power of the pentatonic scale [permalink]

Incredible! (via Neven Mrgan)

bearded dragon crushing ants [permalink]

I bet you never thought you’d be watching a lizard play a video game.

get iphone wifi mac address

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.

rare steve jobs speech [permalink]

A new rare Jobs interview turned up, presented by the Computer History Museum.

path 2.0

Facebook - Groups - Events - Apps - Ads - Desktop Experience ———————————————————— = Path 2.0

how to perfectly reheat pizza [permalink]

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 [permalink]

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.

imessage followup

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.

inspiring creativity

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.

imessengers be warned

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.

photo stream failings

Photo Stream is a great new feature in iOS 5/iCloud. It makes really great strides towards the whole PC Free situation by taking your Camera Roll online.

But it has two glaring problems:

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.

This really diminishes the possible uses of Photo Stream. I’d love to throw it up as a sideshow on my Apple TV, but the experience suffers when that homescreen I shared or those images I catalogued for work pop up.

I’m looking forward to using it more once this gets addressed.

must see videos

A few videos popped up this week that you have to see, and likely most of you already have. If not, check out the sound effect guy from Police Academy making his voice sound convincingly identical to an electric guitar, complete with finger noise and feedback. It gets better and better all the way until the end of the video.

Michael Winslow – Whole Lotta Love

Also, on a nerdier note, someone has posted a demonstration of quantum locking. I won’t try to describe it here (as I haven’t read about how it works yet), but it will break your mind to see it in action.

Quantum Levitation

Craziness.

goodbye steve

Steve Jobs, chief misfit, knew that the best way to see the future was to build it. His handiwork was a crucial part of inspiring my creativity, even from childhood. From Kid Pix creations to HyperCard stacks, those early experiences with technology resonated with me.

It’s impossible to measure the impact he had on the world, but the desire of so many to reflect on his life speaks to how much he will be missed.

Thanks Steve for never squandering the time you had. Our prayers are for comfort and peace to those who loved you most dearly.

my dad, on yesterday’s news

I read for 20 years that Apple was just barely hanging on. Now with Exxon/Mobil, one of the two wealthiest companies on earth. Two lessons: 1) keep believing what you believe in; and 2) Don’t pay too much attention to the media.

eye phone four ess

In Tim Cook’s first product introduction since being officially named CEO, Apple introduced us to the iPhone 4S yesterday. There was an above average rumor mill leading up to this release, so let’s take a look at how things faired.

Confirmed Rumors

The A5 processor was a pretty fair bet. Following the apparent pattern established last year with the iPad and introduction of the A4, there was good reason to believe the latest and greatest iPhone should run on Apple’s latest and greatest chip. By all accounts the 4S is snappier, and by the looks of it this new computing power is put to good use.

Ever since they acquired Siri in April 2010, rumors have been floating around that Apple would reintroduce their voice recognition technology as a major component of the iPhone. Leading up to Tuesday’s announcement, those rumors began to have a consistent voice. Apple opted to keep the name, and Siri assistant was reborn as the key new feature of the iPhone 4S. While the product demos suggest that Siri is a very capable assistant, I assume there is a reason Apple has chosen to designate it as beta. Rather than jumping up and down for what Siri offers today, I’m much more excited about where this technology will be five years from now.

The 8 megapixel camera was right on the money. Fortunately, Apple didn’t stop there. Better optics, a much improved backside illuminated sensor, and a bump up to 1080p video are all very welcome changes. All this on top of the amazing photo software in the App Store, and the iPhone 4S is the best consumer point and shoot camera you can get your hands on.

Denied Rumors

Numerous iPhone cases and anecdotal evidence pointed to a radical new enclosure design for the “iPhone 5” that many people were expecting to see Tuesday. A sleek, smoothly-beveled metal backing certainly could have made for a beautiful phone. The steam that these rumors picked up just goes to show you how much stake people place in the appearance of their handset. I wouldn’t doubt that there are a some prototypes locked up somewhere in the Apple campus that resemble these designs, but people hoping for a visual refresh this time around were disappointed.

Some late breaking rumors suggested Sprint had scored exclusivity on the purported cutting edge next-generation “iPhone 5” model. Reports said they had agreed to purchase millions of the devices, without regard to whether they would be bought by customers, in order to lock in the deal. While Sprint did make the cut as a new carrier for the 4S, the immensity of the deal was clearly overblown.

One of the longer standing rumors has been an iPhone with a larger screen. This seemed to gain some support from the case designs that were floating around. To me this has never been likely. If you don’t think Apple ran some seriously thorough research and development before landing on the 3.5 inch screen of the iPhone, you might have a narrow view of how they operate. Changing the physical size of the screen affects interaction and software design more than many people would realize. Frankly, I would be surprised if we ever see an iPhone with a larger or smaller screen.

Out of Left Field

Apart from rumors, we saw two new apps debut that hadn’t been talked up by the rumor mill. While they aren’t exclusively for the iPhone 4S, they are noteworthy.

Cards is an app that lets you build greeting cards right on your phone using your photos and a number of templates. Apple will print, envelope, address, and ship your card for $2.99. This represents a small subset of Apple’s print offerings available in iPhoto, but it’s a practical app that I’m sure will get good use.

Find My Friends allows you to keep track of where your friends are whether you’re at an airport, a museum, or a party on the beach. They even suggest you could use it to check and see if your kids made it to school. A really simple idea that will definitely come in handy on certain occasions. Important for an app like this, it seems to have very simple and transparent privacy controls.

Certainly from a technological standpoint the iPhone 4S looks like a substantial bump up from the iPhone 4. While many people are disappointed not to see an iPhone 5, let us remember the 3GS. It’s main advantages over the 3G were a better camera, and faster internals. Sound familiar?

Ask anyone who upgraded from a 3G to a 3GS, and you’ll hear nearly universal satisfaction. As of last quarter, the two and a half year old 3GS was still the second best selling handset in the world, only behind the iPhone 4.

I anticipate a similar story with the 4S.

naming whiplash

The original iPhone was obviously named iPhone. No one was surprised by this. The press had already been calling it that for the better part of a decade. But one of the major criticisms of the original iPhone was its lack of 3G networking. Apple was apparently docked hard enough for this that they wanted to address the shortcoming right in the name when they released the iPhone 3G. This was technically the second iPhone, but 3G was a pretty big deal, so iPhone 2 didn’t work.

Then comes along the next iteration, technically, the third iPhone, but you can’t call it iPhone 3 when you’ve already released the iPhone 3G. The 3GS had two big differentiators, faster internals and a better camera. However, being that it wasn’t a radically new design, Apple decided it was enough to tag an S for speed on the end.

Finally come WWDC 2010, we can finally call this next thing what it is, iPhone 4. All is right in the world. Apple is set up to sequentially name their future iPhones. Everyone will be happy, and no one will be confused.

And then comes the iPhone 4S… wha-WHAT? So, now the fifth iPhone is called iPhone 4S. So, what the heck do they call the next one, iPhone 6? iPhone 5 would be incorrect. Now everything is all messed up again.

My guess is that the next iPhone will go back to the beginning and simply be called iPhone. A numberless product line has worked for both iPods and Macs for ages now, and frankly I can’t imagine what else they could do going forward.

click-wheel ipod games removed from itunes [permalink]

Seems to me this is a pretty good indicator of what’s going to happen to the classic iPod.

a new day

The iPhone has done more than shake up the phone industry—it has shaken up our collective vision for the future of computing. I’ve found myself building, designing, and dreaming about what’s next in mobile software without having to slot out time, or populate my to-do list. That’s the kind of interest and drive I want to have in my full-time work.

Today, I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position at ZAAZ as an iOS developer. ZAAZ is an interactive digital agency, utilizing analytics to plot out digital strategies for their clients. Increasingly, those strategies are calling for iOS apps.

I have always been proud to be employed by 5TH Cell. It has been a privilege to be involved with so many wonderful and well-received projects, and to work with such dedicated and talented people.

