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Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Logitech Create: The First Third-Party Keyboard for iPad Pro ★

Interesting:

Today Logitech announced the Logitech Create Keyboard Case for iPad Pro, developed closely with Apple to leverage the new Smart Connector. As a result, Logitech will bring to market the first ever third-party keyboard compatible with the iPad Pro Smart Connector, eliminating the need to power on, set up or charge the keyboard — it is always ready when you are. […]

The Logitech Create Keyboard Case for iPad Pro will be available in the U.S., and select countries in Europe and Asia at the same time the iPad Pro is available for purchase. Additional product information and pricing will be available on Logitech.com and our blog in the coming weeks.

Yet another sign of “new” Apple: working with a third-party company like Logitech in advance of a major new product introduction.

Adobe Survey: 62 Percent of Streaming Video Is Watched on an Apple Device ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

The chart below is based on Adobe’s analysis of 1.49 billion TV Everywhere authentifications in Q1 and Q2 2015. Between the iPad, iPhone, Mac, Apple TV and iPod Touch, Apple captured 61.9% of these viewers.

Windows PCs are in second at 18 percent; Android third at 9 percent.

And Apple hasn’t even launched its streaming video service yet.

From the DF Archive: ‘If You See That “If You See a Stylus, They Blew It” Quote, They Blew It’ ★

I was wrong about one thing on this post from January: It’s come up way more than a thousand times already.

Last-Minute Predictions (Or: Pretty Sure I Was Wrong) ★

Lot of little birdies out tonight in San Francisco. The consensus is that there’s only going to be one Apple event this fall, and it’s tomorrow. So if there’s an iPad Pro, it’s coming tomorrow, no matter how much or how little sense that makes.

Tuesday, 8 September 2015

TechCrunch: ‘Periscope Is Secretly Building an Apple TV App’ ★

Two thoughts:

1. This sort of thing could be what’s been missing from all previous living room boxes — a way for a company that’s hustling, like Periscope, to bring something new to the game. Simply put: what the App Store did for phones, maybe it can do for the living room.

2. There’s a bit of irony here, given that Periscope has helped popularize vertical (portrait) video, and most people I know keep their TVs in landscape.

Tuesday, 8 September 2015

The Stupid, It Runs Deep ★

The Macalope takes a look at a Fortune piece headlined “Why Android Wear Will Give the Apple Watch a Run for Its Money”.

iPhone users won’t be able to download third-party apps either, though this should be less of a dealbreaker.

Sure, who likes downloading apps? Practically nobody. Most of those “billions of apps downloaded” numbers Apple likes to report come from one guy in Duluth, Minnesota.

This guy has it completely backwards. The tight integration required between today’s smartwatches and their tethered phones means that anything other than a first-party solution is going to be rough going. Apple Watch only works with iPhone, and iOS is tied down such that no other smartwatch is going to offer a competitive experience for iPhone users.

Like I wrote two weeks ago, this is why I think the stakes are higher for Apple with the new Apple TV this year than they were for Apple Watch last year. Set-top boxes aren’t integrated with your phone. An iPhone user can freely choose a Roku or Fire TV or Chromecast and have a great experience. Apple TV has to be excellent, on its own, for it to succeed.

There’s Nothing Like an Impending Apple Event to Bring the Jackasses Out of the Woodwork ★

Matt Krantz, writing for USA Today under the headline “Apple’s Latest iPhone 6S Is Already a Bore”:

Other new products including the iPad, Apple Watch and Apple Music have failed to meaningfully diversify the company’s offerings — especially profitability.

Is the iPad iPhone-like in profitability? No — but nothing else on the planet is, either. I think most companies, including Apple, would love to add a new product with iPad-sized profits their offerings.

Apple Watch has been on the market for a grand total of four months, and has yet to see its first holiday quarter. Apple Music launched two months ago and every single person using it is still within the three month trial period. Where do they find people like this guy?

‘But by Being Hit You Become Bigger, and That Makes You Feel Really Happy.’ ★

So great: Shigeru Miyamoto explains the design of level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros.

