May 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Facebook: The List of Incompetents →
Felix Salmon for Reuters
Zuckerberg’s refusal to play the Wall Street game is admirable, in some respects — but at the same time is completely inconsistent with a desire to sell $16 billion of shares at a $104 billion valuation.
Yes. Exactly this. There was a wave of “why should Zuckerberg wear a suit?” sentiment on Twitter; this quote is why that sentiment made no sense to me.
4 tags
Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover
Whatever you think of the hoary old “the iPad is/isn’t perfect/awful for content creation” debate, there are few bloggers who’d argue that it’s a lot more practical for writing on when coupled to some sort of physical keyboard. The on-screen one keyboard is OK for modest amounts of text, but the prospect of writing a 5,000 word TUAW post by hammering my fingers...
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"Windows RT" versus "WinRT"
Blogging Windows:
Windows RT is the newest member of the Windows family – also known as Windows on ARM or WOA, as we’ve referred to it previously. This single edition will only be available pre-installed on PCs and tablets powered by ARM processors … For new apps, the focus for Windows RT is development on the new Windows runtime, or WinRT, which we unveiled in September
So WinRT is...
April 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Ben Brooks
Ben Brooks prefers style to substance!
It’s interesting to me that Shawn types faster on the mechanical keyboards — that alone makes me want to try one. But there is no way in hell I am putting any one of those keyboards Shawn reviewed anywhere near my desk.
They are hideous, repulsive, and offensive looking.
Even if I was more productive with them, the tradeoff of adding in wires...
4 tags
OMGPOP goes the weasel
Shay Pierce was the only employee at OMGPOP who didn’t take Zynga’s money when the company sold out following the smash-hit success of Draw Something.
Pierce chose to reject Zynga’s offer for good reasons. Firstly, he disagrees strongly with Zynga as a company:
When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in...
March 2012
3 posts
2 tags
4 tags
The dilution of "4G"
So, iOS 5.1 changes iPhone 4 and 4S handsets on AT&T to show “4G” instead of “3G”.
4G was originally defined in 2009 by standard body ITU-R as “peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 Mbit/s for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users)” (quote...
2 tags
Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the... →
By me, for TUAW. A deep dive on exactly what a “Retina display” should be defined as, and what this means for the rumours of Retina display Macs.
February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Does Gatekeeper point the way to an App Store-only... →
By me for TUAW. Spoiler warning: “not bloody likely”.
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What resolution would a "Retina display" 27-inch...
Earlier, via @viticci, I saw a tweet from @marcedwards that said:
Retina 27” Thunderbolt display:
5120×2880 = 14,745,600 px
4K film:
4096×2160 = 8,847,360 px
Retina iPad 3:
2048×1536 = 3,145,728 px
This is based on the widely-held but fallacious belief that a “Retina display” is twice the resolution of a current-day display. There’s...
January 2012
6 posts
4 tags
The no-nonsense guide for travellers to using an...
Scenario: you (like me, a month ago) are going to the United States for a trip. You have an unlocked iPhone you can use with any carrier world-wide — but you are confused by the lack of a “sell me an iPhone SIM card” option on AT&T’s Byzantine website. You want to make your phone work with a minimum of hassle. You’ve looked at various sites and guides but...
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The WSJ: "Con Artist Starred in Sting That Cost... →
Absolutely extraordinary story. A convicted felon con artist, David Whitaker, co-operated with the government to pose as an unlicensed online dealer in illegal pharmaceuticals (including steroids, human growth hormone, oxycodon, and the abortion drug RU-486). He then bought huge numbers of Google ads for the illegal sites, in blatant breach of Google’s written rules about what sorts of sites...
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Windows 8 "Secure Boot mode" locks Linux out of...
Some time ago, it emerged that Windows 8 would support a new “Secure Boot” mode. In this mode, only operating systems with a cryptographic key signed and stored in the machine’s firmware would be bootable. Linux users and kernel hackers like my old pal Matthew Garrett feared this would lead to a wave of machines that Linux was not bootable on, as it’s unlikely to ever have...