I’m looking forward to this new chapter in my career, and can’t wait to build some great apps.

amazon press conference [permalink]

If this is anything other than their tablet announcement, it’s a waste of a press conference.

movie clip brain reconstructions [permalink]

About two and a half years ago I posted about a group of Japanese researchers reconstructing still images from brain waves. It looks like that line of research has progressed quite a bit since then.

layoffs at hp’s palm division [permalink]

I’m sure this won’t hurt their “commitment to developing webOS as a platform.”

reading rainbow gets ipad reboot [permalink]

Three reasons I like this news:

I remember watching Reading Rainbow as a kid.
I’m a pretty big fan of seeing the iPad used in education.
You can never have too much Geordi La Forge.

dress like steve jobs day [permalink]

It was news to me. This morning a coworker told me it’s dress like Steve Jobs day. I, unfortunately, don’t have the black turtleneck nor the New Balance shoes to complete the costume.

friday reading

MG Siegler over at TechCrunch scored a double-whammy today starting with his take on the value of the iPad, and the threat it is posing to Microsoft.

When I went on vacation a few months ago, I brought both my laptop and my iPad. I promised myself I wouldn’t do any work during the trip — as a result, the laptop never came out. Not once. The iPad? I used it every single day, for hours.

It was followed up with an inside scoop on the now-imminent Amazon Kindle Tablet. The touch based Kindle sounds very much in line with the rumors and speculations, but the article is well worth the read. It looks to be the first interesting contribution to the tablet eco-system since the iPad.

Good stuff.

embrace the platform

Shaun Inman recently posted a treatise on touch, where he describes some issues and considerations for a touch control scheme for platform games.

On screen buttons are a stop gap for supporting yesterday’s control scheme on today’s platform, and Shaun is going easy on them when he says they “are not the way forward.” The truth is they are unworkable at best, and they tend to skew towards abominable.

Each platform has strengths, and successful games play to those strengths. Shaun should be applauded that The Last Rocket feels perfectly at home on the iPhone. Few games manage to do this.

The biggest revolution of iOS is getting the computer out of the way of the software. You do that by making the interactions transparent and obvious. Instead of making the platform suit the games, the games must suit the platform. That might mean you shouldn’t port your last popular title, or you may need to think again before building that remake. The way forward for game developers is building titles that embrace the platform.

who is apple’s next taste-maker?

Steve Jobs is a man with impeccable taste, like a Vignelli with a bent for technology. The minutiae of Apple’s pipeline, products, and services have been subject to his stamp of approval for years. There is something cohesive about Apple across all levels of the company. That DNA is a reflection of Jobs’ personal style.

The impression I get is that Tim Cook doesn’t fulfill this role. My main concern for Apple is that they might not be able to keep up the current momentum without that singular, brilliant taste-maker. It is rather well established that matters of style are not well suited to board rooms.

windows 8 ribbon explorer [permalink]

Because Windows Explorer doesn’t have enough buttons, checkboxes, and drop down menus. (via Ben Brooks)

the big apple [permalink]

Silicon Valley capitalism had arguably delivered what the Soviets had dreamed of and failed, modernism for the masses. An iPhone really is the best phone you can buy at any price. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: Lady Gaga uses an iPhone, and just think, you can have an iPhone too. An iPhone is an iPhone and no amount of money can get you a better phone. This was what American modernism was about.

(via kottke)

tools & toys [permalink]

A man buys something for two reasons: a good reason and the real reason.

Shawn Blanc has introduced a new website where he curates a fine list of gadgets and trinkets for the modern geek.

21 kilometer apple logo [permalink]

As a tribute to Steve Jobs, Joseph Tame took a 21km run around Tokyo in the shape of an Apple logo. Now that’s a dedicated fan.

resigned [permalink]

In relaying his thoughts about Steve Jobs resignation, John Gruber writes the most poignant description of Apple’s corporate culture, and what I believe remains key to much of their success.

Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like.

ben’s ideas for hire [permalink]

The concept is simple: ask Ben to write something for you, and when he does, pay him whatever you’d like. He has a proclivity for the written word, and while he may not have an English degree, he does have a rather impressive résumé. I recommend reading every word on his site; it’s all highly entertaining.

Here’s a little taste, where Ben presents his desire to follow the voice in his head:

This is what made Kevin Costner’s character in “Field of Dreams” seem like a crazy person, because he listened to that creepy, whispery voice he heard while working on his farm. But it turned out alright for him, I guess. He got to have a catch with his ghost father and played baseball in a corn field, and then all the headlights appeared at the end as the camera panned out so that you knew the farm was saved. I suppose success looks different for each of us.

Ben is trying to broaden his experiences, and add value to the lives of people along the way. Go ahead, ask him to write something for you. You have nothing to lose.

Also, Ben is my brother, but you shouldn’t hold that against him.

hp and reality

Unless your source for tech news is your local suburban newspaper, you’ve undoubtedly heard about some big changes happening at Hewlett-Packard: considering spinning off their PC business, cancelling the webOS devices they’ve been hyping the past few months, and buying an enterprise company that nobody has heard of for 10 billion dollars, give or take.

On the surface these moves seem irrational and abrupt. But maybe, HP is just the only company with the guts to read the writing on the wall. Quoting from the recent Personal Systems Group press release:

The personal computing market is quickly evolving with new form factors and application ecosystems.

The PC industry is in a free fall, because the iPad and App Store are what consumers want.

Given these realities, HP believes it is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders to explore ways for PSG to position itself to address these rapid changes and maintain its technological and market leadership positions.

Because our initial efforts to keep up have failed, we think it’s best to find a place to put the PSG out to pasture where no one will even notice when it breathes its last.

Even with a minority of market share, Apple’s cut of PC industry profits is unprecedented. Their integrated approach has paid off, and they have the cash pile to prove it. Slow growth and incremental improvement got them to where they are, and that game plan won’t be successfully implemented by anyone else in short order.

It’s disappointing that the vision behind webOS seems completely lost on the executive team of HP. It almost feels as though their corporate structure is incapable of supporting innovation. We can cross our fingers that webOS will fall into capable hands at some point, but for now it seems that HP is just the first player to admit they were in over their head.

luminance [permalink]

Luminance from Subsplash is ‘whoa!’ awesome. (via Sean)

elements 2.0

Second gear has released version 2.0 of Elements, their popular text editor for iOS. It’s a beautiful looking app, and I had been looking forward to checking out this latest release.

The new icon is much preferable over the previous one (always a big deal in my book). Generally, it’s a much sharper release, but it has one glaring problem for me — the iPad.

Elements is still utilizing the extra space on the iPad by stretching out list views, and making lines of text span the entire width of the display. It’s almost a completely naive up-scaling of the iPhone version, almost as though coming up with a more usable interface would just be too hard, so they didn’t even try.

If you’re an iPhone only user, or keen on Markdown support, this could definitely be worth a look. However, if you’re spending any amount of time with your editor on iPad, I’d find this hard to recommend. It seems like it wouldn’t take much to make Elements the front runner in the text editor game, but for now I’m sticking with PlainText.

the patent system isn’t broken – we are [permalink]

For those of us who aren’t well educated about the US patent system, Nilay Patel lays it out nicely. He also includes some plausible directions for reform. It’s the most thorough and thoughtful piece on the subject I’ve seen recently.

the last rocket, a review

The Last Rocket is a new action puzzler for iOS by Shaun Inman. For those of you who haven’t heard of Shaun, he’s a designer/developer with a penchant for fine tuned pixel graphics and 8-bit music. He put his soft spot for retro gaming to good use, making The Last Rocket a fresh experience that emanates nostalgic vibes for any veteran of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

You assume the role of Flip, the last rocket to come off the assembly line as an intergalactic war comes to a close. A fun intro cinematic brings you up to speed. You are in a race to escape your starship, which is under threat of a solar flare. Along the way, you’ll collect whatever gears you come across in an attempt to salvage what you can from the ill-fated vessel.

The core mechanic of the game consists of launching your rocket with a tap, and landing on the opposite wall. You fly around avoiding spikes and other traps as you make your way toward the exit where you complete the level. It’s easy to draw some trivial comparisons to the recent platformer VVVVVV, but rather than strictly a platform game, The Last Rocket is more established by its puzzle elements. It brings a collection of new mechanics to the table, and there is constant variety and interest in the design.

