One day after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal attack on Gawker Media to the New York Times, Gawker reporter Ashley Feinberg published a lengthy investigation that sought to solve the enduring mystery of Donald Trump’s infamous mane, which she described as a “cotton candy hairspray labyrinth.”
[…]
But if you were under the impression that praise-worthy journalism is somehow inoculated against campaigns like Thiel’s, you’d be mistaken. Last week, Thiel’s lawyer-for-hire, Charles J. Harder, sent Gawker a letter on behalf of Ivari International’s owner and namesake, Edward Ivari, in which Harder claims that Feinberg’s story was “false and defamatory,” invaded Ivari’s privacy, intentionally inflicted emotional distress, and committed “tortious interference” with Ivari’s business relations. Harder enumerates 19 different purportedly defamatory statements—almost all of which were drawn from several publicly available lawsuits filed against Ivari.
Harder’s demands included the immediate removal of the story from Gawker, a public apology, the preservation of “all physical and electronic documents, materials and data in your possession” related to the story, and, notably, that we reveal our sources.
The precedent has been set: billionaires are allowed to silence and drive into the ground publications with which they disagree. It doesn’t matter that Feinberg’s piece is well-sourced, well-reported, and of public interest. Gawker now has to brace themselves for another fight that can likely trace back to Thiel. Apparently, he’s so committed to destroying Gawker that he won’t stop at a Chapter 11 filing — he’ll stop when Nick Denton is living in a Cheerios box on the High Line.
Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica has been following this case closely:
The US broadband industry has lost its lawsuit attempting to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules and the related reclassification of Internet service providers as common carriers.
ISPs’ First Amendment claims (among others) were rejected. “Because a broadband provider does not—and is not understood by users to—’speak’ when providing neutral access to Internet content as common carriage, the First Amendment poses no bar to the open Internet rules,” judges wrote in a decision released today by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (full text).
This is tremendous news, and a model that I hope is copied worldwide. The internet has become as essential to our lives as electricity; it should have the same kind of protections for consumers.
During the keynote today, Craig Federighi explained how Apple was attempting to bridge the gap between attempting to collect as little personal information as possible, while still creating software that takes advantage of ongoing trends and larger data sets. Federighi phrased it “differential privacy”, which isn’t a made-up thing at all: it’s a specific and defined field of study regarding the collection and fuzzing of data in larger sets. The intent is that it can provide a sense of larger trends — a newly-coined word or phrase, for instance, or traffic patterns in an area, or potentially voice patterns for regional accents — but there’s no useful data on any one person.
Differential privacy, [Aaron] Roth explains, seeks to mathematically prove that a certain form of data analysis can’t reveal anything about an individual — that the output of an algorithm remains identical with and without the input containing any given person’s private data. “You might do something more clever than the people before to anonymize your data set, but someone more clever than you might come around tomorrow and de-anonymize it,” says Roth. “Differential privacy, because it has a provable guarantee, breaks that loop. It’s future proof.”
Roth is the professor that Federighi gave a shout-out to in the presentation.
Ideally, what this means is that Apple can mine users’ devices for larger amounts of information to analyze and help improve their services, without it being invasive. It’s less about strip-mining data, and more about carefully retrieving it, and it’s the kind of thing that Apple can do because they have an established record of looking out for users’ privacy. More importantly, it’s the kind of thing that Apple is doing because they continue to respect users’ privacy.
But, from what I’m reading, this doesn’t necessarily allow them to provide better individualized services on its own. Data collected en masse must be married to individual user data. For iOS, this sounds like it occurs on the device itself. Any company can collect a bunch of data; the hard part is making meaning of it. I hope that’s successful here.
Alex Guyot, writing for MacStories, on the confused behaviour of mailto links after deleting the Mail app:
First beta and all that of course, but this isn’t a great user experience at all. I honestly can’t think of any way to rectify this besides either not allowing the Mail app to be deleted in the first place, or allowing the user to pick a different default app that will handle mailto: links in the absence of Mail.
A potentially elegant way of handling this would be to allow third-party apps to add mailto as one of their supported URL protocols. However, that would likely require the ability to select an app to handle them by default when many are installed.
My guess is that Mail will simply be disallowed from being deleted until this can be resolved, however. If it isn’t it’s going to be important for third-party email clients to have a sharing extension — many still do not.
Something not mentioned at all during today’s WWDC keynote is the long-requested ability to remove many built-in apps in iOS 10, including Tips, Stocks, Contacts on iPhone, and the Watch app.
I’m not usually the type to jump ship on apps I love, but VSCO’s new update has been so puzzling to me1 that I am actively seeking alternatives. Most importantly, I’d like something that is easy to use, and doesn’t have a social network built into it.