Gizmodo: ‘The Real Reason Netflix Won’t Offer Offline Downloads’ ★

Gerald Lynch, writing for Gizmodo:

Netflix however remains firm in its stance that it’s not going to offer offline downloads through its mobile applications, even in the face of competition from its rival. But why?

According to Neil Hunt, Netflix’s Chief Product Officer, Netflix users won’t be able to handle the complexity the added choice will bring.

“I still don’t think it’s a very compelling proposition,” said Hunt, speaking to Gizmodo UK at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin.

“I think it’s something that lots of people ask for. We’ll see if it’s something lots of people will use. Undoubtedly it adds considerable complexity to your life with Amazon Prime — you have to remember that you want to download this thing. It’s not going to be instant, you have to have the right storage on your device, you have to manage it, and I’m just not sure people are actually that compelled to do that, and that it’s worth providing that level of complexity.”

This amused me greatly, as I read it while flying across the continent. Without even standing up, I see at least four passengers watching movies they’d downloaded to their iPads and MacBooks. Air travel alone is a compelling use case for offline video, but I think cellular data caps are an important factor too.

Complexity isn’t the reason why Netflix doesn’t allow offline viewing. It’s just their excuse for not having it yet. It’s right out of the Steve Jobs handbook: something you don’t offer is a terrible idea, until you offer it yourself, at which point you explain why your solution is the first to get it right.

‘An Action Movie Driven Almost Exclusively by Words’ ★

Pete Hammond, writing for Deadline after the Telluride premiere of Steve Jobs:

Boyle said the script is 200 pages and it is densely filled with the kind of dialogue only Sorkin seems to specialize in these days. It’s actually thrilling to listen to, an action movie driven almost exclusively by words, a rare thing for sure in today’s visually driven cinema. Boyle told me at the 221 South Oak dinner after-party that it was unlike anything he had ever done before, and a bear to edit due to Sorkin’s precise style of writing. His direction is flawless and really keeps this thing moving, avoiding the static pace it might have been in lesser hands. The result is well worth it, and those magical words provided lots of opportunity for great acting performances led by Michael Fassbender’s spot-on and relentless portrayal of the not-very-likable computer genius.

Sounds so great.

How to Set the Size of Finder Windows, and Other Tips ★

Christopher Phin:

To have Finder windows in OS X open at a consistent size and location, open a new Finder window, resize it to how you want, then, and this is the important bit, close it again before you do anything else. Just open the window, resize and reposition it, then close it. Don’t click icons inside it. Now, subsequent new windows will be at the same size and position.

Vintage 2012 Henry Blodget Claim Chowder ★

Henry Blodget, three years ago:

Over the past few days, the latest round of purported pictures of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 5 have hit the web. And I can’t be the only potential customer who is deflated by what they see.

In fact, I’ll go far enough to say that, if the iPhone 5 looks like the pictures that have recently appeared, Apple may be screwed.

Why? Because the “iPhone 5” looks pretty much like the iPhone 4S. Which looked exactly like the iPhone 4, a phone that is now two years old.

Those pictures looked exactly like what the iPhone 5 turned out to be. Good call, Henry.

Monday, 7 September 2015

NYT: ‘New Apple TV Is Said to Focus on Games, Challenging Traditional Consoles’ ★

Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:

Could a new Apple device — one linked to the television — shake up the market for game consoles?

The idea no longer seems ridiculous to many people in the games business.

Apple is expected to make games a primary selling point of its new Apple TV product, which is scheduled to be announced on Wednesday in San Francisco, according to people briefed on Apple’s plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Talk Show: ‘A Full Canseco’ ★

For your listening pleasure in the days leading up to Wednesday’s Apple event in San Francisco, a new episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with special guest John Moltz. Topics include Google’s new logo, new iPhones, Apple TV, round-vs.-square watches, and more.

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Saturday, 5 September 2015

For Meetings ★

My thanks to For Meetings for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. For Meetings is, well, an iPad app for use in meetings: recording meeting notes, agenda items, actions, attendees, and more. It’s an unusual name, but after thinking about it, it’s kind of genius in its aptness.¹ If you read about For Meetings here in this post on DF today, but then try to remember the name of it a few weeks from now when you find the need for it, you will recall it just by asking yourself “What was that iPad app for meetings?”

