Month: June 2016

Waze Against the Machine ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Steve Hendrix, writing for the Washington Post:

“It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know,” said Bates Mattison, a city councilman in the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven, Ga. “In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood.”

When population growth began to overwhelm a set of major intersections in his district, there was an increase of 45,000 cars a day on some residential streets, as app-armed commuters fought their way to nearby Interstate 85. In response, the city is posting signs to restrict left or right turns at key intersections.

Coincidentally, I was reading the 1979 Calgary inner-city plan today — I’m just one big ball of fun — in which the 1914 Thomas Mawson plan is referenced. On roads, Mawson wrote:

We ought to arrange our plan so that certain streets naturally become traffic routes and others remain mere means of access to the buildings which line them on either side, thus giving quiet and privacy to the residential districts.

This is the way most cities are built: wide roads invite higher traffic loads, while narrow roads dissuade all but those who need to drive them. Even cities like London, with its comparatively narrow streets in high-traffic areas, have this hierarchy in place.1

Waze, and other apps like it, subvert the natural flow of traffic and divert it into areas that simply aren’t built to handle the onslaught of vehicles. Instead of one large traffic jam, it creates several smaller ones in typically quiet, residential areas. This could be mitigated by suggesting detours along roads of a similar capacity or intent, rather than directing rush-hour traffic through some bungalows and playgrounds.

  1. While an area like Soho is bordered by roads of two lanes — like Shaftsbury — and three lanes — Oxford and Charing Cross, its internal roads are virtually all single-lane affairs with a narrow parking lane. ↥︎

Cartography Differences in Apple Maps and Google Maps ⇥ justinobeirne.com

Justin O’Beirne is a cartographer who, until last year, led the design of Apple Maps. In this, the first in a three-part series, he explores differences in the way cities, roads, and points of interest are portrayed by Apple and Google. It’s impossible to summarize, but this is a must-read essay.

As noted earlier, I find the most striking difference to be search. Google Maps is very good at it; Apple Maps isn’t. The latter is getting better, insomuch as it less-frequently shows me results in Delaware and Washington D.C. instead of Calgary, but Google is still leaps-and-bounds ahead.

To Apple’s credit, Maps is now a much more reliable product than it was just a couple of years ago, and especially a couple of years before that. I use it regularly, and I only open Google Maps when I want to take a street-level look. But the degree of specificity I need to use when searching is not encouraging.

Fixing App Store Discovery ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

The App Store grew like wildfire. By January 2009, there were about 15,000 apps. Though modest by today’s standards, 15,000 was already enough apps that it felt like there was one to fulfill every possible need you might have. Apple celebrated the success of the App Store the next month by launching a TV ad campaign featuring the catchphrase ‘There’s an app for that.’

Fast-forward to today and the scope of the App Store of 2009 feels quaint by comparison. There are now approximately 1.5 million apps in the App Store – a 100-fold increase in just seven years. But while the App Store has been an undeniable success for Apple by almost any measure, that success has come at a cost. With so many apps in the App Store, discovery has become such a serious problem that today’s version of Apple’s 2009 catchphrase may as well be ‘Where’s the app for that?’

Of all the things I wish to see at WWDC next week, improvements to search — across the board — rank highly on my proverbial list. The company has come a long way in a very short period of time, but search still isn’t good enough; searching on both the App Store and Maps, in particular, remain among the most frustrating experiences on any of Apple’s platforms.

Icons vs. Textual Labels in UI Design ⇥ ia.net

A very smart essay from Information Architects:

What does this [series of icons] tell us? Not much, except that icons save space and great icons look fresh. But unless you have designed and assigned them yourself, their clarity is suspect. An icon can represent a thousand different words, and that is precisely the problem. Anything with a thousand possible meanings needs a lot of context to become unambiguous.

[…]

Functionally, a “label-only” design is as clear as day (if the IAs have done their job), but something unsettling happens if you pull all the graphics from a graphical user interface. The temperature drops to 0° Kelvin. It doesn’t look crisp and fun anymore. A design positivist may not care about crisp and fun. Every other human being does. We tested this assumption in iA Writer. The feedback we got during the period we eliminated all icons was a resounding “Don’t!”

Way back when iOS 7 was released, one of my primary criticisms of it was its text-based interaction paradigm:

But this issue simply wouldn’t exist if symbols were used instead of text. After all, the OS X Mail client uses symbols for these same functions, and it seems comprehensible to me. I may be missing something, but symbols seem like a simpler, clearer, and more universal language.

This essay presents a compelling counterargument that icons are not clearer nor are they more universal. One may argue that the icons in today’s Mail for OS X could be designed better — whereby better, one means clearer and more universal — but I disagree. There clearly are limitations to how much may be communicated via a small icon compared to the clarity and directness of text. But, as IA argues, text is almost too clear, which makes the UI feel dry and anodyne.