3 tags
On cell phones, "silent" mode, and alarms
A story about the iPhone’s mute switch not turning off the alarm sound has somehow become big news, with both John Gruber and Andy Ihnatko weighing in on a debate about exactly what the mute switch should (or shouldn’t) do.
The furore has baffled me, because as far as I can remember, this isn’t even vaguely new.
For example, consider the manual for my beloved Sony-Ericsson...
9 tags
MG Siegler: "Why I Hate Android" →
MG Siegler hates Android because, he claims, Google kowtowed to the carriers. He writes that the original plan for the Nexus One back in 2010 was to sell it as an unlocked Android handset for $99, but the US carriers outright refused to support it. Google’s hand were tied so in the end it went on sale for $529 and no-one bought it. Later, Google started to support things like Verizon’s...
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Windows Phone 7 "spiffs"
Apparently, Microsoft is now offering resellers a $10-15 bonus, or “spiff”, for each Windows Phone 7 device sold. John Gruber doubts this strategy, saying “Obviously this isn’t sustainable in the long run, given that $10-$15 per phone is probably the most Microsoft could be making in licensing fees.”
He’s probably right that, with any non-trivial spiff, each WP7...
December 2011
7 posts
5 tags
iTunes Match quality upgrades isn't just for low...
I’ve seen a lot of tutorials like this one by Quentin Stafford-Fraser or this one by Jason Snell stepping people through the process to upgrade their old low-quality music to high-quality fresh version via Apple’s new iTunes Match service. All the posts I’ve read suggest the same thing: make a smart playlist showing all your matched songs with a bitrate below 256 kbit/sec (which...
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Daniel Jakult on tech elitism
Joshua Topolsky’s take-no-prisoners post “Horseshit”, about perceived elitism and class warfare in the ever-present Android-vs-iOS debate, is probably going to set off a wave of response posts. Here’s some quotes from one of the first, by Daniel Jakult of Red Sweater software:
And yet John and MG are totally right. You either see it or you don’t. This is egalitarian,...
4 tags
Chris Morris on what Microsoft should and... →
Great post for industrygamers.com. I agree with pretty much everything Morris says.
The big question mark I see that he hasn’t mentioned is the processor architecture. The Power PC chips used in the Xbox 360 have been in an evolutionary dead end since Apple stopping using them, but moving back to Intel’s x86 (as was used in the original Xbox) will break backwards compatibility for...
1 tag
Kickstarter project "Elevation iPhone Dock" raises... →
Impressive. It looks nice, and (as Marco Arment noted) some freebie PR from John Gruber can’t have hurt.
But… this is not a cheap item. It starts at $59 (which will sell for $90 if the project goes fully commercial after the Kickstarter) plus $20 international shipping for us UK types, with an estimated delivery date of “April 2012”. By that point, history suggests...
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iPad 2 seasonal sales at risk from iPad 3 rumours
Philip Elmer-Dewitt:
Remember what happened to iPhone 4 sales last summer? They hit a wall in mid-July, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, when “speculation” that Apple was about to release a new iPhone, “hit extreme highs.”
Now we’re in the middle of what’s shaping up as Apple’s (AAPL) biggest holiday season ever, and the same thing may be...
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A Windows feature I routinely miss in OS X
Under Windows, all File dialogs (Open, Save As, etc) allow a full range of file manipulations too. So if I’m opening a file and I notice the filename is wrong, or I decide to move it to a different folder first, I can do so. This makes conceptual sense because the file manipulation dialog looks like an Explorer window, so the user expects it to do the same things.
On OS X, the File Open...
November 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Cracking long passwords
Dan Dieterle for Infosec Island:
Most hackers will crack passwords by decoding the password hash dumps from a compromised computer. So, I pulled several 14 character complex passwords hashes from a compromised Windows XP SP3 test machine, to see how they would stand up to Objectif’s free online XP hash cracker.