Each level is set with a uniquely shaped layout, fitting within (but generally not filling) a single screen. This solution nicely eludes the problem of displaying the same levels on both the iPhone and iPad where the aspect ratios don’t match, and it makes for some really clever designs. Speaking of the iPad, The Last Rocket plays as well or better on its large screen. With plenty of spare room to make the tap and swipe gestures that control Flip’s movement, it’s a great experience.

As a one man show, Shaun has ultimate creative control, and can follow a singular vision in a way hard to match by large development teams. Not only has he brought his pixel magic to bear with colorful, animated sprites, but he has an equal gift for composing music. In fact, as I write this, I’m listening to the game’s soundtrack using another of Shaun’s creations, NoiseES, a chiptunes player for the iPhone. The music he’s crafted for The Last Rocket is on par with some of the best of the NES generation. There is a healthy mix of both lighthearted and intense tracks, rekindling memories of Kid Icarus and Mega Man 2.

I managed to complete my first play through in just over 86 minutes, though, mileages are likely to vary. Levels have a pretty smooth ramp up in difficulty as you progress through the game. And going for 100% completion by collecting all the gears certainly increases the challenge quite a bit in some later levels.

All in all, this polished retro experience is worth well more than the sticker price. Go buy it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we will continue to see delightful projects like this coming from Shaun down the road.

blog, blecch

When I tell people about this website, I still hesitate whenever referring to it as my blog. The thing is, I really hate that word. ‘Blog’ incites visions of the nearly endless wasteland of garbage.blogspot.com sites that were started in March of 2004 and fell into disrepair a half-dozen posts and two pageviews later. It was a trendy term back in its heyday, but now it’s blanketed over far too many types of websites.

If it isn’t obvious, I spend a fair bit of time keeping up technochocolate, hopefully more than your average blogspot.com offering. It’s a place where I can write, think, share, and exercise my creative muscles. Even more than my site, it makes me cringe whenever I refer to the site of someone who writes professionally online as a ‘blog’. Some responses to an offhanded post I made on Twitter suggest I’m not the only one who disdains the term.

When I try to boil down the broader category of websites that technochocolate falls into outside of the context of the Internet, they could be pretty accurately described as self-published, editorial columns. Wouldn’t that be a mouthful. But hey, column isn’t bad. Is that too misleading? How about webcolumn?

Upon further reflection, this is how many people treat these websites already. Many of us don’t read magazines, but we’re assembling them ourselves all the time. By combining things like RSS, Twitter lists, and other social networks with tools like Reeder, Instapaper, and Flipboard we stand as editors over our own content stream all the time. John Gruber is a columnist for my magazine, so is Shawn Blanc, Ben Brooks, and many others. I get more value from the columnists I read than loads of people with journalism degrees.

I’m certainly not the first person to use the term webcolumn, but I’m going to try it on for size. If you like it, you should run with it too.

Welcome to technochocolate, a webcolumn about chocolatey smooth technology and other stuff by Chuck Skoda.

hello twitter

Meet @technochocolate. He’s a new way to follow along with the posts here. Hat tip to Ben Brooks for pointing me to Twitter Tools and this hack that lets my twitter feed post links without a lame prefix.

the one rule [permalink]

This quote that Gruber excerpts exactly sums up how I feel about Mission Control.

It might not seem like a lot of change, but after religiously trying Exposé and Spaces for years, Mission Control finally feels like my desktop and not a set of sexy but poorly integrated tools that were fun to demo but hard to use.

when patents attack android [permalink]

But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.

Give me a break. Poor, helpless Google, whatever will they do?

driven [permalink]

The conveniences designed to enrich our lives are pointless if, while using them, we endanger our lives. The risks are too great.

Sean tackles texting, etc. while driving, a struggle felt far and wide by our ever more wired public. It certainly hits home for me.

capture give-a-way

As a token of appreciation to my readers, I’ve got 10 promo codes for Capture to give to the first ten people to ask for one.

If you’ve already bought a copy, consider giving one as a gift to a friend who might not be so inclined as to pay 99¢ for it.

Thanks for reading!

Update: Out of promo codes, thanks everybody!

lion tomorrow [permalink]

This is pretty much conclusive evidence that Lion will be out tomorrow.

Update: Apparently, this is official information that was shared in today’s Q3 Financial Results conference call.

web apps, support retina displays already

A lot of web apps, even new ones, can’t seem to manage serving good images for retina displays. All you have to do is explicitly set the dimensions of your images, and serve image files that are double the width and height.

You can see this solution in action in Counter, my web app for counting.

If that’s too easy, you could always draw everything with CSS.

hating waiting

Apple’s OS X Lion and any variety of possible hardware refreshes have been rumored to be released any day now for about the last week and a half. Latest word on the street is Wednesday. I’m not a registered Mac Developer, so I haven’t had access to the beta.

I probably won’t be writing a full review, but I’m looking forward to highlighting what features really affect day to day usage. Based on what was shown at last month’s WWDC, I’m really looking forward to it. Why do they have to be so secretive about the actual launch date?

google plus, initial thoughts

When I disparaged Google’s announcement of the “+1” button in March, it seemed like an orphaned idea that some lofty Gaggler was duped into pushing live. Now, in the context of the newly revealed Google+, it makes more sense. Google’s new entry into social networking seems promising, and I’m hopeful that they have learned from the mistakes of the dearly departed Wave and Buzz.

I’ve spent some time meandering through the new service, and must admit it’s clean and effective. This new initiative for better design has been reflected across many of Google’s other key web services recently. What I find interesting though is that I don’t see any ads. There’s no question of whether Google will integrate ads into Google+, only when and where. But if I were them, as an observer of recent outrages over Twitter’s trend bar fiasco, I’d start the ads sooner rather than later.

If Google+ had the same network of people that I’m connected with on Facebook, I would abandon the purveyor of Farmville and Mafia Wars quite readily. It’s not without overcoming some hurdles that Google will win over the vast hordes of Facebook though. I think the prime difficulty will be planting a foothold in the mobile space. I’m not talking about making an iPhone app. Google says that’s coming soon, and unless it’s built by a crack team of meerkats, it couldn’t be worse than the Facebook app.

What they need is third party app integration. There are thousands upon thousands of mobile apps for Android and iPhone happily integrating with Facebook and Twitter, and approximately zero integrated with Google+. In fact just yesterday Twitter announced it’s one millionth registered app. I haven’t heard or seen anything about a Google+ API yet, but they have a long way to go to catch up with one million apps.

A lot of people are talking about the security issues of letting Google host all your “private data”. I skirt the privacy concerns because, as an adult, I have already assumed the responsibility of restricting the content that I share across various internet services. If you’re posting anything online that you consider to be “private data”, you probably don’t have a good grasp of reality. If you haven’t duly considered the ramifications of what you share online, perhaps you should keep off your Facebooks, Twitters, and Tumblrs until you do. For example, a bad post: “My mother’s maiden name is Bigglesworth and my first pet was named Snuffles! This is a fun game! Would you like to know what city I was born in?”

Bottom line, Google+ is positioned to be a worthy competitor to Facebook, but it’s still far too early to call the game.

preparing for review of os x [permalink]

This video, Preparing for John Siracusa’s Review of OS X Lion, by Pat Dryburgh and Edward Platero made me crack up this morning. If you’ve ever read any of the extensive reviews over at Ars Technica, you know just what this video is alluding to.

capture

Is this a familiar scenario to you?

Launch iPhone Camera.app to record a video
Wait 5 seconds for the iris to open only to find it in picture mode
Tap to switch to video
Wait for the iris to close and re-open again
Never mind, the moment has passed

Well it was for me. It has frequently caused me to miss out on moments that I wanted to capture, but was just too late on the draw. Not to mention all the times I didn’t even bother to try, because I knew I just couldn’t make it on time.

No more! Capture is our latest app from Sky Balloon for addressing this exact issue. It launches directly into recording mode. Quitting the app automatically saves the video to your Camera Roll in the background. No other superfluous features to slow you down or get in the way of launching and letting you capture the moment.

wireless dual-screen gaming [permalink]

The good part of the video in the linked post starts at 1:28.

