Linked List: December 14, 2011

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Troy Patterson, writing for Slate, on the cocktail:

The old-fashioned is at once “the manliest cocktail order” and “something your grandmother drank,” and between those poles we discover countless simple delights, evolutionary wonders, and captivating abominations. Because of its core simplicity and its elasticity — because it is primordial booze — ideas about the old-fashioned exist in a realm where gastronomical notions shade into ideological tenets. It is a platform for a bar to make a statement, a surface on which every bartender leaves a thumbprint, and a solution that many a picky drinker dips his litmus paper in. You are a free man. Drink your drink as you please. But know that your interpretation of the recipe says something serious about your philosophy of fun.

Don’t miss his link to this gem of a letter to the editor in the NYT in 1936.

Font Swap in iBooks ★

Glenn Fleishman, in a well-illustrated piece for Boing Boing:

The release of iBooks 1.5 offers an interesting swap out. My three least favorite fonts for reading on screen were removed: Baskerville, Cochin, and Verdana have been erased from the list. Only the dread Times New Roman remains alongside Georgia and Palatino. Added into the mix are four other faces: Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek.

MG Siegler’s Take on the Galaxy Nexus ★

MG Siegler:

Unfortunately, the system still lacks much of the fine polish that iOS users enjoy. The majority of Android users will probably think such criticism is bullshit, but that has always been the case. I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them from point A to point B. As a Honda owner myself, I’m not sure I would buy it — I’d have to experience it to understand it, I imagine. And most Android lovers are not going to spend enough time with iOS to fully appreciate the differences.

You either see it or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool, enjoy your Nexus. But I think the reason Apple Stores are so crowded, and getting so big, is that there are an awful lot of people who do see it.

Gitbox: Year One Status Report ★

Oleg Andreev:

In June on WWDC10 my boss told me once more that “real artists ship” and I shipped Gitbox with version 0.9 for free. It looked clumsy and I really worried that nobody would like it.

But it was a success. A lot of people got interested by a concept of “one-button” Git client. Never before version control app, especially for Git, was expected to be “simple” or “minimalistic” yet useful. A lot of people dismissed it for a lack of features. But still many fell in love with it from day one and continued using it daily. For many it became the only way to work with Git repos without exploding their brains.

It’s a pretty clever app — deceptively simple, in a good way. Currently on sale for just $10 — regular price, $40. (Via Gus Mueller.)

Dan Frommer on His New Gig at ReadWriteWeb, and What It Means for SplatF ★

Dan Frommer:

I will continue to write SplatF, now, then, and probably for the rest of my life, with the same mission as always: To write the site I want to read.

Good to hear.

Accounts of a Massacre in Iraq Found in Junkyard ★

Michael S. Schmidt, reporting for the NYT:

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp. […]

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

Galaxy Nexus Launches Tomorrow on Verizon for $299 ★

Has Google ever released sales figures for the Nexus phones? Doesn’t seem to me like they’re particularly big sellers, even though year-after-year they’re widely reviewed as the best Android phones on the market. I spent a few minutes playing with Topolsky’s Galaxy Nexus in the On The Verge green room; some of the text editing improvements in Android 4.0 alone make it quite obviously the best Android phone in the world. But will people line up for this? Is there any Android phone that people will line up for? I point this out not to mock or make fun, but simply as an observation of how profoundly different the Android and iOS markets are. This is the Android equivalent of the iPhone 4S — the newest OS, the most features, the leading-est-edge hardware.

Also interesting to observe how Android phones have evolved in a decidedly-iPhone-like direction. The 2008 G1 had a hardware keyboard; a hardware up/down/left/right controller for moving the insertion point in text and navigating menus; dedicated hardware buttons for Menu, Home, Search, and Back; and SD card storage expansion. All of these things were held up by some critics as advantages against the iPhone. Today’s Galaxy Nexus has none of these things. (It still has a removable battery, though — does anyone want to take a bet that next year’s Nexus Whatever does not?) The biggest anti-iPhone difference in Android evolution is the ever-increasing size of the displays — the Galaxy Nexus’s measures 4.65 inches diagonally — and the corresponding increase in the overall size of the hardware.

But: the iPhone copied Android’s pull-from-the-top notification list. So it’s all even.

ReadWriteWeb Acquired by Say Media; Hires Dan Frommer as ‘Editor-at-Large’ ★

Say Media is the new incarnation of Six Apart. Frommer says this is not the end of SplatF — his new gig at ReadWriteWeb is in addition to SplatF, not a replacement or acquisition. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reports the deal was for about $5 million.

I’ll tell you what sets off my spidey sense, though: the way Say Media wants you to spell the “say” in all caps.

Process Now Universal ★

Speaking of native apps, remember last week’s DF sponsor, Process — a photo filtering/adjustment app for the iPad? As of yesterday, it’s now a universal app for the iPhone, too. It’s apps like Process that make today’s camera market so fascinating. The sensors and lenses of dedicated point-and-shoot cameras remain superior to those in smartphones, but, smartphones can run real photo editing apps right on the device itself. Use a “camera” and you still need a computer to tweak or share your photos. Use a smartphone and you can do it all right there.

Instagram is more fun for me than anything else in photography today. Process is a good way to tweak photos for Instagram — or any other way you might want to share directly from your phone — without the schtick of faux-retro toy camera effects. Here’s the neat living-in-the-future thing: when you save a set of adjustments as a new custom process, it gets synced across your devices via iCloud. Save a new process on your iPhone, and that process is available on your iPad. Just like that. $3 on the App Store.

Dave Winer on Apps and the Web ★

Dave Winer:

I’m talking about the newspaper or magazine that, when you click on a link to go to one of their articles, puts up an interstitial telling you that you could read the article in their app instead. Initially, I installed one or two of these. The other day I installed a big comprehensive one from Google. Flipboard is the original one of these reading environments that is not the web. The NY Times has a slow buggy huge app for reading their news.