Creating and publishing official “meeting minutes” seems like a total pain-in-the-ass, and For Meetings is entirely focused on reducing the friction and drudgery involved. It makes great use of the iPad’s larger screen — it’s the sort of app and use case that the purported upcoming iPad Pro is targeting. This is about using an iPad as a serious business tool. Structure content using bullet points and numbered lists. Visualize attendees, apologies, and absentees. Use tags to organize your meetings.

Find out more (and watch a demo video) at their website, or download it — for free — from the App Store.

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1. They style the app’s name “for Meetings”, with a lowercase leading “f”. DF house style is to title case all proper names, with a handful of exceptions for prefixes like Apple’s iNames. ↩︎

Temple Beats Penn State for First Time in 74 Years ★

This is the best thing to happen to college football in Philadelphia in my lifetime:

After 39 games of coming up empty against the state’s predominant football program, the Temple Owls came up with the signature victory they’ve been seeking since returning to “big-time” football in 1970.

Led by quarterback P.J. Walker and a swarming defense that totally befuddled Penn State quarterback Christian Hackenberg, the Owls upset the Nittany Lions, 27-10, in the season opener for both teams before a record crowd of 69,176 at Lincoln Financial Field. It was Temple’s first win against Penn State since 1941.

DirectLinks: Safari Extension That Circumvents Google and Facebook Link Redirects ★

Great little Safari extension from Canisbos:

This extension circumvents certain techniques used by Google and Facebook to track link clicks.

When you click a link in Google search results, Google uses JavaScript to replace the actual link with an indirect one, which they use for click tracking. Google then redirects the browser to the actual destination after logging the click. DirectLinks disables the JavaScript that replaces real links with indirect ones, so that when you click a search result link, Safari goes straight to the destination.

If you’ve ever tried dragging-and-dropping a URL from Google search results and getting a Google redirection URL instead of the actual URL you wanted (and Google’s JavaScript will show the actual URL in the status field if you hover over the link, so it’s impossible to tell that’s what’s going to happen), this extension is for you. There are obvious privacy benefits as well.

Boston Red Sox Fire Beloved Play-by-Play Announcer, Then Ask Him to Tweet That He Wasn’t Fired ★

Joe Rodgers, writing for The Sporting News:

The Red Sox, who have angered fans with their decision to dismiss beloved play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo after this season, reportedly tried to defuse the backlash by asking Orsillo to lie about the reason behind his departure.

According to Boston radio station WEEI, NESN requested Orsillo tweet that the decision to part ways with the network was mutual, when in fact the network dumped him for Dave O’Brien in order to “re-energize” the team’s television’s broadcasts. Orsillo declined.

Orsillo, who has been the network’s play-by-play voice for Red Sox baseball since 2001, has the support of more than 58,000 fans who have signed an online petition to keep him in the broadcast booth.

This is really a bizarre story. I’m a Yankees fan, so I don’t watch many Red Sox telecasts, but I’ve watched a few over the years (via my MLB At Bat subscription) when the Sox were playing important games down the stretch. Orsillo is a great announcer — it’s no surprise that fans are upset.

Here’s a tip to the Red Sox organization: a better way to “re-energize” the team’s telecasts would be to field a team that isn’t in last place.

Friday, 4 September 2015

Jonathan Kim on Alex Gibney’s ‘Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine’ ★

Jonathan Kim calls it “an Apple-hater’s manifesto”:

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and the man credited with bringing both personal computers and advanced mobile electronics to the masses, died on October 5, 2011. But the battle to define both the man and his legacy is being waged right now in the form of several books and high-profile films, the latest of which is the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man In the Machine, from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, a man I’ve interviewed in the past and whose work I greatly respect.