Nintendo just announced the WiiU last week, but I feel like the iPad 2/Apple TV combo presents similarly compelling gameplay scenarios, available now. You can play games like this today with the optional AV Adapter, and as of iOS 5 this fall, it will be completely wireless.

a week with ios five

My first week with iOS 5 hasn’t been earth shattering, but it has been ground breaking. What Apple has accomplished is reducing friction in the user experience. They prove time and time again that they can repeat this action, which is more than competitors can claim.

The biggest difference in daily usage comes with Notification Center. It has its share of rough edges, but it has distinct advantages over the modal dialogs that have been frustrating users since the dawn of the push notification. The messages feel much more like notifications and less like interruptions. The new system might lack originality, but the notifications work as promised, making this a big leap forward. The lock screen notifications pose some privacy issues. They are configurable, but not to the degree of what content they will display. Mail notifications in particular could use more granular control.

Apart from Notification Center, the changes are so well considered that you almost forget they exist. The geek inside wants to tinker and fine-tune the experience, but it’s unnecessary because ‘it just works’ was more than hyperbole.

Wi-Fi Sync was an omission that had gotten more glaring as each year passed. Although, it isn’t enabled in the beta, tethered syncing also gained improvements indicative of how the experience will work wirelessly. Your device can now be freely operated while syncing, and a rotating icon in the status bar alerts you to the reason your phone isn’t responding quite as quickly. Otherwise, this is iTunes syncing as usual, so not much to talk about here.

The new iMessage protocol is almost completely transparent. When messaging other iOS 5 devices from your phone, messages are automatically sent with iMessage. They bring the benefit of delivery and read receipts, as well as typing notifications to indicate the recipient is working on their response. If you aren’t rocking an unlimited text plan this could significantly undercut the number of text messages you send each month. SMS is basically relegated to a fallback for messaging people without iPhones. iMessage is an incredible feature that you will hardly notice.

And then there’s iCloud. Also transparent, but undoubtedly the most revolutionary piece of the WWDC keynote pie. iCloud isn’t one entirely new and cohesive piece of technology. It’s a smattering of Apple tech both old and new that completes a larger overall picture of your digital life in the cloud.

Device syncing is nothing new to a MobileMe user. Confidently updating a contact or calendar event, and seeing that change ‘instantly’ propagate to another device has been experienced by anyone willing to pay $99/year for such a novel service. What is new with iCloud is that this functionality is available to all developers with the new APIs. Apple has already demoed document syncing with iWork, and we’re going to see apps big and small taking advantage of iCloud to improve their experience across multiple devices.

Managing media has always been a sticking point of syncing with iTunes. Your computer, as your digital hub, stored all your media which you would then pare down to get some desired subset to sync onto your iPod, iPhone, etc. Now with the apparent flick of a switch we can delete songs off our phones, and download them again if we wish. This is true of songs, books, and apps from their respective stores. Not only can they all be downloaded again free of charge, but a list of previous purchases is maintained, so you can always reclaim something that you have previously purchased. This doesn’t seem to be true of movies or shows purchased on iTunes, but that doesn’t mean an agreement for such a thing couldn’t be reached in the future. iTunes Match enables you to treat all your songs in this manner (for $24.99/year), regardless of whether they were purchased with iTunes. But I think Apple is right in assuming this feature will only be necessary for a smaller percentage of users.

Photostream is one of the newer pieces of the puzzle. As our iPhones and iPads take more and more pictures, Photostream soaks them up and parades them across your iCloud account for you to view and copy to your other devices as you see fit. It shows the last 30 days of images (up to 1000) from all your devices. The limitations seem fairly straightforward given the large amounts of data required for storing digital photos, but I could see people being willing to pay for a solution in the future that would make this more flexible.

Cloud backup is possibly the most revolutionary pillar of iCloud. This is what enables PC Free to be a key feature of iOS 5. Your device settings, app data, and Camera Roll get backed up to the cloud from which you can restore the data to a new iOS device wirelessly next time you drop your phone in the lake. This is largely possible due to the fact that Apple already stores your music, books, and apps on their servers. Those things excluded, Apple gives you a 5GB limit of data for your device backups, with evidence that more will be available in the future at a price. Right now, my iPhone 4 backup is about 1.9GB, the majority of which is the 516 items in my Camera Roll. To contrast, my iPad is a mere 252MB, as I have a first generation unit with no camera.

While also subtle in how it affects day to day use, there is a feeling that overtime the advancements of iCloud will have an ever widening impact. Not only painting a new experience for the iPhone and iPad, but broader strokes that change how we think of, interact with, and design the next generation of software.

encapsulation

Before object-oriented programming, we had data and methods, separate and distinct, yet indivisible. Data always needs to be interpreted and manipulated, and methods make that happen. At some point along the evolution of software engineering, it became evident that we should give up the freedom of a world with no walls, and create encapsulation to hold data together with the associated methods that give it meaning and value.

The walls let us put things in order, wrap our work neatly in a box, structure and build. Relinquishing minor freedoms to manipulate data at a low level, we created a newer freedom to design software at a higher level.

From data and methods, you can step one rung higher in the abstraction of software. You will find yourself at files and applications, separate and distinct, yet indivisible.

Apple made a firm stance on Monday. That for the majority of people, they believe the freedom associated with a traditional file system is not worth the trade-off in complexity. Coupling files with the associated apps is more than logical, it’s downright simplistic.

Now there are hurdles. Sharing files with other apps is among them, but they are cases that deserve special treatment, rather than broad, heavy solutions like file managers. The Camera Roll has been a fantastic example of one such solution in iOS, and similar hubs could easily exist for other files as well. The reality is, sharing data with people and services has been easier on the iPhone than ever before. That little “Share” button works wonders. The simplicity outweighs the hurdles by more than just a small margin.

The Finder is my second least favorite Mac app (behind iTunes). There is a lot of promise in an environment free of a user managed file system. I find the concept most welcome.

backblaze external drives, a warning

When I noticed this evening that the amount of data listed as backed up by Backblaze was much smaller than it had been previously, I did some sleuthing. I found some very important information in the external drives help pages (emphasis mine):

Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.

If you, like me, have something important on an external drive—like all the photos you’ve ever taken, or something like that—be sure to plug it in regularly. You might want to make a recurring alarm to remind you. Just thought you should know.

a glimpse of windows 8 [permalink]

A preview of Windows 8, which kind of looks like a giant version of Windows Phone 7 and regular desktop Windows 7 living side-by-side.

iwork for iphone [permalink]

What the… …what?

I had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.

so much for a week of rumors [permalink]

Apple let the cat out of the bag with plans for next week’s keynote:

Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

I can’t recall them disclosing a major keynote like this in recent memory. It’s possible they’re still worried about people getting upset that for the first year since 2007 we won’t be seeing a new iPhone in June/July.

ipad usability: year one [permalink]

Jakob Nielsen followed up his study from last year on iPad usability:

Except for people who lived alone, our study participants uniformly reported sharing their iPads with other family members. When we asked them to walk us through the apps on their tablet, people frequently came across apps that someone else in their family had installed.

It will be interesting to see if/when/how Apple decides to address the multi-user issue.

(via Wired)

slow week

Apple is fighting off patent trolls and malware, Google wants to hold your money in their wallet, Amazon wants to sell you Mac apps, and Microsoft wants to show you their awesome phone update.

Those were some of the bigger tech news items this week. I didn’t find them very interesting, or have anything to add to the stories. That’s why I haven’t posted about them until now. Next week, the rumor mill might start kicking as we lead up to WWDC. Hopefully, there will be more noteworthy items to share.

amputee demonstrates his bionic hand [permalink]

It’s strange to imagine what will come with advancements to this kind of technology, but it’s an increasingly sci-fi world we’re living in. (via Slashdot)

instapaper redesign by tim van damme [permalink]

Good developers love to get solid design criticism of their work. But with software that has matured, it’s hard to give suggestions and criticism that take all the angles into account. Here Marco gives some thorough feedback to a proposed redesign of a few parts of Instapaper’s iPad incarnation. It’s very enlightening to the depth of design work that goes into such a well traveled app.

ranking apps

Neven Mrgan talks about the despicable “virtual currency” apps that have ascended the ranks of the Top Grossing section of the App Store:

You will not see Apple promote these apps; they know very well what the score is. If Apple wants the Top Grossing list to be at all useful, they’ll change how it’s calculated.

