The Daring Fireball Linked List

Friday, 14 Nov 2014

David Ruddock Compares the Nexus 9 and iPad Air 2 ★

I really enjoy reviews like this one by David Ruddock at Android Police. It’s often very interesting to read something from the point of view of someone more deeply attuned to another platform. This, from the list of “cons” for the iPad, caught my eye:

Is an iPad, will result in some people thinking you’re an Apple sycophant / the kind of person who lingers at coffee shops for 8 hours a day.

I often need reminding just how weird some people’s ideas are about Apple and Apple users.

Substantially, these few bits stood out to me. Battery life:

Standby life on the Nexus 9 isn’t fantastic, either - I’m getting around 15% idle drain quite reliably every 24 hours, which is absolutely at odds with Google’s 30-day standby estimate. Even if you don’t agree with my assessment of the usage time life, Android’s idle drain is still an absolute embarrassment. I could let my first Air sit for a week untouched and the battery gauge would barely budge - maybe a few percent. Android has never been great about this, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.

Safari vs. Chrome:

You can throw benchmarks and timed tests at me until you’re blue in the face - mobile Safari kicks Chrome’s ass every day of the week. The smoothness alone is evidence to me that while Google may care about a browser’s technical proficiency, Apple cares at least as much about its usability and consistency, if not more.

Chrome for Android’s usability is a victim of Google’s cross-platform utopian vision, and for now, it’s just not a fantastic touch browser. Safari may not always be faster in every benchmark or timed comparison, but it’s smoother in all the ways that matter.

The feel:

From a smoothness and stability standpoint, iOS 8 feels so much more refined and predictable than Lollipop does on the Nexus 9. Apple is known for obsessing over things like animation draw times and smooth scrolling, trying to create an experience that never feels jarring or rough around the edges. Apple seems to toil indefatigably to ensure those home screen swipes and launch animations are perfect every time. Moving to the more powerful A8X chip with three cores now means that smoothness persists even during app installs or other background operations, an area where the first Air occasionally would have difficulty.

This is such a huge thing, for me, from a UX standpoint. Google has tried to instill these values in Android with things like Project Butter, but it’s never seemed to pan out exactly in the way I think we all hoped would. The obsession with smoothness in iOS is almost religious. In Android, it’s always seemed like an attitude of “hey, if you can keep things at around 60FPS, that’d be great or whatever.” I realize animations and such things are far more aesthetic than functional, but they can have a huge effect on how you perceive performance and feel about a device. Using the iPad just feels nicer, I don’t find myself getting annoyed by it nearly as often as the Nexus.

This ties into one of my recent themes here on DF, regarding Google’s own iOS apps, and the asymmetry of the Google/Apple Android/iOS rivalries. Ruddock is clearly an Android guy, but more so than that he’s a Google guy. He can use an iPad and still have a Gmail app, still have a Google Maps app, still use Google Docs, etc. Google’s wide support for iOS makes it a lot more likely that an all-in Google platform user might prefer an iPad to an Android tablet.

Report Claims iPhone 6 Outselling iPhone 6 Plus by 3-to-1 Margin in US ★

Take it with a grain of salt since the numbers don’t come from Apple, but interesting if true. 3-to-1 sounds about right to me. But there was an app analytics report a few weeks ago that pegged the ratio at 6-to-1, and T-Mobile CEO John Legere told Recode it was closer to 50-50.

Reuters: ‘Google Glass Future Clouded as Some Early Believers Lose Faith’ ★

Reuters:

While Glass may find some specialized, even lucrative, uses in the workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near future are slim, many developers say.

Shocker.

(Via Abdel Ibrahim.)

Strictly VC on Nest’s Company Culture ★

Connie Loizos, reporting for Strictly VC:

Sources who spoke to StrictlyVC and asked to remain anonymous say Fadell has fashioned a hierarchical structure reminiscent of TV’s “Game of Thrones.”

According to one employee, “Almost every decision, no matter how small,” goes through either Fadell or Matt Rogers, who cofounded Nest with Fadell and was previously a senior manager at Apple. (Through a spokesperson, Fadell and Rogers declined to answer questions for this story.)

“It’s always, ‘Tony and Matt want us to do this. We have to hit this deadline because Tony and Matt want us to.’ You definitely see people taking the path of least resistance because they don’t want to upset Tony.”

Another employee calls it a “huge meeting culture, to the point where anyone at the director level or up spends their entire day in meetings, many of them duplicative meetings about the same subject, over and over to the point where a lot of people have complained.”

