July 2011
38 posts
1 tag
False Dichotomy of the Day
Who else, John Gruber:
With print, newspapers chase circulation — readers. With the web, they’re not chasing readers but instead page views. It’s a corrupting revenue model.
Here is Fire Joe Morgan on Murray Chass:
Murray Chass: People play baseball. Numbers don’t.
FJM: I actually believe that goofy, anthropomorphic numbers with arms and legs and silly oversize white gloves play all of the...
↯ Nieman Lab: Design is about more than beauty →
Joshua Benton wonderfully says what I tried to say:
I guess my overarching point is that, while there are no doubt lots of pages on nytimes.com or any other news site that could use a once-over, the problems of large-scale information architecture for news sites are really hard problems. Smart people think about these problems. And their solutions require more than a nice slab-serif typeface and...
So Beautiful. So Misguided.
Andy Rutledge offers a redesign of the NYTimes website. It is gorgeous.
It is also awfully misguided. The design is premised on tenets like
Those whose news reporting is of low quality avoid the marketplace and instead concentrate on the mob/opinion arena.
Quality news is valuable. It must therefore have a cost. Quality news is subscription only. You pay for valuable information.
It would be...
2 tags
Paranoia Fantasyland
John Gruber stokes the paranoia flame:
Dave Winer:
There’s a very simple business reason why Google cares if they have your real name. It means it’s possible to cross-relate your account with your buying behavior with their partners, who might be banks, retailers, supermarkets, hospitals, airlines. To connect with your use of cell phones that might be running their mobile operating system. To...
↯ Intellectual Ventures Investors →
What kind of companies would invest in a patent troll like Intellectual Ventures?
Apple, Microsoft, Google…
Of course. As This American Life puts it, “The big companies — Google, Apple, Microsoft — will probably survive.” No shit.
↯ NPR: When Patents Attack →
Very nice piece about Intellectual Ventures and patent-trolling, with this bit at the end:
In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses. Google said it wanted the patents purely to defend against lawsuits and it was willing to spend over $3 billion to get them. That...
Gateway Drugs
Mike Elgan, on how he became an “Apple fanboy”:
In other words, I’ve been primed and conditioned for years to switch to a Mac by Apple’s mobile gateway drugs.
The article is an overall interesting read, but I want to dwell on this point a bit more. A while back, I said it makes no sense to compare how much HP makes on a PC and how much Apple makes on a Mac. This quote illustrates...
↯ Aaron Draczynski: New Features in Lion →
“Sometimes the viral video world seems like an arms race, with parents trying to...”
– Dylan Matthews
↯ Loren Segal's Lion Tips →
I don’t plan to get Lion now, but when I do, I’ll probably enact all these tips. Showing the Library folder is especially crucial.
2 tags
On Advertisements and Content
Sane person John Gruber, 2008:
Advertisements aren’t endorsements. They’re promotional messages from the sponsor, not me. In short, an ad is an ad, and what I write is what I write.
[…] The idea that editorial content is independent of advertising content works both ways.
Apple enthusiast John Gruber, 2011:
But it’s fascinating to me that Google makes so much of its money from spammy...
2 tags
Willful Amnesia
David Barnard:
In “Everything Is a Remix” Kirby Ferguson makes a compelling and fascinating case that innovation and creativity lean heavily on prior art. That’s always been the case in technology, especially software, but I can’t recall a single company going so far in “borrowing” from product after product as Google has done recently.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Reading List, from Instapaper (among...
2 tags
OMG I STILL FEEL SO EXPLOITED
Apple enthusiast John Gruber:
But it’s fascinating to me that Google makes so much of its money from spammy words like “insurance”, “loans”, “mortgage”, “attorney”, “credit”, and “lawyer”.
Time to go to my fav reader mail again:
How can the author of the most popular Mac tech blog still be in the “omg ads exploit the users I feel so violated” stage of his development as a user of the World...
1 tag
“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate...”
– Larry Summers on the Winkelvi
1 tag
↯ John Siracusa's Lion Review, page 3 →
In particular, this change reveals the tremendous weight that Apple gives to visual simplicity. A complete lack of visible scroll bars certainly does make the average Mac OS X screen look a lot less busy. A lack of visual clutter has been a hallmark of Apple’s hardware and software design for years, and iOS has only accelerated this theme. Also, practically speaking, the sum of all those...
Smart Case vs. Cover
9to5Mac reports on a Samsung (-ish) Smart Cover knock-off:
Anymode Corp. […] is in the business of designing, manufacturing and selling a blatant Smart Cover rip-off, pictured above and below. Conveniently dubbed the Smart Case – obviously because Apple trademarked it – the accessory comes in five pastel color choices. It too can prop a tablet upwards and it folds like Apple’s accessory as...