I fully agree that these apps are terrible, but for Apple to change the Top Grossing ranking, it would no longer be representative of its name.

And here’s my bold statement — there is no purely statistical way to rank good apps.

These poker, etc. apps have actual people continually paying money to use them. As much as we can denigrate these developers, it doesn’t change the fact that someone thinks it’s worth paying them money. Apps that we see as terrible and valueless are statistically telling us a different story. It is unlikely that Apple will ever solve this issue. I’m hoping to see some third parties solve this problem. As it stands, the App Store isn’t really a great place to discover quality software.

chromebooks

Wired just posted an article outlining Google’s new Chromebooks computing solution. For a small monthly fee, Google hopes to manage the needs of many business and education users with light-to-moderate computing needs. Chrome OS is still a far cry from the maturity of platforms like Windows and Macintosh, but however you look at it, $28 per month, per user is a pretty appealing price tag for computer hardware, software, and support.

Back in 2009 after Google first announced Chrome OS, I wrote an article suggesting how it could change things. My main point focused on consumers who primarily use their computers for email, Facebook, and media consumption, but there were a few things to say about the enterprise as well.

The Windows-centric workplace is fading into the internet-centric workplace, and this is exactly where Google is positioning Chrome OS.

It will be interesting to see which institutions will find these laptops sufficient for a meaningful percentage of their users, but internet services and web-based software have only become more central to our workplaces and schools in the past two years.

android sees 400 percent rise in malware [permalink]

The report noted that enterprise and consumer mobile devices are exposed to a record number of security threats, including a 400 percent increase in Android malware since the summer of 2010.

One of the reasons I’m happy Android is around — it’s helping keep malware off my iPhone.

see through frosted glass [permalink]

Another nifty trick from Lifehacker. Although, I imagine it only works with glass that is only frosted on one side.

google music beta

Google at its annual I/O conference just announced Music Beta, a music streaming solution similar to the recent Amazon Cloud Player and the alleged, forth coming iTunes Music Locker. What I find most interesting is a phrase near the bottom of the initial splash screen.

Music Beta is available free for a limited time.

This would mark a big departure for Google, the company that has thrived on giving away ad-supported software. Why don’t Android users buy apps? Why would they? They have been accustomed to getting the software that is most important to them for free. I think once Google moves Music to a paid service, it’s going to meet a lot of resistance. People in Google’s ecosystem are just not used to paying with cold hard cash.

callout

Ben Brooks:

Are these things that you could do in other apps? Certainly, but not with the ease and beauty that [app name] gives you.

One could say those same words about Tweetbot.

instapaper free takes a vacation [permalink]

Marco talks about an experiment he’s been running with the free version of Instapaper. He shares some great data and analysis of a very common App Store strategy. This is a must-read for anyone developing for iOS.

apple q&a on location data [permalink]

And now, Apple’s official response.

privacy and incentives [permalink]

The iPhone location database has gotten mainstream attention, and I’ve had many of my less technical friends asking what it’s all about. Marco Arment wrote a post that is somewhat of a mini state-of-privacy address. For anyone concerned specifically about the iPhone location issue he writes:

Most of what your iPhone knows about you is stored on your iPhone — a device in your physical possession that you can quickly wipe locally or remotely at any time — and, as far as we know, is not transmitted to Apple or anyone else. To access your private data, a snoop or government would need physical access to your phone.

ipads on the way to hospital [permalink]

Ottawa Hospital, which already has about 500 Apple tablets being used by health-care providers, has recently ordered another 1,800 iPads to replace paper medical charts.

it’s the little things

There seems to have been quite a bit of dissent online the last few days about what differentiates Tweetbot from any other Twitter client, other than beautiful UI chrome. Truly all the little things are what give the app its edge. I’ve had a better overall experience with Tweetbot than any client I’ve used for an extended period of time (Tweetie, Twitteriffic, Echofon, Tweetlogix, …), but I don’t feel like I can pinpoint all the reasons why.

Here are just a few that I can:

no stupid chat bubbles
Why do so many clients think that direct messages look better in chat bubbles? Like, I get it… it’s a private conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to make it ugly, not to mention, harder to read. In Tweetbot, DMs are visually consistent with every other list view in the app. They are also ordered with recent messages on top, so they bear stronger functional consistency as well.

“12 new posts”
Tweetbot is the first client I’ve checked out that puts the count of newly loaded tweets directly into the timeline upon refresh. I know how many tweets I have left to read, and can determine whether I have time to tackle them now or need to come back later. And it’s a good point of reference to see where my last refresh occurred right in the timeline.

retweeted by so-and-so
Many clients make the retweet visualization too easy to miss, and I’m left wondering why this tweet ended up in my timeline. Others try to do something clever, like overlay the retweeters icon, or something else that forces me to shield my eyes. Tweetbot’s solution is excellent. It’s both visually clear and unobtrusive.

customizable tab bar
The tab bar is customizable in a way that humans can manage. This post: The iPhone Tab Bar, has some points about the standard “More” functionality. Namely, it references research that suggests the feature confuses users, and they generally avoid it. There’s nothing confusing about customizing the tab bar in Tweetbot. Although the app does break some other “rules” for tab bar usage from the aforementioned post, the same rules tend to be broken by most good Twitter clients.

Good UI adds great value, and good UI is all about the details. Tweetbot is a great app, and despite much ado about it’s lack of differentiation, it’s worth a good hard look if you spend any significant length of time using Twitter on your iPhone.

how to fix any computer [permalink]

There. Now no one can ever again ask me how to fix their computer.

feature distinction

Ben Brooks and Sean Sperte had a little discussion today: AppSuration and Unique Traits begat Sean’s Response begat UI, UX — Style.

They both make some good points.

Ben seems frustrated at the multiplicity of apps that don’t bring anything truly new to the table. That’s a sentiment I’ve found myself complaining about lately as well. It seems like a significant amount of mindshare keeps solving the same problems over and over again.

Sean defends user experience as a distinctive feature. This idea helped convince us to make Canned. We didn’t bring any features that didn’t exist in the dozen or so apps that beat us to market. In fact, we had less features, but focused on a simple and compelling user experience. That is the edge that makes Canned worthwhile. It’s a tradeoff that diminishes complexity.

You’ll always find the most clutter in the marketplace among apps that people use the most. Note-taking apps, RSS readers, photography apps, and yes, Twitter clients. It stems from the fact that designers love to develop apps that fulfill the user experience they’re looking for, and that’s different for every person.

Tweetbot has optimized the way I use Twitter on my phone. It has brought many features that seemed clumsy or inaccessible to the forefront in a way that makes me do more while spending less time in the app. I couldn’t be happier with it, and I’m excited to see where the roadmap is headed.

cloud my apps

John Gruber just posted a great piece, Cutting That Cord, concerning the state of cloud services for iOS. Certainly a topic of relevance in today’s mobile landscape. More and better cloud syncing services could bring our post-PC devices into the stratosphere in both usefulness and simplicity.

One of the four applications of cloud syncing that Gruber mentions, device backup, I see as a heavy handed solution. Any iOS user who has stumbled upon their device backup folder in iTunes knows it claims an unruly amount of space. Clearly, sending and receiving full device backups over the air is a bit beyond the reach of the state of bandwidth today. Gruber knows this: “It just isn’t technically feasible to have people backing up and restoring 32 or 64 GB of data to the cloud.”

But what is in those 64GB? Media, apps, and app data. Let’s break down the state of syncing for each of these.

Media
Photos, movies, and music regularly occupy the largest chunks of data on a mobile device. But these types of media already have some cloud solutions available, albeit imperfect ones. Rdio can help you ditch your music library. Netflix gets loads of video over the air. Photos can be pushed and pulled to services like Flickr. And there are other solutions on horizon. Amazon just recently released Cloud Drive, a service that seems awfully close to the oft rumored iTunes Locker.