Sounds like Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam isn’t going smoothly.

Are ‘Green Credits’ a Legitimate Way to Account for Energy Usage? ★

Alex Epstein makes the case that Apple’s claim that its “data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources, which result in zero greenhouse gas emissions” is fraudulent:

Imagine this scenario: Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to take an ocean liner across the Atlantic. He has a problem. Ocean liners run on oil but Cook wants to be “green.”

What can he do?

Well, he could try his luck with a sailboat. But the wind is volatile and unreliable — not to mention that a wind-swept voyage across the ocean would be dangerous.

But then, when all hope seems lost, Apple Board member Al Gore offers an idea. Use an ocean liner, but install sails on top, so that at least part of the time the boat is at least partially powered by wind.

Epstein is the author of a new book titled The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, so he’s clearly coming at this from a certain perspective.

Wednesday, 12 Nov 2014

More Photos of Comet 67P From ESA ★

Glorious.

Twitter’s New ‘Strategy Statement’ ★

Twitter:

Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.

That’s 220 characters. If any company should be able to fit its strategy into a single tweet, it’s Twitter. So clunky. Worrisome that they can’t express themselves clearly.

I can just see the argument. “Let’s call them platforms.” “No, products.” “Platforms!” “Products!” “Wait, I’ve got it: platform products.”

Benjamin Esham on Twitter:

I’m sure there’s an artful way to use “world” three times in the same sentence, but that ain’t it.

One Star Reviews Flood ‘Monument Valley’ Following Paid Expansion Release ★

Eli Hodapp, writing for Touch Arcade:

I don’t know how many of those angry single star iTunes reviewers read TouchArcade… But, seriously guys? It seems like the hive mind of the App Store is continually pushing developers in to this unrealistic corner of demanding absolutely everything but not being willing to pay anything. The fact of the matter is Monument Valley is an amazing game, made by real artists, working in a real studio, getting paid real salaries, with real families they go home to and support. They’re selling their game for a total of six bucks if you buy both the game itself and the expansion. I don’t fully understand what happened to get us on this horrible Biff with the almanac timeline of Earth where this kind of thing is unacceptable to iOS gamers.

Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5-star review; such a beautiful and original work of art, and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.

Landing on a Comet, 317 Million Miles From Home ★

These photos from the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander are just hauntingly beautiful. Can’t stop looking at them.

ESA Philae Probe Successfully Lands on Comet ★

Circa:

The European Space Agency (ESA) Philae probe successfully landed on the Comet 67P, a first in space exploration.

The Rosetta satellite and its probe payload arrived at the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Aug. 6 after 10 years, five months, and four days in space. Rosetta traveled 6.4 billion kilometers (3.98 billion miles) on its journey and orbited the sun five times.

10-year mission. 4 billion miles. Landing on a comet traveling 40,000 miles per hour. Science.

Tuesday, 11 Nov 2014

App as Calling Card ★

Dan Provost, Studio Neat:

Tom and I have been reading and thinking about these things for a while, and a few months ago we had a realization. Studio Neat is in a unique position. We are not just app developers, we also sell physical products. Products that are meant to work with the apps in a way that enhances both, as is the case with the Glif and Slow Fast Slow or Frameographer. What if we make apps that are free with “ads”, but the ad is simply for our other products? You know, the products that actually make money?

It was an intriguing enough idea that we decided to try it, first with Slow Fast Slow. As of today, you can download Slow Fast Slow for free. If you are unaware, Slow Fast Slow is our app for manipulating the speed of videos with our interactive timeline. It works amazingly well with the new 240 fps videos on the iPhones 6.

Writer Emergency Pack ★

Clever idea from John August: a deck of cards with advice, ideas, and tricks for helping writers get unstuck. Nicely illustrated and designed (including excellent use of Univers). It’s a Kickstarter campaign that aimed small and has exploded way past their original goal. But the coolest thing is they’re donating packs of the cards to youth writing programs, and the more decks they sell, the cheaper each deck becomes to produce, and the more they’ll have to donate.

The project is already funded nine times over, but if they can get a few more thousand backers they’ll enter rarified status as one of the top 1 percent of Kickstarter projects (by backers, not dollars) ever. And you can get in for just $15 — or, just $12 if you want to donate two packs to the youths.

Internet Freedom ★

Fred Wilson on Net Neutrality:

This is about something more simple and more important. It is about making sure that the Internet remains open and free for innovation. It is about recognizing that the last mile of the wired and wireless internet is a natural monopoly/duopoly where scale creates massive advantages, just like the electrical grid and the water system. It is about making sure that the massive companies that operate these last mile monopolies don’t use their market power to extract rents from the entrepreneurs, developers, and companies that must go through those networks to reach their customers.