That’s why it really bums me out that The Man In the Machine makes little attempt to portray someone who was, by most accounts, a complex, iconic, but all-too-flawed man who, over the course of his career, could be both inventor and thief, monk and businessman, brat and sage, tyrant and beloved leader, and managed to use those conflicting traits to both change the world and create the most valuable, influential, and admired company on the planet. Instead, The Man In the Machine is focused largely on the thesis that Jobs was always and only a jerk, that people who enjoy Apple products and admire Jobs are idiots and cult members, and that the computer revolution that was born of Jobs’ vision must inevitably contain the same ugly darkness Gibney feels is Jobs’ defining trait, despite any evidence to the contrary.

Sounds like the film equivalent of Yukari Iwatani Kane’s book Haunted Empire — an attempt to fit the facts to a preconceived narrative, rather than craft a narrative from the actual facts.

Two Kinds of People ★

Beautiful, clever blog by João Rocha. From the about page: “There are only 2 kinds of people in this world, those that find this blog hilarious and those that have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

How to Get a New Finder Window the Size You Want ★

Glenn Fleishman, writing last month for Macworld:

In Yosemite, I tested one suggestion after I was unable to set a window’s default opening behavior. I created a model window, closed it, and then closed all windows (Command-Option-W, Option plus close button, or hold down Option while selecting File and choose Close All Windows). Then I held down Option and right-clicked the Finder icon in the Dock and selected Relaunch.

Voila! After that point, whenever I resized a Finder window, all subsequent windows would open in the same dimensions, offset slightly in location, including the width of the sidebar. I tried this in the current public El Capitan beta, but had zero luck. Perhaps it will be fixed by release.

It’s a little depressing that all these years later, the OS X Finder is still so bafflingly flaky at stuff like remembering windows sizes and positions.

Apple and the TV Market ★

Well-researched, insightful piece by Pavan Rajam:

There is clearly a viable market for streaming media players like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. However, the bigger opportunity is breaking into the market for Pay TV set top boxes, which today are less compelling products but retain access to the content consumers want. The only way any tech company will be able to pull that off is by having a TV Service to accompany their hardware. Of the companies with streaming media products on the market, only one is rumored to be working on such a service.

Unlike its competitors, Apple is playing the long game in the TV market. Apple TV’s long term goal is not about beating Amazon, Google, or Roku in the streaming media player market, it’s about redefining the TV market by building a true smart TV platform.

‘Death to Bullshit’ ★

Brad Frost:

We’re bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we’re exposed to. Death to Bullshit is a rallying cry to rid the world of bullshit and demand experiences that respect people and their time.

There’s a blog listing examples of bullshit. (I would argue that there’s a wee bit of bullshit on the no-bullshit version of the blog: all of the links are Tumblr redirects, so you can’t see the URLs where they lead. It almost feels wrong to complain about that, because I am so totally on board with the fight against bullshit, but I really do think URL redirects — particularly ones that completely obscure the destination — are bullshit.)

Who Is NetNewsWire 4? ★

Jesper:

Because the answer to “who is NetNewsWire for?” used to be “people who want to use an RSS reader that’s stable, full featured, regularly updated and fast to use”. And that’s not the case any longer. For example, NetNewsWire 4.1 could just be the reimplementation of the back/forward buttons for article item selection, such that if I went to an item and then went to another item and since the first one now was marked as read, I have to hunt to find my way back to it, I could just press the back button, and I would happily buy two extra licenses just for giving me some of the sophistication back.

“Who is this for?” is an essential question when you’re designing any app.

RSS Readers ★

Dan Moren, writing about NetNewsWire 4 at Six Colors:

Of course, the real question is whether an RSS reader is still software that people get worked up about. With the demise of longtime RSS staple Google Reader and the incursion of social networks and alternative news reading apps like Flipboard, Nuzzel, and soon Apple News, an RSS reader seems decidedly last decade. It’s a challenging environment into which to drop a new product — even one with as respected a brand as NetNewsWire.

RSS readers exploded in popularity a decade ago, and Dan is right that their use has died down dramatically. But I think “RSS is dead” is the new “email is dead”. And I know from my server stats that an awful lot of people still read Daring Fireball in an RSS reader — many of them using NetNewsWire. For me, as a news junkie, an RSS reader is something to get worked up about.