See Also: Last year’s “Don’t Wash Tennis Balls”, which I’ve linked to previously.

A Look at Twitter After Nearly a Year Under Jack Dorsey ⇥ vanityfair.com

Much of this article’s length is spent on explaining Dick Costolo’s departure from Twitter and Dorsey’s re-hiring. But Nick Bilton, writing for Vanity Fair, also explores Twitter’s user retention problem. See if you can spot a theme within these two paragraphs:

Meanwhile, Dorsey was trying to figure out how to stop the user decline. He was also forced to face the reality that, in the years since he had last led the service, Twitter had become a vicious, often ruthless platform. Louis CK had recently thrown away his millions of followers, saying Twitter “didn’t make me feel good.” When Stephen Fry deactivated his account, he likened the site to someone taking a “turd” in a reservoir. Megyn Kelly repeatedly said that she could no longer look at Twitter because of the violent tweets from Donald Trump supporters.

[…]

Dorsey then mentioned something more revealing. The stagnant user growth, he conceded, was due in large part to the constant turmoil at Twitter. “There has been an ever shifting leadership, platform, and strategy, and it’s hard to see any momentum in that,” he said, digging into his third beef taco. […]

The issues that have plagued Twitter for the past several years seem institutional. It’s conflict and toxicity all the way down.

LinkedIn’s Sloppiness Hurts Us All ⇥ arstechnica.com

Jeremi M. Gosney, writing for Ars Technica:

The RockYou breach revolutionized password cracking. No longer were we using crap like list_of_kitchen_appliance_manufacturers.txt for wordlists. Everyone was just using rockyou.txt, and they were cracking a significant percentage of passwords. Markov statistics, mangling rules, everything was being based off what we learned from the RockYou passwords. […]

This means hackers will soon have a drop-in replacement for RockYou that is over five times more effective: a new de facto wordlist, new patterns to analyze to generate new rules, and new statistics for probabilistic password cracking. When you take both RockYou and LinkedIn and combine them with eHarmony, Stratfor, Gawker, Gamigo, Ashley Madison, and dozens of other smaller public password breaches, hackers will simply be more prepared than ever for the next big breach.

At the time that this breach occurred, LinkedIn was a publicly-traded company for at least a year. They were already the de facto social network for “business” people wishing to market themselves to each other. At the end of their 2012 fiscal year, approximately when this data set is from, LinkedIn had over 200 million members that they could regularly spam with terrible emails.

Think of this breach every time any company asks you for information. LinkedIn was a large, public company at the time this data set was collected. You know of a lot of large, public companies with a lot of information about you. One hopes they aren’t nearly as sloppy, but one also hopes that we never find out for certain.

Tony Fadell is Leaving Nest ⇥ nest.com

Tony Fadell, in a post on the official Nest blog:

Since the launch of Nest in October 2011, this blog has been a place for me to share my thoughts on all things Nest – like explaining why we created the Nest Learning Thermostat, sharing the customer stories that inspire us, announcing new products and services, or highlighting our exceptional partners across retail, energy and insurance providers, professional installers, and the developer community. Today though, my news is bittersweet: I have decided that the time is right to “leave the Nest.” […]

Although this news may feel sudden to some, this transition has been in progress since late last year and while I won’t be present day to day at Nest, I’ll remain involved in my new capacity as an advisor to Alphabet and Larry Page. This will give me the time and flexibility to pursue new opportunities to create and disrupt other industries – and to support others who want to do the same – just as we’ve done at Nest. We should all be disrupters!

No surprises here — it has not been a good year for Nest, amidst allegations of poor organization, overbearing management, and a lack of focus. Just last month, Google announced a “unified hardware division” that would function as a sister company that directly competes with Nest.

It’s a shame that Fadell is out. He is, by many accounts, a terrific product person and someone who truly understands a bigger picture. But Nest has floundered over the past couple of years, escalating with the Information’s blockbuster report at the end of March.

Fadell has announced that his replacement will be cable executive Marwan Fawaz, because when you think “big changes that make both employees and customers really happy”, you think of cable executives.

New York Above 800 Feet ⇥ nytimes.com

This is a tremendous series of essays about New York’s skyline, and those who live at the very top of it. Michael Kimmelman and Helen MacDonald contributed, but my favourite is Jon Ronson’s:

By living above 800 feet, Estis and Enkin are two members of an unexpectedly exclusive group in Manhattan. In my estimation, no more than 40 people currently live above that line, scattered among just three buildings (Trump World Tower, One57 and 8 Spruce Street, a Frank Gehry building downtown). But they’re just the vanguard. The city is in the midst of another building boom, one unlike any that has come before. In the past, Manhattan’s tallest buildings were filled with corporate offices; now, the most imposing skyscrapers are built as homes for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. By 2020 there are expected to be at least 14 residential skyscrapers in New York City. Many of them will block out the light for a great expanse of Central Park. A small city is being built in the sky — but for whom? I was curious to learn about them, so I set out to meet as many as I could.