↯ FOSS Patents: Apple vs HTC Battlemap →
Apple isn’t Microsoft. Apple doesn’t have a history of being a particularly cooperative patent holder. That’s why HTC’s situation is much more precarious than most financial analysts may think — with or without S3.
Less cooperative than Microsoft. That’s something.
1 tag
Too Smart Cover
Apple enthusiast John Gruber, right after the release of Smart Cover:
The Smart Cover for the iPad 2 is a joy to connect and disconnect, maintains an overall thin profile while attached, and works terrifically as a prop for the iPad while watching video or typing at a slight incline.
Smart Covers are so cool that I can imagine iPad 1 owners — who think they’re happy to stick with what they’ve...
↯ iOS 4.3.4 Software Update →
Fix for that recent PDF vulnerability jailbreaking opportunity.
↯ MacRumors: 7-day Refund on Apps in Taiwan →
1 tag
↯ Marco Arment: Google and Patents →
The best thing to happen to software-patent-disliking geeks might be for Google to get their ass kicked a bit by patent litigation so they’re motivated to challenge the patent system more seriously than any of us ever could.
1 tag
↯ Twitterer of the Week: @YankeesLose →
↯ Khoi Vinh: Google and Design →
I’m not sure that Page has fully seized the moment yet — these recent launches look better than what came before them, but they’re not terribly inspiring, and they’re certainly not iconic. But they do represent a promising step forward, and they could be setting the stage for much more exciting things.
Fair-handed and exactly right.
1 tag
↯ Dyslexie, typeface for dyslexics →
1 tag
Question of the Day
Player A: career .850 OPS in the playoffs / .756 OPS in ALCS / .832 OPS in WS
Player B: career .925 OPS in the playoffs / 1.047 OPS in ALCS / .973 OPS in WS
Guess which one is called a playoff choke and which one is called “Captain Clutch”.
↯ FOSS Patents: W3C vs. Apple →
There’s still going to be some interest among industry players in the W3C’s ability to develop its standards, but a company like Apple is certainly not the most generous contributor of patents to “free” standards, to put it mildly.
Translation: We support open web standards, unless we can sue the fuck out of other companies.
1 tag
1 tag
↯ Bloomberg: Apple Cutting iAd Prices →
That’s why we’re not Apple’s product.
1 tag
Soon-to-be Mr. 3000
ESPN’s Jayson Stark says an important reason we should celebrate Derek Jeter’s 3000 hits is that he did it as a shortstop.
How many members of the 3,000-Hit Club spent most of their careers as a shortstop? Precisely two — Honus Wagner and Calvin E. Ripken Jr.
This would be relevant if Derek Jeter were at all a good shortstop. He’s not.
According to Baseball Reference,...
1 tag
Reader Mail, Edition #1
From a reader who I’ll call “Dustin”:
How can the author of the most popular Mac tech blog still be in the “omg ads exploit the users I feel so violated” stage of his development as a user of the World Wide Web? You Mac people need some new Mac people.
Srsly. (See my “We are the Product”.)
1 tag
We are the Product
Apple enthusiast John Gruber’s second-favorite meme:
Mike Elgan, back in February 2009:
Google makes billions of dollars in revenue each fiscal quarter. That money comes about by the same process that all companies use: They sell a product to their customers. Their customers pay money for that product.
Who’s Google’s customer? You? Really? When’s the last time you paid Google for...
“[Final Cut Pro] X’s autosave feature is awesome, since FCP X crashes every...”
– David Friedman of Ironic Sans
1 tag
“You are a computer salesman
— I am fucking JAMES BOND!”
– Fake Sean Connery to Steve Jobs [via Most ExeRent Blog]
1 tag
↯ FOSS Patents: Dealing with Lodsys →
Since only a tiny minority of all app developers can really afford a U.S. patent lawsuit, the first thing most of you need to clarify is whether the relevant platform maker(s) will cover you.
When I say coverage, I mean absolutely hard and fast, clear-cut coverage. Anything less wouldn’t do.
At this point, neither Apple nor Google have made definitive commitments to that kind of coverage...
1 tag
Enthusiasm
John Gruber says
“Enthusiast site” is pejorative. Enthusiast implies that MacStories is produced by zealous hobbyists.
Uh, no it isn’t. In understanding people’s claims, it is often relevant to the reader where the claims are coming from, especially if the entity may not be well-known. If someone claims to have evidence disproving evolution, it is damn relevant whether that person...
↯ NYTimes: Apple and Microsoft got Nortel's... →
Now, thousands of crucial patents will be in the hands of rivals like Apple and Microsoft, both of which have shown themselves to be much more aggressive in patent litigation than Google.