Brent Simmons:

There are plenty of software categories that are hot when they’re new, and then they settle down. RSS as a format remains huge (ask your local podcaster) — and RSS readers have become a type of productivity software that some people like and some people don’t. Simple as that.

NetNewsWire 4.0 ★

Black Pixel has finally shipped NetNewsWire 4.0 for Mac — and an all-new iOS app, and a new sync service. The apps are solid, and so far the syncing is working flawlessly and quickly for me.

But, I have some concerns. First, I think the prices are too low: $10 for the Mac app; $4 for the iPhone app; and the syncing service is free. I don’t see how that’s sustainable.

Second, Black Pixel has simplified so much, they’ve removed a lot of what made NetNewsWire NetNewsWire. Let Apple News and Flipboard be the simple news readers — I think the opportunity in today’s world for a non-free Mac RSS reader is at the high-end.

Michael Tsai:

It still has the “lite” feature set, nothing like my beloved NetNewsWire 3. There are no smart folders. There’s no meaningful AppleScript support. It doesn’t support the system share menu.

One can argue that most people don’t use smart folders, and few people script apps with AppleScript — but that’s exactly why there’s an opportunity for a paid app that does support such things. This is why BBEdit has so many esoteric features. This is why apps from Omni and Panic have esoteric features, and in Omni’s case lots of customization options.

Thursday, 3 September 2015

Peter Kafka: Apple Discussed Podcast Deal With Bill Simmons ★

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:

And more recently, Apple showed interest in signing up former ESPN star Bill Simmons to an exclusive audio podcast deal. Apple media boss Eddy Cue discussed the idea a couple of times with Simmons this summer, say people familiar with the talks, who say that they were preliminary at best.

In July, Simmons ended up signing a “major exclusive multi-year, multi-platform agreement” with HBO; an HBO rep says that deal includes a podcast that should debut in October. It’s reasonable to assume that those podcasts will be available on Apple’s iTunes platform, as well as other outlets.

Interesting idea, but I wonder how the exclusivity would have worked? Would listeners have to use Apple’s Podcast app? Would they use DRM on the audio? If they didn’t, what would keep people from listening to the show using non-Apple devices? Podcasts have always been like websites — something anyone can consume using any app on any device. The complete opposite of “exclusive”.

SiriusXM has exclusive audio shows (most famously, Howard Stern), but to listen to them on your phone, you have to use their app, and their app is absolutely terrible. Update: Maybe that’s what Apple was thinking with Simmons — it wouldn’t be a “podcast” really, but a show you can listen to on Apple Music?

A Ruling for Tom Brady Ignores the Biggest Question ★

William C. Rhoden, writing for the NYT:

The ruling clearly is a victory for the New England Patriots, for Brady, for the N.F.L. Players Association and for critics who argue Goodell has too often acted arbitrarily and hypocritically and even hamhandedly in administering discipline. But the decision did not address — because it was not asked to — the more important issue of sportsmanship that was at the heart of the suspension, and of what Brady knew about a supposed plan to deflate the footballs he used in last seasons A.F.C. championship game.

What a weird saga this whole deflate-gate thing is. Feels more like a storyline from pro wrestling than from a real sport.

Samsung’s Tizen-Based Gear S2 ★

Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge after some hands-on time with Samsung’s upcoming new watch:

The impressive things with the Gear S2 don’t end with its new design: Samsung’s actually figured out a really smart interaction model for smartwatches that I’m shocked no one else has done yet. There’s the touchscreen, yes, just like most other smartwatches, and the Gear S2 has a couple buttons on its side for home and back. But its real trick is in the rotating bezel, which lets you quickly and easily scroll through lists, apps, watch faces, and whatever else you might be looking at on the screen. It’s more predictable and intuitive than the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown and is a joy to use.

It does seem clever, and it’s a design that embraces the circular watch face.