Christmas in June

On the week-ago episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment delivered a good followup to his piece on Apple and services and my thing on Apple’s recent AI acquisitions:

What I can see is from the outside, and again, like, I mean every time anybody criticizes or has some kind of fear about Apple or […] is pessimistic about Apple in the springtime, everyone always says “oh, just wait, you’re gonna see. This is so stupid for you to be thinking about this now because just wait ’til WWDC.”

Well, you know what? WWDC is not like Santa Claus. [It’s] not magic. They’re not going to solve every problem that everyone wants them to solve in one keynote. That’s not realistic.

And people say that I am naïve for thinking Apple’s not working on this stuff. I think thinking Apple’s going to solve everything in two weeks is naïve.

I think we can look at what Apple services are today, and what they have been — things like Siri, things like search and relevancy and predictive inputs for things like Proactive on the phones and everything, and Apple News, and Apple Music even, like the recommendations [stuff] — and we see Apple’s current capabilities, and we know their past capabilities in big data, AI-based web services. And we see that they can do it, and they can manage to have a service out there, and it can work most of the time and be up most of the time, and be fast most of the time. But that’s, like, what was good enough five years ago — ten years ago.

And now, the companies that were really good at this stuff — like Google — they have moved to a different level of sophistication and performance and consistency, and we haven’t seen Apple match that level. And it took them a pretty long time to get to the last level.

I’ve been thinking about this since last week, and it was rather poetically brought to the forefront again with today’s iCloud outage.

Arment is, of course, correct in saying that Apple isn’t going to become great at this stuff overnight. They have certainly been struggling over the past couple of days in particular, but their cloud infrastructure and reliability has been weak for a very long time.

Steve Jobs, in an email to Apple employees after MobileMe’s fragile launch:

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Two things. First, that was ostensibly a direct copy-and-paste of the original email. How weird is it that Jobs used double spaces after periods?

Second, this isn’t intended as a cheap shot. There are lots of talented people working on this stuff. Many of you reading this are designers and developers, and I bet you’ve all made mistakes in your work. You know how crappy it feels when something doesn’t look or work correctly. Now imagine that it’s affecting tens of millions of people around the world and, yeah, that’s a shitty feeling.

What I’m trying to convey is that the sentiment that Arment and others have towards Apple’s cloud services is deeply-entrenched. Part of the problem is that their major events — like WWDC and the September keynote — are seen as milestones from both an external and internal perspective. They typically bring monolithic updates to iOS, OS X, and now watchOS and tvOS.

But cloud services are far more granular, and require updates on a much more frequent basis. It’s a completely different release style that requires a more fluid approach to development. And I’m sure that’s something that Apple realizes.

Sometimes, it’s as simple as better communications. The addition two years ago of notifications for when reports of problems with Maps are addressed goes a long way towards communicating to users that it’s an actively-developed platform. Conversely, the iCloud System Status page is frequently an embarrassment — I wouldn’t be surprised if it requires manual updates when there’s a problem.

My totally pie-in-the-sky hope is that these major iCloud outages are part of Apple laying the groundwork for a nimbler cloud services development architecture.1 I think we’ll see the first signs of this at WWDC. That’s not to say that everything will be hunky-dory overnight, but I would be surprised if they were not taking steps to modernize their development and release approach for cloud services.

Either that, or the Mac Mini that runs iCloud Drive is smouldering somewhere in Cupertino and nobody knows how to fix it.

Update: WordPress helpfully but annoyingly removed the double spaces in the quoted Jobs email. I have “corrected” this. Thanks, Kenny.

  1. Maybe largely built with Swift? I’m not saying that will be why it would be more robust, mind you.

    Also, the closer these sorts of things happen to WWDC, the more my mind warps those events to fit my hopes and dreams. C’est la vie. ↥︎

Outages Across iCloud Services ⇥ macrumors.com

If my Twitter timeline is to be believed, iCloud Music Library has been suffering some pretty significant periods of downtime over the past couple of days. But that’s nothing on these systemwide outages of major iCloud services, including Drive, Keychain, Apple TV services, and the App Stores. Ouch.

Update: According to a maybe-believable Hacker News commenter, this outage was an issue with Akamai’s DNS.