I think Winer’s piece yesterday was almost completely misunderstood. There are people taking extreme positions on this: those who believe native apps will replace the web, and on the other side, those who think we’ll eventually use nothing but browser-based web apps. Winer isn’t arguing that.

Some things work best on the web. Some things work best in native apps. And as Brent Simmons writes, they’re getting intermingled in interesting ways. I love native apps, but almost everything I read other than books, I read on the web. I make my living writing for the web. But a lot of what I read on the web I read in web views inside native apps like Tweetbot.

Maybe someday there will be a Daring Fireball app, but I still haven’t thought of a reason to make one that would be better than just reading DF on the web.

Samsung Exec Says Apple Made Galaxy Tab a ‘Household Name’ ★

Asher Moses, interviewing Samsung’s Australian chief for The Sydney Morning Herald:

But when asked whether the court action — which Apple launched after claiming Samsung “slavishly copied” its iPad — was the best marketing Samsung could hope for, McGee was under no illusions about the boost Apple’s case, and the subsequent media coverage, provided.

“At the end of the day the media awareness certainly made the Galaxy Tab 10.1 a household name compared to probably what it would’ve been based on the investment that we would’ve put into it from a marketing perspective,” he said.

I think he’s right. The overwhelming majority of the media coverage I’ve seen for the Galaxy Tab is related to Apple’s various lawsuits. I’ve still never seen a single person using one in the wild, so I don’t think it’s helping Samsung sell tablets, but I don’t think there can be any argument that it’s raised overall awareness that the Galaxy Tabs even exist.

John Lasseter on Steve Jobs ★

John Lasseter, in Time magazine:

A few months later, Apple bought NeXT, and Steve sat me down at Pixar and asked my permission to go back to Apple. He didn’t want to do it without our blessing. He said he wanted to go back because the world would be a better place with Apple in it. That was incredibly touching to me, and it showed that Steve cared about people. He knew that his products and technology could improve people’s lives.

Today in Dishonest Fox News Charts ★

I’m sure this was an honest mistake.

Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice ★

Worth a re-link: Barry Schwartz at TED on the paradox of choice.

ReadWriteWeb: ‘6 Mobile Malware Trends for 2012’ ★

Would this not be more accurate if headlined “6 Android Malware Trends for 2012”? These damn malware facts have an anti-Android bias.

Daniel Craig on ‘Quantum of Solace’ ★

Daniel Craig, in an interview with Time Out London:

Q: It seems that the script is sometimes an after-thought on huge productions.

A: ‘Yes and you swear that you’ll never get involved with shit like that, and it happens. On “Quantum”, we were fucked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, “Never again”, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes — and a writer I am not.’

That explains a lot.

Too Many Choices ★

Interesting interview with Sheena Iyengar:

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display, and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam.

What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam, whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.

Think about this in the context of, say, Apple Stores.

(Would it have killed them to add a few paragraph breaks to the transcript, though?)

Louis C.K. Answering Questions on Reddit ★

Fascinating, wide-ranging group interview with Louis C.K. Here’s a bit regarding piracy and bootlegging:

To steal from someone and not feel bad, you either have to be a sociopath or view the act differently. One way is to remove “Someone” from the equation. You’re not stealing from a person. Big companies do a lot to help people view them as less than human. I heard a speech by Noam Chomsky who said that corporations are like super humans. They cannot be hurt like a human can and they never die. They are not susceptible to scrutiny or accountability. This makes them more profitable. If companies want to enjoy these benefits to some degree they have to live with what else comes with being not human. You miss out on compassion, forgiveness, camaraderie, empathy, trust all kinds of shit.

Sales Figures From Louis C.K. ★

Louis C.K.:

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

Sounds like a success. I watched it the other night and it was great. I hope it continues to sell like hotcakes.

Jesse Hollington on Deleting Photos From iCloud Photo Stream ★

Jesse Hollington:

Photo Stream as it existed in iOS 5.0 and related iCloud components was a very simple “push” technology that required absolutely no tracking or syncing; new photos simply got pushed to every device after which iOS, iCloud and iPhoto/Aperture could basically forget about them.

The ability to actually delete photos from a Photo Stream requires synchronization of existing photo content.... Suddenly Apple’s iCloud servers and related client components have to keep track of every photo in the Photo Stream individually so that they can push delete operations across all devices. Of course it’s not rocket science, but it does add an extra layer of complexity to the process.

I’m not saying it’s easy. (I try never to make any assumptions about how hard or easy it would be to add any given feature.) What I’m saying is, no matter how hard it was to allow deletion of individual pictures from Photo Stream, it shouldn’t have been released until the delete feature was ready.

On the other hand, that’s the advantage of software over hardware. You can omit an essential feature and then hustle to get it into your first major update. Good luck adding volume buttons to your Kindle Fire.

A Man, a Ball, a Hoop, a Bench (and an Alleged Thread) ★

Wonderful profile of Teller (of Penn and Teller fame), and his The Red Ball trick, by Richard Abowitz for Las Vegas Weekly, back in 2008:

Penn amended Teller’s suggested explanation, offering “Now, here’s a trick that’s done with a piece of thread” in its place. Suddenly Penn was happy and excited. There was an idea. “That’s all,” Teller remembers Penn saying, “Just give them that much. That gives them so much and puts them on our side. Nobody else in the world would do that.”

Craftmanship, respect for the audience, and the pursuit of perfection. Years of practice before putting the trick in the act. Then, they introduce the trick by telling you how it’s done. I’ve seen their show twice, including this trick both times. It’s amazing.