The S2’s screen is colorful, sharp, and bright, and looked great in the few minutes I got to spend with the watch. It has an always on ambient mode — like many Android Wear watches — that makes it easy to quickly check the time. But this isn’t an Android Wear watch: it’s running Samsung’s proprietary Tizen platform. In the past, that was a huge red warning flag, but Samsung’s cleaned up its act, and the software on the Gear S2 is fast and intuitive. There are lots of different watch faces to choose from, including new “dynamic” faces that can update with various bits of information, and you can see all of your phone’s notifications and reply to incoming messages with canned responses, emoji, or text dictated by voice.

Some quick thoughts:

• Using Tizen is huge. It separates Samsung from everyone using Android Wear, and gives them what Apple has: complete control over everything. I’d still bet against them switching to Tizen on the phones — even if they can pull it off technically, it’d be so hard for them to get iOS/Android levels of third-party developer support.

• They’ve gotten the size down to something reasonable. I still think these look like men’s watches though, both because of their size and their design cues.

• From what I’ve seen in the videos and photos, it looks like Samsung is using black backgrounds for most of the UI, like Apple Watch does. Android Wear’s use of white and primary-colored backgrounds just doesn’t look good on a watch.

Wednesday, 2 September 2015

Variety: Apple Exploring Original Programming ★

Andrew Wallenstein, writing for Variety:

The moment the media and technology industries have been expecting for years may finally be arriving: Apple is exploring getting into the original programming business.

Sources indicate the Cupertino, Calif., colossus has held preliminary conversations in recent weeks with executives in Hollywood to suss out their interest in spearheading efforts to produce entertainment content. The unit putting out the feelers reports into Eddy Cue, who is Apple’s point man on all content-related matters, from its negotiations with programmers for Apple TV to its recent faceoff with Taylor Swift.

On the one hand, everyone else is doing it, so why not Apple? On the other hand, Apple makes devices where Netflix and HBO provide content/apps. If Apple starts competing against Netflix and HBO in content production, do they risk spoiling those partnerships?

Here’s a what-if: What if Apple had bought Pixar instead of Disney?

Alliance for Open Media ★

Frederic Lardinois, reporting for TechCrunch:

Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix today announced that they have formed a new open source alliance — the Alliance for Open Media — with the goal of developing the next generation of royalty-free video formats, codecs and other related technologies.

It’s not often we see these rival companies come together to build a new technology together, but the members argue that this kind of alliance is necessary to create a new interoperable video standard that will work across vendors and platforms. While it goes unmentioned in the announcement, it’s also clear that none of the members involved in this alliance want to have to pay royalties to the likes of MPEG LA.

There seems to be a conspicuous absence from the list of companies involved.

Mark Gurman on Apple TV 4 Hardware ★

Mark Gurman, writing at 9to5Mac:

The current Apple TV design, first released in late 2010, has 8GB of internal storage for caching media, and the fourth-generation boxes in testing surprisingly range from 8 GB to 16 GB of storage. We are told that Apple has considered two pricing strategies: the simultaneous release of a $149 base model with 8 GB of storage alongside a $199 16 GB model, or the release of the 16 GB Apple TV alone at $149. In either case, Apple will offer a $149 Apple TV.

While the new Apple TV will include an App Store for deep support for gaming, sources say that the limited storage offered by 8 GB and 16 GB flash memory is appropriate for the new model, as all content outside of applications will be streamed directly from the Internet.

It seems silly to have two pricing tiers separated only by 8 GB of storage. Seems a lot simpler to just go with one model with 16 GB of storage and be done with it. Keep it simple.

Curious too what Apple is going to do with the existing Apple TV? If the new model is as much improved as we’re all speculating — with a better controller and an actual App Store — I would think Apple would replace the current Apple TV with the new one. But the current model costs only $69. If they replace it in the lineup, and if Gurman is right about the new model starting at $149, it would mean the price of Apple TV would more than double. Even if you disregard the price drop from back in March, the price would still be going from $99 to $149. I can’t recall that ever happening before. But, it really does sound like the new Apple TV will be an unprecedented upgrade.

And for as much as we think we know about the new Apple TV, Apple has successfully kept a lot of it under wraps. We have a basic description of the remote control, but we don’t know how you’re going to move around the UI, or what the software interface actually looks like. I’m pretty excited about that.