Enter, via Dave Day, RNI Films. Instead of filters, the creators of the app have modelled actual film stock, including favourites like Fuji’s Instax instant film, classic Polaroid stock, and Kodak Gold — in six different variations of the actual chemistry of the film. They’ve even scanned in actual film grain and dust, instead of modelling those textures digitally.
It includes most of the editing tools that VSCO has, but with icons that are much easier to understand. Some of them are quite clever: vignette is a camera’s aperture, grain looks like wheat, and highlights and shadows are salt and pepper, respectively. They have text labels below them, too.
I’m not super keen on the app’s cropping workflow, though. I often edit at full-size, then crop or re-crop later. In RNI Films, cropping is, unfortunately, the first step after selecting a photo from the camera roll, and there’s no way to re-crop without discarding edits. It’s also missing perspective correction tools, but you should really be using SKRWT for that anyway.
Overall, though, I really like RNI Films. The app itself is free, and includes a pretty good starter kit of different film stocks. Additional packs of film types are about $5 per set, which is a little pricey, especially if you purchase them all. I do think it’s worth your time to check it out, though.
Really Nice Images — the RNI, obviously — has another app available for $5 called Flashback. Instead of fine-tuned settings, it randomizes the film stock, textures, and various other effects. It’s fun to play around with if you’d rather not fiddle with a bunch of settings. You can grab it on the App Store, too. (App Store links in this post are affiliate links because I’m an opportunist like that. I do genuinely use and recommend both apps, though, and I haven’t been compensated in any way for this post.)
It’s so confusing that VSCO has published a “How to Use VSCO” help article. That’s not a good sign. ↥︎
Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, in order to protect its assets from seizure by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Simultaneously, Gawker Media parent company Gawker Media Group announced that it had agreed to sell its assets in an auction supervised by a bankruptcy court. Ziff Davis, the media company that owns PC Mag, has agreed to purchase Gawker’s assets for $90 million to $100 million, a person close to Gawker told POLITICO, though it’s expected that other potential buyers will participate in the auction and make higher bids.
At the moment, what seems most important about the Hulk Hogan case is last week’s revelation that Hogan’s legal costs were borne by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire on whom Gawker has been inflicting pain for years. The story has been that Thiel is out for revenge against Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton, and may well get it, in the form of a forced sale or even Gawker’s going out of business. The stakes may actually be bigger than that. Remember that Thiel is a graduate of Stanford Law School who clerked for a year on the Eleventh Circuit, and that, in his world, “scale” and “disruption” are the hoped-for ends of every investment. He is surely aware of this case’s potential to begin a reëxamination of the fundamental questions in American press law, far beyond the fate of Gawker.
Nothing is right about this whole case. I don’t think there was a good reason for Gawker to have published Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, but I also don’t think their punishment was commensurate with the damage inflicted.
But most damaging of all is the ability for Peter Thiel to bankroll the suit. This is not a case where the plaintiff needed a friend to lend them a few bucks; this is Thiel’s personal vendetta under the guise of a right to privacy suit. Make no mistake: I am not in favour of many of the things Gawker chooses to publish, but I am far more opposed to the bankrolling of an opportunity to suppress their publication.
If money is truly representative of speech, as implied in the Citizens United decision, Thiel has a far greater freedom of speech than does Gawker or, indeed, most publications.
Remember when, in 2012, Mother Jones released the “47% Tape”? Shortly after, they were sued by a billionaire donor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
I’ll let Mother Jones’ CEO Monika Bauerlein and editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery take it from here:
People have asked us whether we think these two things were connected, and the honest answer is that we have no idea. What we do know is that the take-no-prisoners legal assault from VanderSloot and Melaleuca has consumed a good part of the past two and a half years and has cost millions (yes, millions) in legal fees. In the course of the litigation, VanderSloot sued a former small-town Idaho newspaper reporter whose confrontation with him we mentioned in our article. His lawyers asked a judge to let them rifle through the internal records of the Obama campaign. They deposed a representative of the campaign in pursuit of a baseless theory that Mother Jones conspired with Obama’s team to defame VanderSloot. They tried to get one of our lawyers disqualified because his firm had once done work for Melaleuca. They intrusively questioned our employees—our reporter was grilled about whether she had attended a Super Bowl party the night she finalized the article.
Legally, what we fought over was what, precisely, the terms “bashing” and “outing” meant in the context of our article. (Read the decision for yourself.) But make no mistake: This was not a dispute over a few words. It was a push, by a superrich businessman and donor, to wipe out news coverage that he disapproved of. Had he been successful, it would have been a chilling indicator that the 0.01 percent can control not only the financing of political campaigns, but also media coverage of those campaigns.
