Someone could be building something right now, in secret, that could obsolete Facebook. Software is ‘soft’ for a reason, it can change fast. Facebook could easily get overtaken by an upstart. Why do you think they’re so eager to buy out anything that resembles competition? Remember when MySpace was a behemoth? Everyone forgot about MySpace in a short span of months. Microsoft and Apple have endured as software companies because of the complex and substantial connection they have to hardware platforms. The software behind Facebook is not quite trivial, but don’t forget, there are other smart kids in college dorms all over the place.
In a world where mobile computing is obviously becoming top dog, it’s amazing how poorly Facebook has executed their iPhone app. It’s reliability seems to get worse every day. A company with their resources and talent should have the premier mobile experience, but they don’t. To me that can only speak poorly of the structure of their organization. We aren’t seeing the vast measure of their talent manifest in their product, and that doesn’t seem to present a bright future.
Are a lot of people going to invest in Facebook today? Undoubtedly. Would I recommend it? Nope.
Zeldman breaks it down.
This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation.
Readers should prefer to read things here rather than Instapaper/Readability/Safari Reader Mode/RSS Reader. That is the guiding point that I use to design this site, and of the sites I like best, I find that it’s universally true of them as well.
Adobe releases an early version of its new free, open source code editor Brackets on Github:
This is a very early version of Brackets, a code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I saw a demo of Brackets from Adobe a few weeks ago, and I must say it looks impressive. Even early on, there are a lot of great features and workflows that other web development tools should be taking a hard look at.
Cargo-Bot is a recent game on the App Store. Notable for being the first shipping game programmed on the iPad using Codea, this game actually presents some very fun challenges. It simulates programming at a very simple level, but the puzzles get complicated fast. If you make your way into the hard levels and can still make heads or tails of what is happening, you might want to consider a career in mathematics, or at least computer science.
Paper by FiftyThree has been so much fun over the last few weeks, it’s definitely worth your time. I’m not the greatest artist, but I’ve made a tumblr account to post my drawings just to have a place for them. I’m loving watching their #MadeWithPaper hashtag.
The worst thing I expect of Google is that they will misappropriate my private information for their gain.
The worst thing I expect of Microsoft is that they will fail to capture my attention.
The worst thing I expect of Apple is that they will keep making things so compelling, that I can’t help but give them money.
Some epic iPhone wallpapers by Shawn Blanc #MadeWithPaper.
Totally agree with Ben’s sentiments on Dan Moren’s post:
iMessage is great and so is IM, and they are two very different communication methods, BUT one is the future and one is the past.
Out with the old.
A number of years ago someone linked to some handy shortcut here for the Mac, and I check back every once in a while. They have some interesting tips from time to time, and I wonder why they don’t have consumer oriented videos like this.
I must say however, that I disagree with their suggestion for sending text or email templates. You should obviously use Canned and Canned Mail for this type of thing.
iPhoto rounded out the iLife suite for iOS when it dropped earlier this month. Since debuting, it’s been met with a fair share of criticism concerning quirky interfaces and a higher than average level of complexity for an iOS app. As far as functionality is concerned, iPhoto is a capable app, but its usability seems under par among some of its iOS peers.
We’re left with the question, is it ok for iPhoto to have a learning curve? It does have great in-app help and tooltips, so it isn’t out of reach for someone to get well acquainted with its interfaces. Is that enough? Does the app really bring some new functionality that necessitates an interface that demands a little more investment from its users?
It’s possible that iPhoto is unnecessarily complicated. There are other photo editing apps for iOS that have had more positive critical reception. But at what point is it okay for developers to release somewhat more complex software for iOS?
There are many applications running on computers today that are beyond the usability scope for an average user. For example, I don’t have the first clue how to get up and running in Pro Tools or AutoCAD. Granted, we don’t all need to master a studio album or blueprint some schematics. Certainly a larger number of people want great photo retouching tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean iPhoto has an infinitely varied target user.
It’s left to developers to strike a balance between maintaining high usability standards that delight our target audience, and realizing the full potential of the tasks we can address with newer computing platforms. iOS has made this huge leap in smoothing the rough edges of using a computer, and subsequently many people have drawn a conclusion about what is an acceptable level of complexity for its software. But lets not let this artificial constraint hold back the possibilities that the platform can help us realize.
Louie Mantia:
So buy the new iPad. Or don’t and wait for the next one. No one cares.