This is about keeping the Internet the way it has been operating for the past twenty years. This is a conservative idea. Don’t change something that has worked so well for so long. Don’t allow the telcos to start inspecting each packet and prioritizing some over others.

Monday, 10 Nov 2014

Apple Now Has a Self-Serve Site to Deregister and Turn Off iMessage for Your Phone Number ★

Solves the problem where people who switched from iPhone to another platform were unable to receive SMS messages from iPhone users, because iMessage still considered their phone number tied to their iMessage account. The trick was always to disable iMessage on your iPhone before switching your SIM card, but no one ever thought to do that.

When they were designing the “use iMessage instead of SMS when texting from one iPhone to another” feature, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone at Apple that someone might eventually want to switch from iPhone to another phone.

Visual Effects Are Not the Answer ★

Stu Maschwitz:

We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.

Why Dr. Drang Likes Daylight Saving Time ★

Dr. Drang, back in March 2013:

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

Good bit of follow-up to the DST discussion on this week’s The Talk Show.

Kindle Design Quality ★

Marco Arment:

I was expecting better after years of Kindles being decontented into flimsier, lower-end devices, but I think it’s clear that Amazon just isn’t willing or able to make a premium, high-quality e-reader.

Amazon first made the Kindle in 2007 — it’s not like they’re new at this. The obvious answer is that they just don’t give a shit about making a truly high-quality product.

Jason Snell Reviews the Kindle Voyage ★

Jason Snell:

Amazon’s been headed in this direction for a while now. The original Kindle screen was 167 ppi; the Paperwhite upped that all the way to 212 ppi. The Paperwhite’s screen is actually quite good, but the Voyage’s is still noticeably better. To put it in Apple terms, this is really the first Kindle with a Retina display.

Unfortunately, Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it comes to typography. The Voyage still only offers six typefaces — many of them poor choices for this context — and still force-justifies every line (with no hyphenation!), creating variable-length gaps between words just so the right margin is straight rather than ragged. A device that’s dedicated to words on a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type options.

It’s depressing that all my typographic complaints from two years ago still stand. Amazon hasn’t improved the typography of Kindles in any way since then, other than by increasing the resolution of the display. I’ll repeat now what I wrote then:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

They should either devise or license (from Adobe?) a world-class hyphenation-justification algorithm while they’re at it. I’ll never buy another Kindle device until they fix this.

Update: Numerous readers have pointed out that they could just use the excellent open-source hyphenation algorithm from TeX.

President Obama on Net Neutrality ★

President Obama:

I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line rules include:

No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.

No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.

Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.

No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

It saddens me, and almost surprises me, that this issue has become so polarized along party lines.

This tweet from Republican senator Ted Cruz is utter nonsense:

“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.

That’s just word soup. The only similarity to the Affordable Care Act is that Obama supports it. There may well be a rational, reasoned argument against Net Neutrality, but Republicans aren’t making it, and neither are the cable companies or cellular providers. Be wary of the side that can’t express their argument in clear, plain, unambiguous language.

Sunday, 9 Nov 2014

The Talk Show, Ep. XCIX: ‘The Smoker Channels’ ★

Very special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show to talk about Comcast customer service, cable-cutting, Marlins Man (no relation) and his showboating-spectator predecessors, and the state of podcasting today. Also: daylight savings time and Roman numerals. You know, the usual stuff.

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Mr. Miller Doesn’t Go to Washington ★

Matt Miller ran for Congress in west L.A. this year, and wrote about the experience for Politico Magazine. Fascinating, if depressing, “this is what it’s like” perspective:

Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.

Friday, 7 Nov 2014

Meh.com ★

I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s. The sponsor is Meh, a new daily deal site from the founders of Woot. Here’s the sponsored RSS entry they wrote, in its entirety:

Fucking Amazon

I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored.

I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh.

Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go to meh.com.

The headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so bizarre that when it hit the @daringfireball Twitter account, I got about a dozen replies asking if the account had been hacked.

These guys don’t do marketing like other people do marketing. They really do have amazing prices on the products they sell, but the heart of Meh is what made Woot interesting back in the day: the writing. Click through and see for yourself. My thanks to them for sponsoring DF this week. Also: Don’t miss this great profile of Meh/Woot founder Matt Rutledge in D Magazine from earlier this year.