Mother Jones justly won that lawsuit, while Gawker lost theirs, arguably for good reasons. But re-read that last quoted paragraph and notice the similarities: these are lawsuits borne of the personal vendettas of billionaires. They were designed to suppress the publication of true articles disliked by the funding parties.
The Gawker Media Group will apparently be purchased by Ziff Davis — they’re the “ZD” in ZDNet. However, Gawker itself was conspicuously absent from their press release. Brian Stelter heard a potential reason for its omission:
Denton has talked with associates about potentially trying to buy Gawker.com back from whatever company acquires it, sources confirmed to CNNMoney. Then he could run it on its own.
This idea comes with several “ifs” — it is dependent on Denton prevailing in the appeal of Hulk Hogan’s ongoing lawsuit against Gawker.
“Ruin My Search History” promises to “ruin your Google search history with a single click,” and that’s exactly what it does. Click on the magnifying glass and it’ll take over your browser and immediately cycles through a series of search terms ranging from the mildly embarrassing (“why doesn’t my poo float,” “smelly penis cure urgent”) to the potentially relationship-ruining (“mail order paternity test,” “attracted to mother why”) to the type of thing that might get your name on a list somewhere (“isis application form,” “cheap syria flights,” “how to kill someone hypothetically”).
I’d not click that link at work, if I were you. If you’re the type to read the ending of a book before reading the rest of it, you might like to know that someone going by “tomatoaway” on Reddit has copied out the full array and it’s, well, spectacular. Aside from those mentioned by Koebler, queries include “rohypnol safe dosage”, “view ashley madison list”, and “bing”. The stuff of nightmares, really.
Here’s the thing — Among the apps I’ve bought over the years, a lot of them are quality apps I love and enjoy using, but I don’t necessarily use them all the time. A classic example: photo apps and image editing apps. I have a lot of them, and I don’t really have a preference. I decide which to use mostly following the mood of the moment (in case of photo apps) or the specific function/effect I’m after (in case of editing apps and even photo apps as well).
With these kinds of apps, I like to have lots of options available, and I haven’t minded paying upfront for each of these apps; I haven’t minded paying the occasional extra for a paid update or for the in-app purchase that unlocked more photo filters or editing features. But in the extreme case that all app developers behind these apps moved to a subscription-based pricing, without offering alternatives, I would be forced into a position I really don’t like: having to decide which app stays on my devices and which one has to go. Will the App Store’s infamous ‘race to the bottom’ become the ‘race to stay in your device’s (home) screen’?
I’ve been thinking about this as well, and my hope is that an app without an active subscription degrades gracefully. But how graceful it may degrade ultimately depends on what the App Store allows. Restricting app updates based on subscription status, for instance, can’t be done because they’re run through the store itself.
Perhaps some developers will get creative with how they distribute updates within the app. For instance, a new set of filters could be made available as a free download provided the user has an active subscription. Bug fixes could be distributed as app updates, but feature updates could be dependent upon a subscription.
These new rules create a somewhat murky new world for developers and users alike. I’m generally optimistic because the apps you love most probably come from developers who respect their users. Developers like Panic, Flexibits, Cultured Code, Tapbots, Sam Oakley, and Ole Zorn — they actually care. And those developers who do not care about their apps’ users will find it very difficult to retain subscribers.
Macworld received confirmation from Apple that the new in-app subscriptions will — theoretically, at least — be open to all apps. “Content” and “service” subscriptions are just two examples of the kinds of subscriptions that apps could conceivably offer.
However, it’s not entirely clear what criteria Apple will use to determine whether a particular app should be allowed to use a subscription model. Glenn Fleishman:
But Apple also stressed that not just every business model will pass its muster. Unlike with periodicals and streaming media apps, which are allowed to have no content or use without a subscription, apps in other categories will need to ‘make sense.’ As Apple notes on the What’s New page, ‘the experience must provide ongoing value worth the recurring payment for an auto-renewable subscription to make sense.’
We don’t yet know precisely how Apple will evaluate that, and uncertainty is bad for developers. Schiller also promised much faster app review turnaround for developers, but speed doesn’t matter if an app doesn’t meet Apple’s test, and Apple doesn’t yet offer formal advance review of app features or business model. (We have heard of developers discussing features more broadly, but informally, with developer relations staff.)
Poor communication between Apple and developers — and, in the case of the expired Mac App Store certificates earlier this year, between Apple and customers, too — has been the root cause of many of the App Store’s most significant controversies since its inception. I think a lot of developers are going to want Apple’s stance on subscriptions to be absolutely solid before they attempt to integrate it into their own apps.
I am a long-time fan of VSCO, but I have never really liked its interface. It suffers from Don’t Wash Tennis Balls syndrome, with inscrutable icons and odd control patterns. But it’s something I’ve gotten the hang of over the years because the results are worth it.