The William T. Sherman of Crazy ★

Josh Marshall:

But the speed issue is an entirely separate advantage, one Trump is dominating first because he’s been playing this game for decades but especially because he’s adept at social media and is palpably going by gut and operating on his own without the complex messaging operations that cling on to every other candidate. News organizations and media figures can always move faster than candidates because they have to hold press conferences and prep for them or send out press releases which by definition need to go through the media itself. Twitter has the added advantage of allowing him to flick the news cycle without showing his face or getting questions in response. But the whole picture brings home just how much the modern campaign is built around risk aversion, protecting the candidate from him or herself.

When you see tweets like these you are absolutely certain Donald Trump wrote them himself. It’s definitely him, as clear as a tweet from Chuck Grassley could only possibly be from the senator himself.

The same thought has struck me regarding Trump’s tweets. They’re so in his voice — it couldn’t be more clear that he writes them himself, just winging them from his phone. (It looks like they’re all sent from Twitter for Android.)

Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Google’s New Logo ★

Google:

Today we’re introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens.

Their old logo was goofy. This new one is simply garbage. Just right for a company with no taste.

Monday, 31 August 2015

iMore’s Apple Watch Survey ★

Some fascinating numbers. Just one example: stand alerts:

• 25% stand up every time they get an alert.
• 46% stand up most of the time.
• 15% stand up some of the time or less.
• 14% turn them off.
• 1% leave them on but ignore them.

Sunday, 30 August 2015

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorships ★

DF’s RSS feed sponsorships are sold out through the end of October, with one exception: next week. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s audience, get in touch.

Update: This week’s spot has been sold, but a few spots later in the year remain open. My thanks to everyone who inquired about this week’s spot.

Saturday, 29 August 2015

Mapbox Mobile ★

My thanks to Mapbox for again sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Mapbox Mobile for iOS, their newest open source SDK for adding maps and location to any app. Mapbox comes with beautiful, pixel-perfect vector maps in a variety of styles: detailed streets for navigating cities, terrain for adventuring, and satellite imagery for seeing the world up close.

Mapbox’s analytics dashboard provides a continuously updated view of the map usage in your app, from places where your app is popular to average daily users. Mapbox’s Cocoa API works just like Apple’s MapKit — just swap out MKMapView for MGLMapView. Their “First Steps With the Mapbox iOS SDK” guide shows just how easy it is to switch. Start developing with Mapbox Mobile for free today.

The Talk Show: ‘90 Minutes or Bust’ ★

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include: our top complaints about Apple Watch, Apple making a car, the New York Times’s profile of Amazon’s work culture, and more.

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Friday, 28 August 2015

Reading the Apple Event Tea Leaves With Actual Witches ★

Katie Notopoulos, writing for BuzzFeed:

When Apple sends out invitations to its events, like the one coming up on Sept. 9, the tech press loves to try to “read the tea leaves” in a search for clues as to what will be announced. But what the hell do a bunch of tech bloggers know about divination? In order to find out what’s really going to happen at the Sept. 9 Apple event, you need someone who can actually read tea leaves. Professional journalists are useless at this. So I asked professional psychics.

Probably more accurate.

Apple Is About to Lay Down Its TV Cards ★

Matthew Panzarino:

Some very smart people I’ve been talking to suggest that, by building a platform, Apple is generating leverage that it can use to great effect in these negotiations. A mid-market breakout box offering is one thing, but a huge, rumbling platform with an upward trajectory of living-room dominating apps and third-party content is another beast. If, obviously if, Apple is successful with the Apple TV, it could be in a position to dominate content in a way that no other “smart” TV platform has before it.

If Apple did indeed “delay” the Apple TV from being released at WWDC, then it probably had a reason. And, if my sources are correct, that reason could well be polish, polish, polish. The experience of using it is said to blow away the types of junky smart TV interfaces we’ve had to deal with so far. This is the first real Apple TV product.

This, my friends, is the most-informed, best-written piece on Apple TV that you will find before September 9.