Apple to Sapphire Supplier: ‘Put on Your Big Boy Pants and Accept the Agreement’ ★

Kif Leswing, reporting for GigaOm:

Even if you’re uninterested in GT Advanced Technologies, there are a number of details about how much power Apple exercises over its suppliers.

Squiller says that Apple did not ever really enter into negotiations, warning that GTAT’s managers should “not waste their time” negotiating because Apple does not negotiate with its suppliers. According to GTAT, after the company balked, Apple told GTAT that its terms are standard for other Apple suppliers and that GTAT should “put on your big boy pants and accept the agreement.”

GTAT’s take seems to be:

Apple doesn’t negotiate terms.
Apple’s terms were onerous.
We accepted Apple’s terms.

Dan Frakes Lands at The Wirecutter ★

One of the best sites on the web just got better.

Amazon’s Echo Chamber ★

Dustin Curtis on Amazon’s hardware aspirations:

It’s an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing back. You can’t buy a phone and put it in a lonely drawer, never to use it again, like you would with a Fire Tablet. You can’t dupe your customers by selling them a shitty phone, because a phone becomes a part of its user’s identity.

Marco Arment on Business Insider ★

He’s spot-on about whether there’s actually any evidence of more developers going Android-first (spoiler: no), but the real gem in this piece is his dispassionate delineation of Business Insider’s web page design cruft in footnote 1.

Expectations for WatchKit ★

David Smith on the imminent release of the first WatchKit SDK:

So to start with we will be given the ability to implement actionable notifications and Glances. This is what I believe we are getting with the SDK release this month.

It will only be later next year that full apps will be possible. It is not a stretch to think that later next year is code for WWDC next June. Likely along with WatchOS (or whatever they call it) version 2.0. There is a delightful symmetry with the history of iPhone OS, where we didn’t get a full SDK until 2.0 (though I’m sure people will similarly jailbreak to get a head-start).

An Established Product Category ★

The lead from James Trew’s Engadget review of the new LG G Watch R:

I think it’s fair to say by now that smartwatches are no longer the “hot new thing.” It’s an established product category. The paint might still be a little wet on the whole idea, and some might argue there are areas that still need improving, but these clever timepieces are officially here to stay.

I find this perspective to be staggeringly shallow, but it’s an accurate reflection of what I find so inane about mainstream tech journalism. To say that smartwatches are “no longer the ‘hot new thing’” boggles the mind. They’ve never been the hot new thing. It remains to be seen if they ever will be. “Some might argue there are areas that still need improving”? You don’t say. This is as silly a thing to say in 2014 about watches as the same paragraph would have been about phones in 2004, or PCs in 1984.

Paul Ford: ‘The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing’ ★

Put aside some time to truly savor this piece. So good, in so many ways.

Thursday, 6 Nov 2014

Microsoft Makes Full Office Suite Free on Mobile Platforms ★

Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:

But in a sign of the seismic changes underway in the tech industry, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said on Thursday that it would give away a comprehensive mobile edition of Office. The free software for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets will do most of the most essential things people normally do with the computer versions of the product.

Just a few years ago, giving away a full free version of Office would have earned a Microsoft chief executive a visit from a witch doctor. Now, the move is following through on the rallying cry coming from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief executive, who has pushed cloud and mobile computing as lodestars for the company’s future.

Marco Arment:

It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting the reality of Office’s market position on smartphones and tablets. To some degree, Office needs to compete with the free Google Docs and iWork, but for many customers, it’s also competing with the idea of simply not using office apps (or using them far less often).

EFF: ‘Which Messaging Technologies Are Truly Safe and Secure?’ ★

The EFF:

The scorecard includes more than three dozen tools, including chat clients, text messaging apps, email applications, and technologies for voice and video calls. EFF examined them on seven factors, like whether the message is encrypted both in-transit and at the provider level, and if the code is audited and open to independent review. Six of these tools scored all seven stars, including ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal/Redphone, Silent Phone, Silent Text, and TextSecure. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime products stood out as the best of the mass-market options, although neither currently provides complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms of surveillance. Many options — including Google, Facebook, and Apple’s email products, Yahoo’s web and mobile chat, Secret, and WhatsApp — lack the end-to-end encryption that is necessary to protect against disclosure by the service provider. Several major messaging platforms, like QQ, Mxit, and the desktop version of Yahoo Messenger, have no encryption at all.

I’ve never heard of any of the six apps to which they awarded all seven stars.