Apps
You might need backup for Apps if you are trying to archive older versions, or if you want to hold back from updating. In that case, you’d presently be on your own to toy around with iTunes and save all those separate application bundles yourself. But technically, as all (legitimate) iOS apps are hosted on Apple’s servers, they are already backed up.

App Data
This is the biggest point of interest to me, and the one I’d like to speculate about. Currently, iOS app data generally lives in a documents folder inside the app bundle. There is no general filesystem access like on a traditional PC. Apple could solve a number of problems by simply allowing developers an API to synchronize this folder to those shiny new servers in North Carolina. Even a modest 20MB of storage would handle backup for a large percentage of apps. Moreover, if the API had notifications on when changes occur to that data in the cloud, they could enable developers to make simple syncing solutions for running their apps across multiple devices. This is a win on so many levels.

I feel like tackling the specific cases of backup individually can handle our leap onto the cloud much more smoothly than a bulky overreaching solution. As Gruber speculated, “…the iPad and iPhone won’t drop their connection to iTunes running on a PC in one fell swoop. It’ll be incremental…” And I think a solution for backing up data on the app level would really fit nicely into an incremental transition to the cloud.

tweetbot review [permalink]

Do you use twitter and an iPhone? If you haven’t read this yet you should. Another fine review from the venerable Mr. Blanc.

lion signature capture [permalink]

This is actually a pretty sweet solution to a common problem.

the iphone tab bar [permalink]

Five tabs walk into a bar…

Okay, I apologize for that. But if you are at all interested in UI design, this is a great read about some considerations for the Tab Bar interface element on the iPhone. It’s people that think about stuff like this in such great detail that make great software. (via Ben Brooks)

new facebook mobile site

If it’s been a while since you’ve been to m.facebook.com from your smartphone, you might want to check it out. I saw that it was updated last week sometime via a bunch of twitter chatter, and I’ve been using it since as a replacement for the native iPhone app.

It is a far simpler and cleaner experience for using facebook on the go. And the big plus for facebook, it runs on any mobile device with a half-decent browser. I could see a lot more web services going this way as a mobile solution given how well this has come together.

ibooks can open epub books directly [permalink]

This is news to me, and also an awesome development. Of course, iBooks could always open books you copied onto your iPad through iTunes, but syncing the files is a huge barrier to entry to some people. Being able to get books directly onto the device through email and Safari is a big win.

rules from a user to software developers [permalink]

Ben Brooks highlights some great guidelines that would serve developers well. This one is my favorite:

Look at what other apps do wrong, more than you look at what they do right — fill the voids, don’t clutter the market.

bulls recruit boozer with an ipad [permalink]

The Bulls appear to have started using the iPad as a recruitment tool for the team. (via Ben Skoda)

predator – incredible object tracking [permalink]

The doctoral research of Zdenek Kalal produced some remarkable object tracking software.

do not anger the alpha android [permalink]

From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google’s most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans.

A shining pinnacle of openness. (via Daring Fireball)

google makes a +1 button [permalink]

It boggles my mind how out of touch Google is. Can I get a +1?

broken ios icons [permalink]

Neven Mrgan points out one of my biggest annoyances with iOS icons that seems to be increasingly prevalent.

the best computer

A few years ago I had a burgeoning interest in photography. As I researched the websites and listened to the podcasts requisite with developing my new hobby, I kept coming across a common phrase. “The best camera is the one you have with you.” It seems to be an axiom of photography. You don’t always have your two pound DSLR on hand, and it just so happens that you can’t take a photograph without a camera. Therefore, if you find a moment in time worth capturing, whatever camera you have with you is the right one for the job.

Extrapolating the same concept beyond photography, the best computer is the one you have with you. These days that tends to be my iPhone. On top of being the camera that is always with me, here are a few things it helps me do:

Pay my bills.
Read a book.
Book a flight.
Paint a picture.
Tune my guitar.
Make a video call.
Listen to my music.
Launch birds at pigs.
Wake me up on time.
Create a photo album.
Share a clever anecdote.
Write a post on my blog.
Find the nearest Starbucks.
Pay for that Starbucks latte.
Beat my friends at Scrabble.
Stream a movie or TV show.
Broadcast a live video stream.
Make a restaurant reservation.
Subscribe and listen to podcasts.
Share a grocery list with my wife.
Get directions to a friend’s house.
Add someone to my address book.
Tell me which direction I’m facing.
Find out what my friends are doing.
Record, edit, and share a short film.
Check the tasklist on my latest project.
Remind me of meetings in my schedule.
See new posts from my favorite websites.
Tune into a custom internet radio station.
Find out how much money I have in the bank.
Share a photo on my favorite social networks.
See how many people are visiting my website.
Get to those articles I’ve been meaning to read.

I could go on.

I’m not generating sales presentations or writing books on my iPhone (although, neither is strictly impossible), but I can quickly and easily do more things with this phone than any computer I’ve ever used. This phone that stays on all day long, continuously connected to the internet, and fits in my pocket.

The iPhone is the most useful computer in the world.

my via code of conduct

Attention is big money on the web. Many people are making their living sharing and editorializing the things they find online. Your sophomore english teacher liked to see your sources, and we would too.

As far as I’m concerned, everything you post a link to should contain a via reference with two exceptions:

You saw the linked content in your RSS feed, from performing a search, or navigating directly to the linked website by entering the URL.
The person who provided you the link prefers not to be referenced or doesn’t have an address where you can send people their way (and even then, you could still give a shout-out).

Otherwise, there is really no excuse. You either followed a link on someone else’s site or twitter feed, or you were suggested through an email, SMS, or instant message.

Some people really count on that attention for their livelihood. You should give it to them.

china grants apple eleven patents [permalink]

Wait a second… isn’t the real news here that China has patents? Since when has China had regard for intellectual property?

ipad, for everything else

Marco Arment of Tumblr and Instapaper fame recently posted an article entitled Moving on from iPad “office productivity” apps. Trying to boil down the article doesn’t really do it justice, but he basically states that Apple, having touted the first iPad as a viable “office productivity” device, has now taken a 180 degree turn to focus on “casual media creation.”

Apple’s introduction of the iWork suite of apps with the original iPad wasn’t a declaration of the purpose of the device. It met a need to bring editing functionality to some key document types, but they never supposed that people would be writing their TPS reports on an iPad while they suffer from a case of the Mondays. What Steve Jobs sold us with the first iPad, was the idea that this new tablet had to do certain things better than a computer. You might recall that he left word processing and spreadsheets off that list. iWork was simply the software best suited to debut the platform as more than a plaything, and it sent a clear message.

But even as Apple moves into releasing more of the iLife, casual media creation apps that hallmarked the Mac, they aren’t doing it to fall in step with how people actually want to use the iPad. They’re simply creating what they love. They didn’t create GarageBand and iMovie to convince the world of the value of an iPad. They created software that they want to use, and that’s what makes it so good (and why Instapaper is so good). Was there ever any doubt that both iWork and iLife would eventually find their way onto whatever tablet Apple dreamed up? The effort they put into making the best platforms and hardware only exists as it enables them to make better software.

Apple isn’t looking to find the “sweet spot for the iPad’s usage.” With the Mac, most of the software an average consumer wants to use comes standard. But the iPad is about more than meeting the needs of the status quo. Don’t believe me? Watch Apple’s iPad: Year One video. This is where Apple sees the iPad, filling every little niche where a traditional PC is clumsy or unworkable. Apple made a computer that you can fit into any arena or scenario. Not only is there no right or wrong way to hold the device, but there’s no right or wrong task to give it. Yes, the device has technical limitations, but over time it will be computationally just as capable of any task desktop computers do today.

Graphical user interfaces brought computers a big step forward, masking the underlying technology, and bringing the software closer to the user. But it wasn’t emphatically better suited to every computing operation. There are still many tasks that are keyboard-centric, which get only marginal improvement from a GUI environment. Even today, many power users feel slowed down by mice, windows, and file explorers, and lean heavily on keyboard driven commands and shortcuts. Apple doesn’t think the keyboard is irrelevant. The iPad simply proposes that it’s less relevant.