It’s hard to imagine the effort it would have taken a few kids to put this together before the advent of computers. And Dave is right, the fight scenes are surprisingly well choreographed, even by the standards of the actual show. (via Dave Caolo)
The via/credit hubbub has come around the Internet again, as it often does. I think Sean Sperte’s take from the last time is still a succinct, poignant viewpoint on the topic:
The way I see it, I should credit the original author or creator of a work, without question.
…
Otherwise, I’m not going to go out of my way to credit someone for merely passing on a link. (It’s the internet, after all. It’s made of links.)
After iOS 5.0 dropped in October I wrote about some glaring issues with Photo Stream that I had assumed would have been fixed when 5.0 came out of beta:
- It makes the assumption that every picture taken or saved, along with all your screen grabs, deserves a place in the cloud.
- Given that assumption, it still provides no way to delete those one-off images individually from the stream.
I’m happy to say as of 5.1 this is finally addressed. You can now delete photos from your Photo Stream which will propagate to all your connected devices. Photo Stream is far more useful having the ability to delete files.
One small caveat, this appears to only be true of Photo Stream images taken after installing 5.1. Deleting older images from my iPhone alerted me that the file would only be deleted from “the Photo Stream on this iPhone”. I decided to make a clean break and delete my entire stream using the iCloud web interface.
Sean tells the story of Sky Balloon’s iPad browser that hit the cutting room floor. Being preempted by Mobile Safari proved we were on the right track, but we bit off a little more than we could chew.
They just found fossilized remains of one of Smaug’s relatives in China.
Those hobbits know how to roll.
Patrick Rhone posts a story of his daughter’s introduction to “normal” tv, and her reaction couldn’t be more spot on.
This point of view paints the perfect picture of why we cancelled cable, and have no plans to turn back. The successes of TiVo, Netflix, and Roku are all evidence that people are pining for change on their big screen. The days where some network executive decides what you watch at 5pm are on the way out. TV is ripe for getting shaken up.
With $100,000,000,000 in cash and iCloud as the basis of their decade long strategy, my only question is, why are they building these one at a time?
Jim and Ben are talking about whether or not the “iOS-ification of OS X” is taking place. This is another semantical issue, and boy, do I love semantics.
Matthew Panzarino argues that it’s more about a unification of Apple’s two platforms:
Apple is going about unifying the iOS and OS X experience in a few ways, none of which have to do with ‘turning OS X into iOS’.
But many of which have to do with making OS X work more like iOS. So, that’s a pretty thinly veiled argument.
Apple has framed the marketing for both Lion and Mountain Lion as bringing ideas from iOS to the Mac. If anything, Lion had more big features unrelated to iOS than Mountain Lion does, e.g. AirDrop, Mission Control, Versions.
Unification is a great word, and I think it is pretty representative of how Apple is trying to forge ahead. However, the fact remains that today, the way that iOS and OS X are converging is by OS X taking lots of cues from iOS, and not so much the other way around. Call it iOS-ification, unification, or whatever else you want.
Do I hope the changing tides will eventually wash some things from OS X back into iOS, of course. But right now, that isn’t what’s happening.
Far and away my favorite iPhone app. I’d wager an estimate that it accounts for about 40% of my time spent using my iPhone. Some great new features in 2.0, including image thumbnails in the timeline, one-click tappable links, and better contrast. If you use twitter daily, I couldn’t recommend this app more highly.
Update: Also, Tweetbot for iPad.
Is whether or not the iPad is a PC a simple issue of semantics? Yes.
Are semantics important? Yes.
We have more access to data than ever before. Companies have this general tendency to release charts and graphs that paint their position in the most positive light, and having clarity and context for any given data is important to understanding the truth. Just ask Horace Dediu.
For the past few decades when you’d see a chart labelled 4th Quarter PC Sales, there wasn’t much ambiguity. It was talking about desktops and laptops, the things with keyboards, mice, monitors, applications, browsers, files, drives, plugs, and ports. They were the de facto tool for getting online, email, productivity, etc., and looking at “PC Sales” usually painted a pretty clear, if not complete, picture of the industry. That isn’t the case anymore.
The iPad threw a wrench into the gears of the computer industry. Whether by cannibalizing traditional PC sales or drawing a wider set of users into the fold of the internet-connected, its impact is being felt far and wide. We need to frame the conversation if we want to have meaningful discussions about our industry, and having meaningful discussions about the PC industry can no longer exclude mention of the iPad.