Apple Releases Updated Version of iOS 9.3.2 for 9.7-Inch iPad Pro ⇥ macrumors.com

Apple originally pulled iOS 9.3.2 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro after it bricked some users’ units. This update reportedly fixes the issue that caused the bricking, but affected users will still need to contact Apple Support to get their iPads un-bricked.

Update: It turns out that the update might be able to un-brick affected iPads, but not from the device itself — you’ll need to plug it into iTunes and try it there. Huzzah.

Police Are Now Filing Warrants for Android’s Stored Location Data ⇥ theverge.com

Russell Brandom of the Verge:

In an affidavit filed on February 8th, nearly a year after the initial robbery, the FBI requested location data pulled from Graham’s Samsung Galaxy S5. Investigators had already gone to Graham’s wireless carrier, AT&T, but Google’s data was more precise, potentially placing Graham inside the bank at the time the robbery was taking place. “Based on my training and experience and in consultation with other agents,” an investigator wrote, “I believe it is likely that Google can provide me with GPS data, cell site information and Wi-fi access points for Graham’s phone.” […]

It’s not clear whether either of the public warrants were filled. No Google-based evidence was presented in Graham’s trial, and the other suspect plead guilty before a full case could be presented. Still, there’s no evidence of a legal challenge to either warrant. There’s also reason to think the investigators’ legal tactic would have been successful, since Google’s policy is to comply with lawful warrants for location data. While the warrants are still rare, police appear to be catching on to the powerful new tactic, which allows them to collect a wealth of information on the movements and activities of Android users, available as soon as there’s probable cause to search.

Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, is there a reason you’d like any company to have your full location history?

iOS also tracks and stores location data — you may have learned this from panicked Facebook posts from people who, understandably, did not read the Location Services confirmation screen they agreed to when setting up their iPhone. However, the location data stored by iOS seems to be limited to the past thirty days, does not appear to be sent to Apple, and only retains frequently-visited locations. However, Apple doesn’t confirm any of this in their iOS security white paper (PDF). Clarification from both Apple and Google would be helpful.

All Major Canadian Banks Now Support Apple Pay ⇥ iphoneincanada.ca

Like any true Canadian, my first Apple Pay transaction was at Tim Hortons. And it worked super smoothly, as you’d expect.

Apple Pay is probably one of the nicest things the company has done for a while, largely because it’s so Apple-y. It’s something that looks completely effortless, yet clearly requires an enormous effort from both hardware and software, negotiations with major banks, and seamless integration between all of those components. When you think of the greatest Apple products over the years — from the original Macintosh, to the iPod and the iTunes Store, right up to the iPhone, and now Apple Pay — they all exhibit these qualities.

Apple Reportedly Prepping a 5K Thunderbolt Display ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac (emphasis his):

Independently, we have heard some rumblings about what the new display might offer. Finally bringing it up to speed with its Retina display Mac cousins, the new ‘Thunderbolt Display’ will likely feature a 5K resolution display 5120×2880 pixels. Moreover, sources indicate that Apple will take the display in a surprising direction, specifically suggesting that Apple plans to integrate a dedicated external GPU into the display itself…

Good guess, me.

It’s too bad that such a display is likely to work only with brand new Macs, like the upcoming MacBook Pro. I was really — naïvely, if I’m honest — hoping that a Thunderbolt connection and external GPU would mean my poky mid-2012 MacBook Air could run it. I guess you could say that I’m suffering from, uh, pixel envy.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

Update: A (controlled?) leak also published by 9to5Mac says that this year’s WWDC will be software-oriented, so don’t expect new displays or new MacBook Pros. Or a new Mac Pro, for that matter, which is apparently updated on a geological timescale.

Mark Gurman No Longer at 9to5Mac ⇥ twitter.com

9to5Mac founder Seth Weintraub on Twitter:

Very sad to announce that @markgurman will no longer be writing for @9to5mac The departure has been a year in the making…

Of all the writers that 9to5Mac has, Gurman is the one that keeps them in the news. His scoops — which include breaking the news of Apple’s in-house Maps app, the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and breaking the news of the 12-inch MacBook, among many others — are known to be reliable, well-sourced, and comprehensive.

Dave Smith of Tech Insider reports that he’s going to be joining a “big name media publication” in San Francisco. I’m guessing Buzzfeed or Recode, for what it’s worth.

Update: Buzzfeed seems more likely to me. Managing editor John Paczkowski and Gurman have a friendly rivalry — I bet they’d make a great team.

Update: Or perhaps it’s another company that begins with the letter B.

Update: And there’s confirmation: Gurman is headed to Bloomberg, and will be based in San Francisco. (Bloomberg the business and Bloomberg the man are inseparable in my mind and completely tied to New York, hence my Buzzfeed guess.)