Today’s update brings with it an even more abstruse interface. If you’re one of those people who finds Snapchat difficult to understand — and I feel your pain — you’re going to be completely lost in the new version of VSCO.
The app no longer has a “hamburger” menu on the side to jump to different sections, nor does it have any kind of tab bar.
Instead, there’s a floating circle at the bottom similar to the Camera shutter, except with three horizontal lines running through it. Tapping on it does nothing. But sliding it up, down, or to either side switches between different sections of the app, kind of like a joystick.
For instance, dragging down on it while in the Library view will pull up a menu to filter images based on whether they’ve been edited. Dragging right from the Library will take you to the Explore view. Dragging down here will pull up a search box. Dragging up on the joystick thing from anywhere in the app will pull up the camera.
There’s a strange staggered layout to the posts in the Explore feature. They alternate left and right sides seemingly at random; posts from the same users posted on the same day might have two images on the right followed by one on the left.
It’s all very bizarre and very little of it makes sense to me. The app hasn’t changed much under the hood, so far as I can tell, but nearly every aspect of its presentation is different. Even the hard-to-understand icons for various editing tools — saturation, highlight levels, sharpness, and so on — have been redesigned and are now impossible to understand.
There’s not another app providing the kind of quality and variety available in VSCO, so I’m going to have to get used to this. But I really don’t like it.
I think the best thing that can be said for subscriptions is that they’re honest and mostly align everyone’s incentives properly. Customers will essentially vote with their wallets, on an ongoing basis. Developers who maintain and improve their apps will get recurring revenue. Apple will get more revenue when it steers customers to good apps. Over time, more of the money will flow to the apps that people actually like and use. My guess is that the average customer will end up spending more money on fewer paid apps. Some apps will become more sustainable, but others will be culled.
I’m not sure there’s an easy or ideal way to pull the App Store out of its nosedive into unsustainably low pricing, but subscriptions seem like a good option. They’re clearly imperfect, but they might be a key factor in keeping prices generally low for users as they amortize the cost of development over months-to-years and incentivize regular updates.
It definitely won’t work for every app, though, or even every niche. Once the uncertainty about which apps are eligible for subscriptions is cleared up, I think there are going to be specific qualities that justify a maintenance-style subscription: quality apps for a particular audience, made by indie developers who issue regular updates. And I think it needs all of those factors. Users aren’t going to pay for an app maintenance subscription if the app is of mediocre quality, or if the developer is a huge company,1 or if it is infrequently updated — or, at least, does not have some sort of ongoing justification for its subscription cost.
For instance, Things by Cultured Code is a tremendously good app made by an independent development team. Because it’s updated so infrequently, I think that most users would prefer to pay a flat rate upfront than pay a subscription fee. However, because they’ve built in a proprietary syncing backend, that could justify the cost of a subscription.
Weather Line is another good example. The app is of a very high calibre and is designed for a specific user base, but because it’s not updated frequently and there’s no ongoing service for which they can charge a fee, it’s probably best suited to major version updates that are charged at a flat rate.
This is all still theoretical, of course, especially since Apple needs to clear up what apps will be allowed to use subscriptions. I think it should be open to all, and Apple should treat it as a different pricing model. Hopefully, this will allow for a more sustainable App Store for thousands of indie developers.
I bet plenty of Tweetbot users would pay $0.99 per month to use the app, but virtually nobody would pay $0.99 per month to use the official Twitter client. ↥︎
I took about a hundred photos with the Lumia 650. This is a small sampling to give you an idea of what the camera is like; none of the photos have been edited or modified.
On May 25, Microsoft announced that they would no longer be making smartphones.
On the very same day, I purchased a brand new Microsoft Lumia 650 smartphone. I have often said on this website that I would choose a Windows Phone were iOS to one day cease to exist; I figured it was time to put my money where my mouth has long been. So, I used one nearly exclusively for a week.1
The Lumia 650
There are two things to consider here: the Lumia 650, and the Windows 10 Mobile operating system that powers it. And I’ll keep the phone review short: it’s not awful, but it is boring.
The Lumia 650 is handsome, but almost cartoonishly generic. It feels like a prop phone, of the kind you’d see in a stock photo or an IKEA display. The hardware is a slab of glass wrapped in plastic and plasticky-feeling aluminum, adorned with a Windows logo on the back and a Microsoft wordmark on the face. It’s not pretty, but if it weren’t there, you’d forget what kind of phone you were using.
Microsoft has elected to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 212 processor. It’s a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3 GHz. With the 1 GB of onboard RAM, you might reasonably expect it to be fast. Or, least, fast enough.
It isn’t.
Get used to seeing this screen. A lot.