The results are startling. The password ‘72@Fee4S@mura!’ took five...
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Twitter's new "Activities" feature and the social...
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about a concept I’m calling the social feedback loop. To my mind, blogging of any kind — whether it’s the oldest type of longform writing we associate with the dawn of self-publishing on the web through to the very newest microblogging and media-sharing of Twitter and Tumblr — has suffered from a key problem. It too often feels...
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'Apple's aesthetic dichotomy' by James Higgs →
John Higgs on Apple’s skeuomorphic designs:
They are an expression of purest kitsch, sentimentality, and ornamentation for its own sake. In Milan Kundera’s brilliant definition, kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. These are Disney-like apps, sinister in their mendacity.
This was widely linked to a few weeks back, but it so neatly encapsulates how I feel about...
1 tag
Aperture, the stack picks keyboard shortcut, and...
Are you finding, somewhere along the line in the recent flurry of app updates for Lion and iCloud, that you can no longer use the Aperture keypress ⌘-\ to pick your favourite from a stack of pictures? Or maybe you can no longer use the same keypress in Twitter for Mac, to jump to the main timeline when you are currently looking at a child window?
Are you baffled that you’ve looked under...
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Your daily dose of anti-Apple-hivemind
A few anti-Apple-fanboy blogs have either sprung up or crossed my radar recently. Daring No Balls is a witless and charmless troll attempt, and not deserving of your time. But Raging Thunderbolt and the older The Occasional Blargh very much are. Even if you don’t agree with everything they say, even if you count yourself as an Apple true believer 1 the fact remains: they both routinely raise...
October 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Benjamin Brooks on Photo Stream →
I bought an iPhone with tons of storage because I don’t want to have to think about such things as which photo app to use for each scenario I find myself in. To me, it’s worth the price of admission.
Sure, it’s a couple hundred bucks more for 64GB, but that’s a couple hundred bucks that means I don’t have to worry about such things as space for Photos and circumventing Photo Stream. It’s a...
1 tag
How to write factorial in Java →
Bill Woody:
The biggest complaint I have with many Java developers is that they develop a whole bunch of really bad habits. Specifications are unclear, or they think someday the code may need to be extended into a different direction. So they write a whole bunch of overblown architectural nonsense, sight unseen, thinking that the additional crap someday will help out and make things easier....
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Apple earnings smackdown: The bloggers got... →
Philip Elmer-DeWitt for Fortune
This is the exercise in which we divide those analysts into two groups — the pros and the amateurs* — and pit their estimates against each other. (See footnote on nomenclature.)
The cluster of green at the bottom of the chart at right tells the story: This quarter, for the first time since we’ve been monitoring them, the bloggers got...
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A quick shell script to check if iOS 5 is live yet
#! /bin/bash
VAL=`curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version | grep -i \
Restore | grep -i iPhone3,1 | grep 5.0 | wc -l`
while [ $VAL -eq 0 ]; do
VAL=`curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version | \
grep -i Restore | grep -i iPhone3,1 | grep 5.0 \
| wc -l`
echo -n "Not yet "
echo `date`
sleep 60
done
echo "iOS 5 is...
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"Antennagate" rumbles ever onwards
Paul Thurrott, talking before the iPhone 4S announcement:
I have one prediction of my own. And that is that Apple will completely revamp the very much broken external antenna design that it saddled iPhone 4 users with.
John Gruber, commenting on Thurrott’s prediction after the 4S launch:
Good call — the 4S antenna looks totally different.
Jason Snell, reviewing the iPhone 4S...
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Gavin Clark writing for The Register about Richard... →
Best piece I’ve read on this yet, because it doesn’t shy away from criticising both Apple (for various walled-garden shenanigans) and the entire Open Source movement (for absolutely failing to produce anything that normal people would choose over Apple products).
I do think there’s a case to be made that Apple’s current direction in software is removing freedoms that we,...