If the years following January 2007 have been any indication, touch is rapidly fulfilling its destiny to become the predominant human-computer interface, and it will have a reign spanning multiple decades.
Desktop and laptop computers are essential tools for people in a wide variety of fields. Many of the tasks they’ve come to tackle were hard to even imagine thirty years ago, but calling them “personal computers” hasn’t masked the fact that they haven’t been much more personal than your letter opener. Traditional PCs require that you come to them on their terms, overcoming numerous physical and intellectual abstractions. The iPad was the first computer built to meet you on your terms. It brings the last 35 years of digital technology into the physical world in a way so natural, not only do grandmas and toddlers get it, but so do kittens and lizards.
If we aren’t counting iPads and other tablets as PCs, then PCs are well on the road to becoming a radically less relevant category, falling fast and hard. In twenty years, the computer an average human uses will look a lot more like an iPad than it does like a PC. That is, if tablets aren’t PCs, in twenty years people will be saying “what’s a PC?”
Continuing the theme of my last post, Nick Disabato describes his attempt at solving the text referencing problem in his upcoming series of design essays, Distance.
Distance doesn’t have page numbers; instead, it has paragraph numbers at the beginning of each paragraph, which direct readers to the right place in the essay. In the PDF and physical book, these are to the left of each paragraph. Kindle’s and ePub’s paragraphs begin with them. And in ePub, Kindle, and PDF, each of these is represented by a permalink that can be used in a specific citation.
We know this isn’t entirely novel, but maybe it is for interactive texts. And we’re well aware that it proscribes a specific citation style that “breaks” traditional citation schemata, which may frustrate some people – but we didn’t take this decision lightly, and think it’s for the betterment of our writing to generalize citation across analog and digital platforms. It’s increasingly unreasonable to assume that readers will keep their content in just one form, and we’re well aware of that, and trying to account for that in the best way that is as reverent to the text and the reader’s habits as possible, meeting everyone halfway.
(via Jason Brennan)
How do we reference locations in electronic books? Historically, it’s been easy to throw out a page number, and many people were likely to have the same edition as you or at least one with the same page layout. With digital distribution of books coming into stride, that expectation is completely off the table. So, how can we point someone to a specific reference/passage in a book?
The Bible has had this problem covered centuries, but the process also took centuries to come about. Ideally, there would be some standard for breaking up and addressing content within books. Some obvious choices are chapter:paragraph:word or chapter:paragraph:sentence. For it to really be effective though, it needs some level of consistent support within book reading software.
Is Amazon or Apple going to spearhead something like this, or with the advent of search is this a moot point?
Philip Elmer-DeWitt thinks the Apple education event is getting overhyped, and that they aren’t releasing a “GarageBand for e-books” publishing tool. Here he quotes MacInnis of Inkling:
[Apple has] learned their lesson from upending the music industry.
I don’t know whether the event is being overhyped or not, or whether they are releasing any such authoring tool. But if Apple learned anything from “upending the music industry” it’s not that they should avoid shaking things up. I’m pretty sure upending the music industry was ground zero for Apple’s meteoric return, and their current position among the most profitable tech companies in the world.
It’s perhaps the longest running gag in the mobile phone industry that AT&T drops calls. I haven’t experienced that very much, but then again, I wouldn’t top the charts for voice usage on any list. However, I hear people complain about AT&T’s customer service just as frequently, and that’s when I feel like they’re talking about a different company. After a decade or so of paying my own bills and dozens of hours spent on hold, I have to say AT&T has been one of the best companies in regards to customer service.
I just got off the phone with Lisa. Our call was connected almost instantly after being prompted to dial zero to speak to a customer service representative. After I briefly mentioned an unexpected charge that showed up on my bill, she explained precisely where the charge came from, how she’d help me prevent it in the future, and how she would process a refund for the charge. This wasn’t a one-off experience. AT&T reps seem to always know more about my account than I do. What they say lines up with what I see on my bill, or my account online. I’m repeatedly surprised at how quickly they can respond to issues with my account. And this isn’t short lived either. I’ve been a customer since they were AT&T Wireless, through being purchased by Cingular, and the subsequent acquisition and rebranding under AT&T Inc.
