comprehensive reference.

AP to Lowercase “Internet” ⇥ twitter.com

A tweet from the Associated Press:

We will lowercase internet effective June 1, when the 2016 Stylebook launches.

The New York Times still uppercases it, but they lowercase “web”. My internal style guide has lowercased both all along for reasons I’m not quite sure of — perhaps it’s a consistency thing.

John Moltz’s Review of the iPhone SE ⇥ verynicewebsite.net

Moltz:

The iPhone SE is not available for purchase on Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program, which is a tipoff that this phone is not going to get upgraded every March. […]

I understand that a lot of people prefer larger phones, but this is the right size phone for me (and many others). Period. I wish it were a size that Apple would commit to.

I think this might be the best description of why I’m hesitant on the SE: because it feels like Apple is, too.

My wish is that Apple would offer only three phones every year: a four-inch model, a 4.7 inch model, and a 5.5 inch model. I’d like them to have pretty much the same specs, a similar industrial design, and have them all start with at least 32 GB of storage. There’s, like, no way that would happen though, right?

IFTTT Reaches Out to Pinboard ⇥ blog.ifttt.com

Linden Tibbets, the CEO of IFTTT, in a tweet:

@pinboard I built the Pinboard Channel on @IFTTT and have maintained it for years. […]

I find it incredulous how IFTTT thought they’d receive little blowback for building a bunch of working stuff, then turning around and demanding that the developers of those integrated platforms redo all their work for free.

Tibbets sent a followup email to users who have workflows that involve Pinboard:

We made a mistake in asking Pinboard to migrate without fully explaining the benefits of our developer platform. It’s our responsibility to prove that value before asking Pinboard to take ownership of their Channel. We hope to share more on the value of our platform soon.

No kidding.

As best as I can figure out, Pinboard launched publicly on July 12, 2009. I joined on July 14, 2009, paying the incredibly luxurious fee of about $4.00 $2.91 for a lifetime account. I bought archiving for a couple of years today; I hope you’ll do the same. Seems useful, anyway, considering how quickly links rot.

(As of writing, 17% of my bookmarks have been archived, consuming 1.29 GB of disk space.)

John Gruber’s Review of the iPhone SE ⇥ daringfireball.net

Gruber:

If you’ve already upgraded to an iPhone 6 or 6S and have made peace with the trade-offs of a larger, heavier, less-grippy-because-of-the-round-edges form factor, the appeal is less clear. Me, I talk the talk about preferring the smaller form factor, but ultimately I’m a sucker for top-of-the-line CPU/GPU performance and camera quality. For the next six months or so, the iPhone SE stands on the top tier. After that, it won’t — I think — and it’ll be back to the 4.7-inch display form factor for me. So why bother switching back for just a few months? I keep asking myself.

And then I pick up the iPhone SE, and hold it in my hand.

This is so well-written; I wish these were my own words.

I know a lot of people — both on the web and in person — who dislike the sizes of the iPhones 6(S) and would prefer to switch back to a four-inch iPhone. My girlfriend is amongst those people. When I asked her about the SE, she said that she preferred the thickness and rounded edges of the 6S because it feels better in her hands. But, she said, it’s still far too slippery and big. She really wants to stick with a four-inch iPhone.

I’ve seen lots of other reactions to the SE along similar lines, with people making tradeoffs one way or another. There are those who are downsizing because the comfort of a four-inch iPhone beats 3D Touch or a significantly better display, and others — like me — who want to downsize but will tolerate a big iPhone for various reasons. I know that I wish for an iPhone with flat, grippable edges any time I’m taking a photo in a situation that is even remotely precarious, but I don’t think it’s worth downsizing for a model that is the iPad Mini of the iPhone lineup. You just know in your gut that it’s not going to be regularly updated. And that’s a little bit sad, because it’s arguably the best iPhone for a lot of people.

Checks and Balances ⇥ politico.eu

Alex Spence, writing for Politico Europe:

With many people now using smartphones and social media to get news, a handful of huge Silicon Valley companies have amassed disproportionate influence over what we read and view. But they’re not subject to the same checks and balances as the newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that people historically relied on for information.

How to keep the likes of Google and Facebook in check is the subject of a paper published Thursday by the Centre for the Study of Media Communication and Power at King’s College London, which calls for far greater scrutiny of the American tech giants’ power over media and communications.

Martin Moore, the author of that paper, writes:

The tech giants argue they are not equivalent to traditional media organisations and should not be viewed in the same way. They are, they say, only platforms (see, for example, Tamiz vs Google) and they simply act as pathways to enable people to reach content. As platforms that provide access to other content, or ‘mere conduits’ as it is described, they gain legal protection they would not otherwise have, for example through section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (2000) in the US and through exemption from aspects of the European E-commerce directive. Moreover as platforms, they argue, they should not be considered responsible in the same way that traditional media publisher would be. […]

The use of their power to command attention to promote their own views and services takes large information intermediaries beyond neutral platforms, and can give them a political power comparable to that of a broadcaster. The di erence being that, in many democracies, broadcasters are constrained in what they can broadcast and in the political views they themselves can express.

In Britain, and elsewhere, broadcasting was seen as too powerful a medium, and too open to political abuse, to be purely commercial. It was considered to be a ‘utility to be developed as a national service in the public interest’, and is regulated as a public service.

This seems to be more concerning to those of us who live outside of the United States.

40 Years of Apple ⇥ 512pixels.net

Stephen Hackett:

I learned that I could take an idea and brute force it into the world.

And for that, Apple, thank you, from all of us.

As tech companies go, Apple is on the older side. Yet they continue to define how we will use technology for the foreseeable future, and establish the roadmap for the industry. Will Facebook one day turn 40? Will Square? How about Zynga? (I can answer that last one: No.)

They’re a company that has grown to an unfathomable scale, yet they retain the spirit of their foundation: relentless invention. Many of their biggest products are worked on by a relative handful of people internally. That’s a tremendous legacy, and it’s a culture that can’t be ginned up by a marketing department. That’s how they’ve kept going and growing.

In recognition of their fortieth birthday, Apple is flying the Jolly Roger over Infinite Loop.

Google’s Tasteless April Fools’ Day Gag ⇥ twitter.com

Victor-Bogdan Anchidin introducing this year’s Google prank:

Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Everyone will get your message, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won’t see it.

When you hit the button, it will enclose an animated GIF of a clip from Despicable Me in the reply. Lame, right? Completely unfunny.

And, as it turns out, damaging. Andy Baio on Twitter:

I can’t believe how short-sighted Gmail’s “Drop Mic” April 1 joke is. It replaces the “Send+Archive” button, and attaches GIFs to sent mail.

I clicked it, assuming it was just a cosmetic replacement of the “Send+Archive” button, and it sent that stupid Minions GIF on a work email.

There are more descriptions of insensitivity and the glaringly inappropriate nature of this prank on Google’s product forums, particularly those from Allan Pashby and Justin Boxill. I haven’t verified what they’ve written, but their plausibility is what is so concerning to me. Both reports are very likely true. That nobody thought of these potential consequences in a tool that is as vital as email is almost beyond comprehension.

Update: Google has now removed the button. Pranks are terrible.

Update 2: At least it’s not as bad as spraying an almond scent in a factory that uses cyanide.