On Dropbox and Apple ★

My pal Anil Dash served up a dose of his own two-year-old claim chowder.

Amazon Echo ★

A wireless speaker with an always-listening Siri/Google Now-style voice-driven AI agent named Alexa. $199, or $99 for Prime members.

Update: It took me a few hours to collect my thoughts on this. First, I think it’s problematic that Echo is anchored in a room. How will anyone get in the habit of using this instead of Siri or Google Now when they can only use it in one room? In their demo video, the family seemingly bought three or four of these things, because they have one in their living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Your phone is in your pocket all the time. And if it is anchored in a room, why not combine it with the Fire TV? I want fewer gadgets in my living room, not more. If Apple did this it’d be a feature of Apple TV, not yet another standalone gadget. (And I think it’d be a great idea for Apple to add “Hey Siri” listening to Apple TV.)

Wired Interviews Google Designers on Material Design ★

Kyle VanHemert, writing for Wired:

There’s also the risk that material design’s stringent rules could make for an unrelentingly homogenous ecosystem. Nicholas Jitkoff, one of the project’s lead designers, says Google is cognizant that it needs to leave room for third parties to express their own personalities. At one point in the development of material design, Google designers even made mock-ups of third-party apps themselves to see if they felt sufficiently unique.

In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, Jitkoff is the genius who created Quicksilver back in the day.

Wednesday, 5 Nov 2014

Uber’s Web App ★

This is kind of amazing — it’s the full Uber app running as a web app. Really well done. I discovered this via this Designer News comment from Brock Whitten; he’s under the impression that this is what the Uber mobile app is using behind the scenes, that the mobile app is just a thin webview wrapper around this mobile web app. It might be for some platforms, but I don’t think that’s true for iOS — there are a lot of little things that are subtly different between the iPhone app and this website, even when running on an iPhone.

Rip-Off of the Week: Lenovo S90 ‘Sisley’ ★

You expect things like this from Samsung and Xiaomi, but not from Lenovo. Just shameless. (The comment thread on this one is worth a skim too, but don’t start reading them with a beverage in your mouth.)

CNN Election Commentators Used Microsoft Surface Tablets to Prop Up Their iPads ★

You can’t just expect people to switch to an altogether unfamiliar device because of a corporate sponsorship. iPads are essential tools for many people. Familiarity matters. Microsoft needs to focus on getting people to want to use Surface tablets, not use them because of a corporate sponsorship. This is just embarrassing.

It’s Really Alex King’s Share Icon ★

I knew this, but at some point forgot — that sideways-V-with-three-nodes share icon was created by my friend Alex King back in 2007, released under four different open source licenses.

Google Maps Updated With Material Design ★

Other than the status bar differences, it pretty much looks exactly the same on iOS and Android. Same colors, same fonts, same icons. New features include OpenTable and Uber integration.

Matias Duarte on Google’s ‘Share’ Icon ★

Matias Duarte, “one year ago” (that’s the actual granularity of the time stamps in Google Plus), on why Google’s iOS apps use Google’s share icon:

The share icon Google uses in its properties (and the share icon that Android endorses) is a popular opensource icon and one that we feel well describes the connective nature of sharing. In a sense you could say we believe it’s part of our brand and that Google’s brand is to embrace the open and universal standard.

I keep wanting to say “Android’s share icon” instead of “Google’s share icon”, but the more I think about it, the more clear it is that Google is pushing a meta platform UI style, and Android is just one outlet for it. I don’t think they see their iOS apps as being Android-style, but rather Google-style.

Tuesday, 4 Nov 2014

Do as We Say, Not as We Do ★

Here’s a video from last year, with three guys from Google talking about how to properly design apps for Android. Starting around the 6:00 mark, their specific example is about sharing icons. They recommend against using the iOS arrow-coming-out-of-a-box sharing icon when designing for Android, and instead using Android’s standard sideways-V icon. So far so good, right? “Follow the idioms and standards of the platform you’re writing for” is good sound advice.

But Google is doing just the opposite with nearly all of their iOS apps. They’re not adhering to iOS design idioms — they’re adhering to their own Material Design style. Look no further than the “sharing” button in the iOS YouTube app — it’s Android’s.

Nexus 9 Tablet Already on Sale for 50 Percent Off ★

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

We’ve seen widespread complaints about the new “premium” pricing strategy for the new Nexus devices, and to make matters worse, the Nexus 9 didn’t really live up to the “premium” price. With a price cut this deep just a day after launch, we have to wonder if the Nexus 9 is really worth $400. On Google Play, the device is still going for $400, but this is definitely an eyebrow-raising move by HTC.