Despite the smooth animations and capable SoC, the Lumia 650 is slow. Apps take a long time to launch and are purged from memory far too quickly. Even relatively basic tasks — such as opening an email or loading a webpage — are apparently laborious affairs for this phone.
There are a total of two noteworthy things about the Lumia 650. The first is that it’s cheap — really cheap. I bought mine unlocked at the Microsoft Store for $200 Canadian, and it’s the model featuring two SIM card slots and a 30-day return policy. In a world of $600 Samsungs and $800 iPhones, the Lumia 650 is an absolute bargain.
The second interesting thing about this phone is that it is, as far as Microsoft’s plans are concerned, the final Lumia. It was introduced on February 15 and went on sale on April 1. Less than two months later, Microsoft canned the whole operation.
But, while the Lumia brand is dead, Windows 10 Mobile lives on.
Windows 10 Mobile
As with many of Microsoft’s products, I think Windows Mobile is chock full of really great ideas. I noticed this the first time I put my Lumia to sleep, then pulled it out of my pocket. The time, date, and an indicator of an awaiting email were all displayed in white on the jet-black background — a feature called the “Glance screen” that Nokia first introduced on their Symbian devices, and brought to Windows with the Lumia 925 in 2013. Because of the AMOLED displays in virtually all Windows Mobile devices, only the handful of pixels that make up the time and other information need to be turned on. It’s genius.
Then there are the famous Live Tiles on the home — excuse me — Start screen of all Windows Phone-cum-Mobile releases. Instead of being a static icon, the tiles are large enough that they can flip and scroll to show more information.
The weather icon, for instance, alternates between showing current conditions and a forecast for the next few hours. Twitter’s tile shows the most recent notification, and Outlook shows the subject lines and senders of new messages.
Again, I think Live Tiles are an extremely intelligent innovation. They have the at-a-glance information capacity of a widget married to the uniformity and predictability of icons. They’re not interactive, and they don’t need to be. They’re just a glimpse into what the app is doing in the background.
Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana, also brings some new ideas to the table. Instead of being a black box of unknown capability like Siri, or a presence of unknown reach like Google Now, Cortana includes what Microsoft calls a Notebook. It’s a preferences-like menu of things that Cortana knows about you, including connected accounts, frequent locations, and more. These are all editable, so if Cortana starts thinking that your morning coffee pit-stop is where you work, you can correct it.
Yet, for every innovation in Windows Mobile, I encountered a stumbling block of some kind. Some things aren’t fully developed, while other features are marred by poor execution.
For example, you know how I mentioned you could connect accounts to Cortana? The only account types that can be connected, so far as I can tell, are Microsoft Dynamics CRM, LinkedIn, and Office 365.
Cortana itself is deeply flawed. I regularly use Siri for creating reminders and setting timers, especially while cooking. Sometimes, but not always, invoking Cortana and saying “remind me to pick up my parcel tomorrow at 8:30 AM” would present a results page that looked like a reminder was created, but wouldn’t actually follow through. (I unfortunately neglected to get a screenshot of this.) A request to set a timer for fifteen minutes simply shows a search results page:
Photos are a real mixed bag for Windows Mobile. The Lumia 650 has an acceptable camera, though its processing is aggressive with its sharpening. It even has a Live Photos-esque feature where it will record the first few seconds before the photo was taken. Nice.
The front-facing camera isn’t bad, but it has a special viewfinder that makes you look sick:
A screenshot when the front-facing camera is active.The actual image after saving.
After you take a frankly brilliant photo like that, it will automatically back itself up to the mysterious cloud. A Microsoft account includes access to OneDrive and 15 GB of free storage. By default, all of your photos will be uploaded there automatically, and sorted into separate folders for photos, screenshots, and saved images.
OneDrive even attempts to automatically tag objects and scenery in the shot. From the library of about 100 photos I shot on the Lumia, around 60 have accurate — if general — tags, while a handful have inaccurate tags (for instance, identifying an indoor scene as outdoor). The remainder have no tags at all.
Sounds great, right?
Only after taking a bunch of photos in a row did I find out that Windows Mobile will upload those photos to OneDrive over a cellular connection. I have a metered plan, so this is not ideal.
Luckily, Windows includes a really nice dashboard where you can view your mobile data usage. You can even set your monthly cap and your monthly turnover date, so it’s not dumbly accumulating data usage for the entire phone’s life, like iOS does. There’s also a setting in Photos to prevent automatic uploads on a metered mobile connection.
To the best of my knowledge, however, this setting simply doesn’t work. I have my data limit set, yet any photo I take on the Lumia will automatically upload regardless of what connection I’m on. This resulted in a bill from my provider approximately 50% higher than usual, and I used the Lumia for just one week.
And then there are the little things.