So we have tasks well suited to command-line terminals, tasks well suited to our present desktop and laptop machines, and we will see that many, if not most, tasks benefit from this new leap onto the multi-touch interface. The question isn’t, what tasks does Apple think the iPad is suited for, it’s, what do you want your iPad to do?

iphoto for ios [permalink]

Neven Mrgan wrote a post with some speculation about iPhoto and iLife based on what we’ve recently seen with iMovie and GarageBand for iPad. He also had a very positive reaction to GarageBand.

GarageBand in particular is a simply phenomenal app, going well above and beyond most people’s expectations for a creative/consumer app on a tablet. It’s not perfect, but nothing is; given that this is, in a way, a 1.0 release (few ideas from GarageBand for the Mac are reused) I wouldn’t hesitate calling it perhaps the most impressive 1.0 I’ve seen… ever.

I might go so far as to say GarageBand is one of the best pieces of consumer software I’ve ever seen. If this is what the future of iOS software looks like, competitors have a very long way to go.

some early garageband demos

Just playing around with GarageBand briefly, I know people are going to make some really cool stuff with this. Here are some of the first videos I’ve found on YouTube of people using it with at least some level of success.

garageband for ipad [permalink]

If you are any kind of musician, or would like to be, and you have an iPad, you will want to try this. The touch instruments are so well done, and it’s really fun to play around with. Well worth the $4.99 pricetag.

community [permalink]

Some delightful thoughts about what the internet means for community and relationships from Aaron Mahnke.

method & craft [permalink]

“The DVD extras of design.” It looks awesome. I’m still browsing around, but there is tons of good behind the scenes stuff from some of the web’s best design gurus.

server attention span [permalink]

This highlights one of the biggest problems browsing on an iPhone or iPad. Really wish web designers would get a clue how to appropriately target mobile devices.

updated archive

In case you haven’t clicked around in a while… When I switched to WordPress I worked a little bit on updating the site archive. Firstly, I added a Google site-search field, as that ended up being the way that I most often search for old posts. Also, I’ve put a list of the most high-traffic pages for quick reference or browsing for people not familiar with the site. Hopefully it’s a little more useful than it has been.

ipad part deux

If the iPad weren’t in a strong enough position to hold off the competition prior to Apple’s announcement today, it is now. With faster processing, cameras, a further untouchable aesthetic, and a hugely more vibrant software environment than any comparable platform (Flash or no Flash), the iPad 2 has made sure anyone trying to get in on the tablet game is more than a year behind. Meanwhile, Apple is undoubtedly forging ahead on iPad 3.

While most of the changes were expected, if not modest, it’s a very solid update to an already runaway success. I seem to share the sentiment of many in the tech community that it’s not a necessary upgrade for many current iPad owners, myself included. But it certainly does sweeten the deal for those who were on the fence.

Oddly the most magical thing they presented today was the optional cover. It’s something that shows up in Apple products from time to time, a feat of apparent genius that Jony Ive calls a “well considered solution.” And somehow, magnets are often involved. In a solution similar to the MagSafe connector and the latch-less MacBook latch, they’ve overcome the bulk and clumsiness of iPad cases with one fell-swoop. If Apple’s demonstration video isn’t enough, hands on reports suggest it is all it’s cracked up to be.

Unless your iPad is your principle computing device, upgrading to an iPad 2 is likely unnecessary, but if you have been considering picking up a tablet this is a great time to take the plunge.

hello wordpress

Hi everybody, technochocolate is now on WordPress. Expression Engine has served me well the last two or so years, but I was too far behind to upgrade (without paying for it). And being as I’m still working towards making a cumulative $10 from the site, I couldn’t really justify paying for a license.

Oh well, I’m actually kind of digging WordPress. I already feel like I know more about what is going on behind the scenes than I did with EE. That might sound wrong, don’t I want the platform to be easy? Yeah, but I’m a programmer, so having a better understanding of the platform means I can make updates with less frustration. I’ve brushed up on my php, and I’m ready to go.

I apologize to feed subscribers if your reader suddenly shows 15 old posts as new ones. That seems to happen every time someone changes the format of their feed. Hopefully it won’t happen again for a very long time.

Anyways, I’m excited for the Apple event tomorrow, and I’ll be sure to share any thoughts in the coming days.

the real success behind ios

The App Store. It’s the real innovation behind the iOS platform. How do I know? Because it has been the biggest battlefront for Apple since day one.

Straight back to the Macworld Keynote in 2007, the iPhone announcement incited developers with deep disappointment for not being provided an SDK for native app development. We’re all but certain that the SDK itself existed back then. In fact, iOS shares most of its development environment with Mac OS X. What wasn’t ready for primetime was the App Store. The process of screening applications, pushing updates, and creating guidelines in an attempt to protect Apple, its customers, and its developers, all had to be developed from scratch. Many aspects of the App Store were gleaned from Apple’s experience with iTunes, but there were still many unknowns.

After the App Store’s release, the battles only got more heated. Developer wait times, pulled applications, ambiguous and ever-changing guidelines, the Flash debacle, and now, this subscription fiasco, all have been in the forefront of Apple news and community discussion. But how could this not be expected? The App Store debuted as something altogether new, but it was so quickly taken for granted. I won’t rehash the pros and cons of the store that so many blogs have captured and repeated. The simplicity of having such a safe environment for buying and downloading software speaks for itself, and it has been paramount in the success of iOS.

The competitors of the iPad are trying to compete with USB ports, Adobe Flash support, built-in cameras, other hardware features, size, and weight, but many of these are product differentiations based on a bygone PC era. The software ecosystem is what sets the iPad apart, and it’s what none of these other platforms provide. No one has a store that lets me download and purchase fast, native software, with any more confidence in its safety and security than just downloading some .zip archive off the web. Until someone takes the App Store seriously, and makes a model that competes with Apple’s toe-to-toe, none of the competitors are going to make headway in gaining tablet market share. And without a solid competitor, Apple has no reason to kowtow to anyone’s suggestions as to how their store should operate.

auto-correct needs help

This morning I had a texting conversation with my brother which started when he sent me this:

I have very few complaints about the iPhone, but the autocorrect keyboard function is so incredibly unintuitive sometimes, it’s embarrassing.

He later pinpointed one of the primary problems with the feature.

…they have a LOT of really obscure proper nouns, acronyms, etc. and it frequently chooses those over much more sensible words.

I haven’t really thought about it very much, but it is pretty bad. Yesterday I sent a text that I started with “Woohoo!,” which the iPhone promptly auto-corrected to “Elohim!” While it is possible that one day I might send a message referencing Elohim, it isn’t likely to come up from day to day for your average iPhone user.

In fact, there is a popular website (beware, it’s often crude) highlighting this particular deficiency of the iPhone. It can auto-correct some of the simplest words into things that are way out there. Oftentimes, one or two misspelled letters are preferable to a completely altered word that may or may not be even in the ballpark of what you were trying to type.

I’m not sure if auto-correct is over-engineered or under-engineered, but either way it’s far from perfect.

an intrvw with shawn blanc [permalink]

Ian Hines interviews Shawn Blanc about his writing and more. It’s great.

blog pressure

Quite a few folks have been writing about writing recently. I blame Shawn Blanc. But it’s brought to the surface something I’ve been trying to rationalize for a while, the pressure to blog more.

To one person writing is about sharing a personal passion. Another is working for his livelihood. Someone else enjoys having a channel of creative release. And perhaps most common but least esteemed, a fourth person writes to garner attention.

Actually, all people who write have a complex hierarchy of these reasons and motivations and priorities. Whether we have each laid out our hierarchy explicitly or not, it exists. As with any pursuit, knowing the why behind your writing is crucial in establishing its place in your life.

Most of my favorite writers tend to blog frequently, many of them multiple times daily. Their experience might be why I’m drawn to their work. In many cases, I don’t know the impetus behind their writing. It’s likely that they can enumerate a list of reasons and motivations and priorities that invite such a regular pace, but I can’t.