Once, within the first few months of opening my account, they even called to let me know that my bill was due that day, and offered to take my payment over the phone to prevent late charges. Did you read that last sentence? I’m not making this up. I’m not sponsored by AT&T or anything, but I feel like with all the bad press they get, I should let people know that my experience with them has been quite different. Am I alone in my satisfaction?
Now if only I could find a broadband company that doesn’t suck. Cough..COM..Cough..CAST…
This isn’t flawlessly well-formatted, but this plugin is highly valuable for any Apple developer or tester who’s ever had to futz around with provisioning files. (via @chockenberry)
Five years ago today Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone with the claim that it has “software that’s at least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone.”
Would you rather have the iPhone of 2007 over today’s next best alternative? I think I would.
Quantum Levitation strikes again.
Incredible! (via Neven Mrgan)
I bet you never thought you’d be watching a lizard play a video game.
Recently, I needed to do this in an iOS project, and it turns out to be harder than it should be to find a simple solution. So I made one here. Just drop this in your network utilities class or whatever.
A new rare Jobs interview turned up, presented by the Computer History Museum.
Facebook
- Groups
- Events
- Apps
- Ads
- Desktop Experience
————————————————————
= Path 2.0
After ages of reheating pizza in the microwave out of laziness, I finally switched to the oven a few years back. Who knew there was an even better way?
Mixel, a social collage making app for iPad (that sounds weird doesn’t it), is out for free on the App Store. It turns out the weird idea is actually simple and fun, and it gets those creative juices flowing. It is very reminiscent for me of playing with Kid Pix.
After posting my concerns with the group messaging issues in iMessage, I posted a bug report to Apple. I marked it as a security bug, because it’s an issue with regards to privacy.
Apple Product Security emailed me a response yesterday to let me know they’re aware of the problem, and are addressing it. Good to hear them acknowledge the issue. Here’s hoping it gets fixed in the forthcoming update.
Codify circled the web today. A new app with the tagline “Make Anything on your iPad.” That’s a bit hyperbolic, but it does inspire you to think creatively.
This reminds me of the stuff that got me excited about technology when I was growing up. Things like playing with Logo on the Apple II computers in our elementary school. I made the other second graders look like fools with all the awesome things I got that little onscreen triangle to do. Hours were spent toying around in HyperCard on our Macintosh Plus, entertaining myself with my imagination. Not to mention Kid Pix, MacPaint, and many others.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia being kicked up as I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography, but seeing this kind of thing on the iPad gets me excited about computers all over again. When I think about how these tools encouraged and inspired me to learn, and consider what the iPad brings to the table, it’s kind of mind-blowing.
Remember all those people saying that the closed nature of iOS was going to stifle this kind of experience for the next generation? To that I would say, nobody complained that you couldn’t create things on the Apple II. Nobody called it a consumption device. And yet, in what universe is the Apple II more capable of creative expression than the iPad?
Think, a kid today can run around with an iPad or iPhone and record and edit a movie, on a single device. Another one can write a short story, without feeling intimidated because they don’t know how to touch type. It’s all right there on the screen. Paint a picture, record a song, and with something like Codify, make your own game!
If I had an iPad as a kid, my parents would have needed a crow bar to pry it away from me, every single night. I can’t wait to see what the next generation starts to do with technology.
iMessage, one of the headlining features of iOS 5, has a peculiarity with handling multiple recipient messages that you should keep in mind.
There have been a number of instances where I’m seeing peoples’ replies to messages that I received from someone else. In some cases it has been clear that they were intended as a private response. If you send a text to multiple iMessage users, anyone who responds inline will have their message sent to everyone. I previously thought this was an issue with people having “Group Messaging” enabled in Settings→Messages, but apparently this functionality comes standard with iMessage. As far as I’ve been able to determine, you can’t turn it off without disabling iMessage itself.
These messages will show an address bar at the top, so you can see that multiple people are in the conversation. However, this still poses a few problems:
- When you get one of the new banner notifications or lock screen alerts, it only lists the sender. There is no indication that it’s part of a group message. If you happen to jump in and respond quickly without being mindful of the contacts listed at the top, you very well may send your message to people you weren’t intending to.
- When you’re sending multiple people a message, you should assume you’re also sending around a list of everyones’ contact information as well. How can you privately send multiple people the same message? It doesn’t appear that iMessage gives you that option.
I could be missing something, but I’d imagine this is not going to work for everybody. If you have some information about this that I don’t, please fill me in. Otherwise, message multiple recipients with caution in the meantime.