One of the hardest habits to kick while writing this is my tendency to write “Windows Phone”. It turns out that Windows Phone, as a brand, doesn’t exist any more. Due to Microsoft’s platform unification, everything they do is now considered “Windows 10”, and that’s it. My Lumia runs Windows 10, a Surface runs Windows 10, and your friend’s computer begrudgingly runs Windows 10.
Luckily, in lots of their documentation and other literature, Microsoft muddies the water by referring to the phone version of the operating system as “Windows 10 Mobile”, so I’ve been calling it “Windows Mobile” throughout this review.
I mention this because Windows 10 Mobile is surprisingly similar to Windows 10. I don’t mean that in the same sense as Steve Jobs stating that “iPhone runs OS X”. There’s nothing technically wrong about what he said, as anyone who has mucked around in the iOS system folders knows, but the intent of that statement largely served to acknowledge a shared core.
Windows 10 Mobile, on the other hand, is a clear descendent of its desktop predecessors:
In a similar vein, Windows — the desktop kind — is the only supported operating system for syncing software. I tried plugging my Lumia into my Thunderbolt Display via USB to manually drop some songs onto the built-in storage, and it ended up drawing too much power, which shut off all my other connected USB devices.
Even semi-basic stuff like the clipboard doesn’t work as expected. There are two different copy widgets and two different paste widgets, and there’s no consistency between their availability or use.
The inline copy menu.The keyboard-aligned copy menu.
These two controls look completely different, but behave identically. Contrast that with this composite screenshot of the two paste controls available in Windows Mobile:
Composite screenshot of trying to paste a URL into a textarea.
You’ll note that the paste control on the keyboard is greyed out and deactivated, but the menu shows a paste option. I have no idea why this could possibly be.
And that’s all in the first-party apps. What about apps from others?
Third-Party Apps
You knew this was coming, didn’t you?
One of the things I was worried about going into the week with Windows was that I’d find it difficult to use it normally as it might lack the apps I use every day.
One of the nice surprises of the week was just how easy it was. It turns out that I already do a lot of stuff using the default set of apps: email, messaging, web browsing — the usual suspects. But I use a lot of third-party stuff too: Twitter, Slack, Snapchat, the New York Times app, Instagram, a Pinboard client, and an RSS reader, to name a handful.
And you know what? Nearly all of those apps are available for Windows Mobile — Snapchat is the sole exception on that list.
The problem with a lot of these apps is that they’re just not very good. Because Windows Mobile has an insignificant market share, developers are — understandably — hesitant to sink more time into building apps for it than they absolutely must, so there’s a lot of shared interface ideas and assets.
The Twitter app is very similar to its Android cousin, except with a dark background instead of white. Slack, well, looks like Slack. And then there’s Instagram:
Now that’s funny.
Windows Mobile has been the distant third choice for native app development for a very long time. Though Microsoft boasts nearly 670,000 apps in the Windows Store, very few of them are actually good. Aside from cross-platform pollination issues, many of the apps I tried throughout the week felt really bottom-shelf. I’d rather not pick on specific apps, as many are from smaller developers, but there’s a sort of third-rate knockoff quality to most that I tried. They feel rushed, incomplete, and generally of a sub-par quality.
That could be because I bought a Windows device at a particularly rough time for their app store. Due to its dwindling market share, lots of big-name developers and companies have discontinued support for Windows Mobile; what’s left in their wake are lower-rung apps.
The lack of developer support is, of course, not new information. What is news is that Microsoft isn’t making phones any more and is concentrating solely on the operating system. If developers weren’t committed to the platform before, what are the chances of that changing with Microsoft’s reduced investment in it? And how can hardware companies be confident in the phones they’re making when even Microsoft isn’t?
Microsoft may think they’re pushing forward with Windows 10 Mobile development, but it feels more like a slow crawl towards an inevitable sunset.
Buyer’s Advice
For a long time, I’ve said that I’d choose Windows Mobile if iOS didn’t exist. And, to a certain extent, I stand by my reasons why: the operating system feels fluid, it has a lot of uniquely brilliant innovations, and it’s fairly user-friendly.
But after spending a full week with it, I see cracks where I wouldn’t have before. I’ve previously tinkered with a friend’s Windows 8.1 smartphone, and I don’t remember it being as unpolished as Windows 10. There are huge executional flaws that mar the day-to-day experience, in ways that are baffling and obvious. And, of course, the dearth of decent third-party apps is a death knell for the platform.
They say “never meet your heroes”. I think that holds true in a lot of cases; it certainly did here. Despite its deep flaws, I like Windows Mobile. I want to root for it, not because it’s the underdog, but because there’s genuinely good stuff here. But, midway through the week, I started itching to get back onto my iPhone. I missed Fantastical, Pinner, and Tweetbot. I really missed iMessage, and the deep integrations with my Mac. Despite the myriad frustrations I have with iOS, it’s still the one I’d choose every single time.