I’m a blogger primarily because it’s fun. From time to time I have an idea. Maybe I think it’s an original thought. Perhaps I believe I can communicate an old idea in a way that other people can’t. Other times I just like contributing to a current conversation. Whatever it is, inspiration strikes, and I have a blog as an outlet.

After years of blogging casually, and having jumped from zero to mild on the attention scale once or twice lately, I have begun to feel pressure to write more. It’s probably from rubbing shoulders with more bloggers, and getting some positive feedback. However, after due consideration, I don’t plan to yield to the pressure.

There are loads of activities that I love to give time and attention. Writing is one among a very long list. Truth be told, it isn’t all that near the top. Not because it isn’t valuable, but because that’s where it belongs for me. That’s where it sits in my hierarchy. I’ll continue to write when inspiration arrives, but I’m going to write at my own pace. In the end, even though the attention feels nice sometimes, I don’t want to be that fourth person.

If I go a few days without posting, don’t worry. I haven’t gone missing. I hope when I do write, it’s something worthwhile to read, but that’s really for you to decide.

thought on hp announcement

Today’s HP announcement of assorted touchscreen devices slated for this summer echoed with a fresh wave of the too little too late sentiment from loads of pundits and bloggers, but I’m not so sure. Regardless of how late they arrive to the party, there is always going to be room for a solid competitor to the iPad in the tablet space, and WebOS seems as good of a bet as the other contenders.

Sure Android has offerings out already, but we can’t pretend they have a meaningful share of the market yet. Not to mention that the Android tablet space is spread so thin, as CES was so kind to show us. The closest thing to a killer piece of hardware is the Samsung Galaxy thingy, and everybody willing to admit it knows it’s not putting any pressure on the iPad. Having so many tablets available hasn’t been as advantageous as the worlds most “open” company would have hoped.

Palm has been one of the few companies who has risked innovation in the tech world on par with Apple in the past. I’d be happy to see them dish out some solid competition.

macworld review [permalink]

Canned got reviewed by MacWorld’s AppGuide.

app store review process is good, actually

Marco Arment posted an article today lauding the App Store review team.

…the review process has created a level of consumer confidence and risk-taking that has enabled the entire iOS app market to be far bigger and healthier than anyone expected.

The press has been so Apple happy that they pounce on every negative fume that crosses the airwaves. Nobody has been stopping to mention all the benefits of the process. Marco’s article very much reflects the thoughts I wrote about the state of iOS software distribution shortly after the iPad announcement broke. Never has software been easier to buy.

verizon iphone pre-orders sell out [permalink]

In barely three quarters of a day, Apple has already sold out of Verizon iPhone pre-orders. This is just online orders, and only available to people already on Verizon. Nobody knows for sure how many pre-orders they were making available, but a good starting guess would be, a lot.

egypt shuts off the internet [permalink]

Riots ensue. Note to governments—don’t shut off the internet.

canned, sms for jedi masters

We made Canned, because we thought it would be a quick, fun project to get on the App Store. Sean was dissatisfied with the current offerings, but had to do a bit of convincing to motivate changing gears from our current project. I wasn’t too keen on the idea at first, but after using it for a few months, I love it. I wanted to share how useful it’s become to me.

The raw idea is templates for text messages. Write a message and/or select some contacts, then send your SMS later with minimal taps. This only became feasible with the API support in iOS 4.0 this summer. We weren’t the first to market with such an app, but I still think we are the simplest and best SMS template app out there.

Recalling that I was not too pumped about Canned initially, I’ve begun to realize that it might not be entirely obvious how useful it can be. You probably are asking yourself: ‘How many text messages do I really send repeatedly?’

My guess is, more than you might think.

Canned Messages

Has anyone ever asked for your home or work address?
Ever forget your business cards, and meet someone who wants your information?
Do you ever need to send someone directions to your house?
Have you ever notified anyone that you’re stuck in traffic?
Do you have a clique of friends that you’re sending texts to all the time?
How many times this month have you texted ‘LOL!’ to your significant other?
Ever want to courteously respond that you can’t pick up the phone right now?

Canned ended up being more useful to me than I could have anticipated. If you haven’t bought it yet, I’d suggest that you check it out (unless you’re saving those 99 cents for something else). If you have it already, maybe you could recommend it to a friend or rate it on the App Store.

I love using Canned, and I hope it proves useful for you too.

little ‘whoopsie’ from google [permalink]

They stole a little code from Java. I’m sure they’ll give a sincere apology though.

Update: Apparently, the linked article is false. I’m shocked! Engadget has such a pristine track record! (Is there a standard way to textually denote sarcasm)?

smooth criminal cello cover [permalink]

This is the best cover of Smooth Criminal ever. My regrets to Alien Ant Farm.

the genius of thomas edison [permalink]

I had no idea LOLcats dated all the way back to the year 1894.

identifier vs. index – the final showdown

We just fixed a bug in Canned that had been elusive for quite some time. We had gotten a few stray 1-star reviews mentioning crashes on startup, but none of our beta testers had found these issues and we were unable to reproduce the crash ourselves. To make matters worse, we hadn’t received any support request emails until December 1st, more than 3 months after release.

After finally getting some crash logs, the issue appeared to be with our calls to ABMultiValueCopyValueAtIndex which had never caused any problems before. Stack Overflow came to the rescue (as usual) once I found this post.

Most Address Book sample code I had referenced online was calling this function with an ABMultiValueRef and an ABMultiValueIdentifier as arguments, but the second parameter is actually supposed to be a CFIndex. There is an intermediate function (ABMultiValueGetIndexForIdentifier) that returns the correct index given the identifier, but what was tripping us up was the fact that it works for most contacts even when called incorrectly with the identifier.

I guess that’s what I get for learning programming in a language with strong type checking.

Thankfully, early reports suggest that the issue is fixed.

canned will unquestionably serve you

I found this amazing gem of a review for Canned posted here.

You are able to easy create and send pre made text sms form your iPhone through utilising an application for sale in App Store. The name of this application is Canned. Utilising this application you will be able to send “canned” replies through with text edition message. Canned is selfsame simple to function application for iPhone.

Just install this application on iPhone and then open this application. And then you should attend a ezine of your pre made messages. Straightaway just add up whatsoever text you want. And then this application will grant you to specify contacts to your pre created substances.

Utilising Canned you will be able to send grouping text messages, pre compiled text substances. While you’re at work and can not bring a call at time Canned will unquestionably serve you.

lock that rotation up [permalink]

This news couldn’t be more welcome. It appears as though the rotation lock will be back as a user-selectable option in iOS 4.3.

off the google chrome bandwagon

I’m greatly disappointed by the announcement yesterday that Google is removing support for the H.264 video codec from their Chrome browser. In an already fragmented world of internet video, this move takes us a huge step backwards in having a viable cross platform distribution option.

H.264 is an open standard at the best definition of the term, controlled by a large standards body participated in by many industry leading technology companies. While the WebM codec they’re proposing as an alternative is completely under Google’s control. Claiming openness is a flagrant falsehood.

The mobile device industry is full of devices with low power consumption hardware encoders and decoders using the H.264 format. Nearly every recent video recording and playback consumer device uses H.264. It has become a clear industry standard, and WebM hasn’t proven any distinct advantage in power consumption or performance.

All the major video distribution channels serve their content in H.264. Converting a video library to WebM is a massive undertaking with a huge cost.

The openness dream that Google is pushing is a farce. I’ve been promoting their services amongst my friends for a long time. They’ve been giving away a lot of great services with a small cost of advertising. However, the decisions they’re making these days increasingly show self-interest and use of brute force to bolster adoption of their own “open” technologies.

It looks like I’m back to Safari.

google versus the spammers [permalink]

Marco illuminates a big issue with spammers marginalizing the effectiveness of search results. But can we really blame Google? I don’t think any other search engine has found a way around the issue, or even performs any better than Google at filtering junk. It seems to me they’ve become a victim of their own success.

By becoming the de facto search standard, they became the target for spammers everywhere. As long as they keep on top, they’re going to face this issue at some level. I still haven’t seen a single search engine I would prefer. Bing might be ok…

nike better world [permalink]

This is one of the cooler websites I’ve seen recently. Excellent use of parallax scrolling. Very eye catching. (via Phil Coffman)