J2ObjC: Google’s Shared Logic for iOS and Android Apps ★

J2ObjC is a “Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime”. Google uses it to maintain a cross-platform shared codebase for its mobile apps; internal logic is written once (in Java) and ported to Objective-C using this tool. But it’s only for non-UI code. Here’s why, from creator Tom Ball:

It’s regularly asked why J2ObjC purposely avoids translating UI code; after all, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a tool existed where a developer can drop in Android source and out pops an iOS app? Our usual response is that world-class apps need user interfaces that are tightly integrated with each platform, and that common-denominator attempts to span platforms provide degrades user experiences. As I found when working on Swing many years ago, customers notice the smallest deviations from a platform’s UI standards and generally find them off-putting. But non-compromising UIs are just one of the reasons we focus on translating shared logic.

I wasn’t aware of this; my thanks to Google’s Ray Cromwell for bringing it to my attention. What I find interesting is that Google is (wisely, in my opinion) hand-crafting their iOS UI code for performance reasons and to avoid all the well-known pitfalls of cross-platform UI code, but they’re using their cross-platform “Material Design” visual style. That is, they’re writing native iOS code to create Google-styled apps.

‘Fearless Genius’ ★

Photographer/filmmaker Doug Menuez is excerpting some fantastic work from his new book, Fearless Genius, on Storehouse this week. Stories and photographs from Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. Right at the top, a fantastic photo of Steve Jobs. (Via Om Malik.)

Update: A whole page of Steve Jobs photos from the early days at NeXT.

Dan Cederholm on Refining the Dribbble Logo ★

Dan Cederholm:

At small sizes, few will even notice the change, but it feels good having a more refined version in place now, knowing that’ll it hold up to whatever it needs to going forward. Also, the nice thing about refining as opposed to redesigning is that the old and new can easily coexist (temporarily of course).

So subtle, so nice. (Via Brand New.)

Monday, 3 Nov 2014

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand. Right Hand, Meet Left Hand. ★

New promotion from Nokia:

Starting this Friday, if you purchase a Lumia 830 — our affordable flagship phone equipped with the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1 — through AT&T, you’ll get the Fitbit Flex activity tracker for free.

The Lumia handset division is now a Microsoft subsidiary. Microsoft, of course, being the company that released its very own fitness tracking wristband last week.

CNet Launches Quarterly Print Magazine ★

That’s adorable.

Saturday, 1 Nov 2014

Midroll ★

My thanks to Midroll for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Midroll is an ad network that represents more than 140 podcasts, including The Nerdist, WTF with Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang, The iMore Show, Relay.fm, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk Radio. (And yes, that makes this an ad for ads, which sounds funny, but is actually pretty clever if you ask me.)

Midroll’s illustrated whitepaper is full of interesting stats showing how effective podcast advertising is. Here’s one: 63 percent of their surveyed listeners say they bought a product or service after hearing it advertised on a podcast. Here’s another: 97 percent of first-time Midroll advertisers come back again. Podcast ads really do work, and Midroll is a great way to reach a large and diverse audience. Mention Daring Fireball when you contact them, and they’ll take 10 percent off your first campaign.

Jony Ive Talks About Apple Watch at SFMOMA Event ★

Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, writing for Recode:

“Obviously, you’re not going to read War and Peace on your wrist. But for lightweight interactions, for casual glancing, it’s absolutely fabulous,” he said. “And I think this is the beginning of a very important category. With every bone in my body I know this is an important category, and this is the right place to wear it.”

And because it’s a new product, he said there’s “a childlike awe and curiosity” about what the Apple Watch might do. As an example, he spoke about its alarm-clock function.

“Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

How exactly is that going to be useful if you need to charge it nightly?

Tim Cook’s Moment ★

Lovely piece by Kara Swisher at Recode:

With his CEO status now as firm as it has ever been, and the company pretty unassailable, Cook seemed completely ready, criticizing his home state of Alabama in a speech there about its failures in the civil rights arena. “As a state, we took too long to step toward equality,” he said. “We were too slow on equality for African-Americans. We were too slow on interracial marriage, and we are still too slow for the equality for the LGBT community.”

That was this past Monday. At a dinner I attended earlier this week, what he said came up in conversation, and someone wondered what he was up to. With no idea about what he was about to do, I had only one response: “I think we are finally about to meet the real Tim Cook.”

And, while we might have known it all along about him, it’s nice to finally be able to say hello to the entire man.