And if iOS didn’t exist? Well, I can’t see Windows Mobile lasting much longer. I guess I’d have to use an Android phone. I wonder what that’s like.
I wanted to keep using my Apple Watch for fitness tracking, so I had my iPhone in my other pocket. I also listened to music on it, for reasons noted in the review. Excluding that, I was all Windows, all the time. ↥︎
You’d think that the week before WWDC would be locked-down with nary a whisper emerging from Cupertino, with the exception of controlled leaks to deter unreasonable expectations. But Phil Schiller worked the phones yesterday to talk about a few major changes coming to the App Stores on iOS, tvOS, and — yes — Mac OS X.
App Store review times are now much shorter. These changes are already in place, and have been widely noted in recent weeks. Apple is today confirming they’re not a fluke — they’re the result of systemic changes to how App Store review works.
Subscription-based pricing was heretofore limited to specific app categories. Now, subscription-based pricing will be an option for any sort of app, including productivity apps and games. This is an entirely new business model for app developers — one that I think will make indie app development far more sustainable.
Changes to app discovery, including a smarter “Featured” tab, the return of the “Categories” tab, and, yes, as rumored, paid search ads.
The shorter App Review times are dramatically different — they’ve gone from a typical one-to-two-week waiting period to, according to Schiller, no more than 48 hours for 90% of the 100,000 submissions they receive weekly.
But the two changes most likely to impact consumers and developers alike are the opening up of subscription pricing to all App Store categories, and the introduction of ads to search results.
Schiller imagines scenarios where many kinds of apps that were previously single-time purchases could move to the [subscription] model. Games that have an ongoing subscription-like program, ones that have a massive online playing world that require upgrades of game worlds, might make sense. He suggests many enterprise apps could move to subscription, and that professional apps that require “a lot of maintenance of new features and versions” would be a good fit.
Currently the 70-30 revenue split for subscriptions is the same as regular purchased apps. However, under the new subscription rules, that revenue split will favor the developers more in the second year on individual subscriptions. Developers will get an 85-15 revenue share for all subscribers that have been customers for over a year. This will also affect all existing apps and subscribers, not just new apps.
There’s a lot to love about this new subscription pricing scheme. It benefits new users by providing a smaller barrier to entry — for instance, OmniOutliner is a famously-spendy app that starts at $40 for the iPhone app (that’s an affiliate link, if you want to give me money and own a great app at the same time). It’s hard to convince people to spend $40 on an iPhone app, no matter how great it is.1 If they wanted to, the Omni Group could conceivably charge $3 per month instead, making the app more approachable. During the first year of someone subscribing to the app, Omni would make about the same as they would for the flat $40 fee. But, during subsequent years, they’d make about $5 more per customer, owing to the new pricing split.
But what needs clarification is whether this would even be possible for an app offering nothing more than regular feature updates. In his press interviews, Schiller gives the impression that apps could have a subscription built-in to cover ongoing maintenance — note, for instance, the pro apps example he used in his interview with Goode.
Provide paid access to content that is updated or delivered on a regular basis, such as newspapers, educational courses, or audio or video libraries.
Services
Provide paid access to an ongoing service within your app, such as cloud storage or massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs).
Is regular maintenance considered an “ongoing service”? So far, the answer to that question is unclear. Free trials, on the other hand, are now explicitly supported.
The other major change to the App Store is the introduction of paid advertising within search results. This is going to be controversial. Goode, again:
So how will the search ads work in the App Store when they launch in beta next Monday? For one, the ads are only for other apps. An ad will appear at the top of iOS App Store search results, and will be identified as a search ad, showing a light blue background with a blue ad button on it. Only one ad will appear at a time (or none at all).
For marketers, Apple will provide a second-price auction system, borrowing technology from Apple’s soon-to-be-shuttered iAd network, and developers don’t pay unless users click. All of this, Apple says, is a fair system for developers.
The second-price auction should reduce the tendency for well-funded companies to bid high prices on keywords, thereby making them uncompetitive and locking out smaller developers. I worry that it won’t do enough, but that’s something that will have to be seen when the feature is first tested on Monday — Apple is promising to keep an eye on it this summer.
There’s a lot to unpack with this announcement, and much of it will have to unfold over time. As best as I can tell, Schiller didn’t address improvements to the quality of search results, and I hope we’ll hear more about that during the keynote. But if this is what had to be bumped to make way for more media-friendly stuff, I am very much looking forward to Monday.