6 tags
On iOS's "Assistant" feature and that huge Apple...
What if Apple’s big data centre isn’t for iTunes (which is mostly stored on CDNs anyway or iCloud (which is implemented on top of Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2) but instead was built to provide the cloud-based processing muscle to make Assistant work?
Note that voice has been moving to the cloud for years, and that the existing Google Voice Search feature in the iOS app uses cloud...
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
“The iPhone is yesterday’s smart phone, and while it was fascinating when...”
– Paul Thurrott. File this one under “claim chowder” for this time next year when the iPhone is still making tons more money than everyone else put together.
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
“[T]here is very little reward for those writers who spend a lot of time going...”
– From The Internet Explorer IQ Hoax and the State of Tech Blogging. I can’t disagree with this.
July 2011
5 posts
4 tags
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ITProPortal: "iPhone 5 To Use Bluetooth 4.0 Rather...
Desire Athow for ITProPortal:
[Bluetooth low energy] compares positively with other industry groups’ standards in that it doesn’t require any additional infrastructure, and we suspect that it could even be used to rival NFC (Near Field Communication).
Just like Thunderbolt, Apple could singlehandedly decide to pioneer that technology against all the odds, as the rest of the...
3 tags
"Natural Scrolling": I don't get it
John Gruber says give natural scrolling a chance:
My number one Lion tip: No matter how wrong it feels, stick with the new trackpad scrolling direction. Give it a week. At first it will drive you far crazier than you expect, but then you’ll get used to it.
I tested the Lion seeds on my secondary Mac, a then-brand-new-but-as-of-today-not-so-new 11-inch MacBook Air. The inverted trackpad...
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Domain-level social media redirection
Chiming with Marco Arment’s Own Your Identity essay was this tip by Daniel Sander on Google+ to redirect part of a personal domain name to your Google+ profile. So dsandler.org/+ redirects to his main profile, but also dsandler.org/+/about goes to his about page.
I lamented that this doesn’t work if your domain is on Tumblr, which prompted Nik Fletcher to come up with a clever...
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I'm dreaming of an iPad (2.5) Christmas
We’ve had a fresh wave of “new iPad” rumours in the last couple of days, mostly claiming that we’ll see a new iPad design (so the third overall, and the second in 2011) in September sporting a 2048x1536 screen (which makes it a retina display by my calculations). As MG Siegler noted, this echoes John Gruber’s “guess” and Siegler’s own...
June 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Final Cut Pro X and the future of OS X
Daniel Jalkut commenting on the Final Cut Pro X brouhaha:
Final Cut Pro X review: Apple will happily piss off 5,000 professionals to please 5,000,000 amateurs.
Apple quarterly results, 2Q2011:
Apple sold 3.76 million Macs during the quarter, a 28 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 18.65 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 113 percent unit growth...
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How the Internet transforms rumour into fact
Robin Wauters for TechCrunch:
Here’s a tiny tidbit of news for all you Apple aficionados out there: the Cupertino company waited until the day its developer conference kicked off (June 6) to register a bunch of product-related domains.
I’m sure they cost Apple a heck of a lot less than the $4.5 million purchase of icloud.com.
Hey, wait a minute. We know how much it cost now?...
5 tags
The five-minute guide to Apple's announcements at...
If you’re not obsessed by Apple’s products — in other words you are normal, unlike me and most of the other bloggers reporting Apple news — here’s a brief-as-can-be bite-sized overview of what Apple said today and why you might care about it.
iOS 5
What is it? A new version of the system software for the iPhone and iPod.
Why should I care about it? It brings a...
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The Guardian: Ofcom bans three-year broadband and... →
Interesting stuff:
Three-year broadband and phone contracts have been banned by the communications regulator Ofcom, with providers now only able to offer maximum contracts of two years. They must also make 12-month contracts available under the new regulations which bring the UK in line with EU telecoms law. The regulations also require mobile providers to transfer customers’ mobile...
May 2011
6 posts
4 tags