Also, one thing I spotted in this announcement is the introduction of a “Share” option to the 3D Touch menu of third-party apps on the home screen. I sincerely hope that’s not just an additional item in every third-party app’s 3D Touch menu, because that will get pretty gross pretty fast.
Steve Moser reminded me on Twitter today that home screen icons have only one “level” of 3D Touch; there’s no distinction between different amounts of pressure. Perhaps that plays into offering the Share menu somehow?
The U.K. House of Commons on Tuesday passed a controversial bill giving spy agencies the power to engage in bulk surveillance and computer hacking.
[…]
Many of the surveillance techniques — such as scooping up the metadata of communications and using malware to gain access to the computers and mobile phones of terrorism suspects — have already been in use by U.K. spy agencies and the law now gives them explicit authority.
[…]
The bill states that the government will likely reimburse communications companies, including mobile operators, for the cost of complying with the new legal obligations, such as the requirement to retain records of all the websites its customers visit for at least a year.
While this is generally not any more invasive than what British intelligence agencies have been doing for years, the legitimization of their actions is deeply concerning. It retroactively protects their previously-illegal actions. Worse still, laws like this one are rarely undone.
This legislation must next pass the House of Lords, who only have the power to amend or suggest revisions to it; they cannot refuse it outright. Assuming there are no delays, it will go into effect early next year.
Amazon’s Echo speaker, and its descendents, Dot and Tap, are growing in popularity as consumers’ preferred “smart” speakers and the voice computing platform for the home. But they’re also encouraging a wave of developer interest, in the form of add-ons dubbed “skills” which allow you to teach Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa new tricks, like calling you an Uber… or ordering you a pizza. Today, Amazon announced that its Alexa app store, so to speak – the “skills” section – has grown to over 1,000 skills. That’s a notable milestone, given that ordering the Echo was only available by invite up until last June.
The company has also brought Alexa’s power to other connected devices, including Fire TV and even those made by third-party hardware makers, thanks to its open platform.
That’s a fast-growing device ecosystem, and it demonstrates the potential for how far Siri could be extended if developers were able.
Mind you, Apple could also add capabilities like these on a regular basis if Siri was not tied to a monolithic release cycle. And, occasionally, they do add capabilities and features on the fly — that’s how they announced WWDC this year. I wonder how much is possible without requiring a new version of iOS to be released. The lack of rich graphics in Siri, like those in iOS 6, almost certainly makes the release process more flexible as they don’t need to be loaded onto each device.
Erica Sadun reposted her 2012 article on how a Siri API might work, especially if multiple third-party apps are competing for the same kinds of information:
[…] Second, it’s a challenging problem to implement. And third, it could open Siri to a lot of potential exploitation (think of an app that opens every time you say “Wake me up tomorrow at 7:00 AM” instead of deferring to the built-in timer).
That’s why we sat down and brainstormed how Apple might accomplish all of this safely using technologies already in-use. What follows is our thought experiment of how Apple could add these APIs into the iOS ecosystem and really allow Siri to explode with possibility.
A smart article to keep in mind going into WWDC next week. I am particularly interested in knowing whether apps utilizing a (still-hypothetical) Siri API would be subjected to increased scrutiny — I hope they would, for both privacy and functionality reasons.
It’s probably fair to suggest that most people using the internet want to save money, make healthy choices, and keep abreast of current events. What they don’t want, is to give companies their email addresses to prove it.
Much of the online marketing world, however, seeks to change this. Growing numbers of websites, from magazines to clothing stores, have adopted “exit-intent pop-ups,” rectangular modals that blanket a webpage, prompting a user to join a mailing list. Beyond their visual intrusiveness, these ads prey on the uncertain user, foregoing the neutral simplicity of a “yes/no” option in favor of charged, shame-inducing language.
There are few things on the web that I dislike as much as this recent development. It is, at once, a dark pattern and an anti-pattern: it’s awful, and it surely turns readers away instead of attracting them.
All of this has made me feel not just nostalgic, but a little wistful. As much as my Wired archive is a document of its era’s aspirations, it’s also a record of what people once hoped technology would be—and, in hindsight, a record of what it might have become. In early Wired, a piece about a five-hundred-thousand-dollar luxury “Superboat” would be followed by a full-page editorial urging readers to contact their legislators to condemn wiretapping (in this case, 1994’s Digital Telephony Bill). Stories of tech-enabled social change and New Economy capitalism weren’t in competition; they coëxisted and played off one another. In 2016, some of my colleagues and I have E.F.F. stickers on our company-supplied MacBooks—“I do not consent to the search of this device,” we broadcast to our coworkers—but dissent is no longer an integral part of the industry’s ethos.
Once you get past the typical aw, shucks, ain’t it quaint? thoughts one might have surrounding the history of technology — and the media that covers it — it’s surprising at how little has changed. For better, and for worse.
