Linked List: June 26, 2012

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Hard to Believe Gizmodo Would Botch a Story Like This 

Odd story on Gizmodo last night, by Molly Oswaks:

T-mobile customers may have the displeasing distinction of being the only mobile subscribers not to get their paws on the much-hyped and forthcoming iPhone 5. Bummer.

“We are not going to get the iPhone 5 this year,” is what the carrier’s marketing chief, Cole Brodan, is reported to have announced in a recent employee “town hall” meeting.

Follow that link to the purported source, though, and it comes up as an empty web page. I think, though, it was the mobile URL for this story, published by the same reporter (Cromwell Schubarth) for the same publication (The Puget Sound Business Journal). The problem for Gizmodo: the dateline for that story was September 2011.

The whole thing goes back to this report by David Beren for TmoNews regarding the T-Mobile “town hall” meeting — again, from last September.

Oswaks ends her piece thus:

T-mobile customers, now seems like a good time to check out the terms and end date of your current contract. Eh?

It’s also a good time for Gizmodo to check the dates on the stories they link to.

Update: Brad Reed, “News Editor” at BGR, today published a piece based on the same year-old news, about 10 hours after Gizmodo’s. That BGR URL is a 404 now, but our good friends at Google have it cached. Oddly, Reed didn’t even mention Gizmodo, but instead linked to the same mobile URL for the same year-old story from The Puget Sound Business Journal. What a coincidence!

Update 2: Now the Gizmodo story has gone down the 404 memory hole as well. Google has it cached, though.

From the DF Archive: ‘Is That a Podcast in Your Pocket?’ 

Yours truly, back in 2005, on Apple’s initial foray into supporting podcasting in iTunes and on iPods:

The other bit of good fortune is the name: podcasting. Good fortune for Apple, at least. Clearly the “pod” in “podcasting” is about the iPod. Apple couldn’t have come up with a better name for this phenomenon if they’d gotten to choose it themselves. If the whole “audio enclosures via RSS” scene were still known as “audioblogging”, as it was when Maciej Ceglowski recorded his seminal “Audioblogging Manifesto”, I seriously wonder whether Apple would have done this now.

It’s been a long seven years. At the time, Apple’s introduction of podcasting support in iTunes effectively took the market from Ev Williams’s startup Odeo. Odeo (wisely) abandoned their original idea, and instead focused its efforts on a social messaging network instead: Twitter.

Would Twitter exist today if Apple hadn’t added podcast support to iTunes in 2005?

Confrontation With TSA Agent Leaves Grandfather’s Ashes on Floor 

Yet another TSA disgrace:

A man’s attempt to bring the ashes of his grandfather home to Indianapolis ended with an angry scene in a Florida airport, with the ashes spilled on the terminal floor. […]

“She didn’t apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments. I couldn’t pick up all, everything that was lost. I mean, there was a long line behind me.”

Apple Should Eat Some Sandbox Dog Food 

Manton Reece:

Maybe Apple could make the same case for Mac OS X’s built-in apps: Address Book, iCal, and Mail don’t need to be sandboxed because they are part of the operating system. But that argument doesn’t work for Keynote or iMovie. Those apps should play by the same rules that all productivity and video software in the store does.

If Apple were to sandbox a few of these it would go a long way toward convincing developers to do the same. And it would also shake out bugs and missing APIs in the whole sandbox environment.

It’s not-eating-their-own-dogfood hypocrisy, pure and simple. Apple has a bunch of Mac apps in the App Store, and none of them, to my knowledge, are sandboxed. This includes new versions of Aperture and iPhoto that were released this month, after the June 1 sandboxing deadline.

As Manton points out in a separate piece, the new rules are forcing some apps out of the Mac App Store.

Andy Ihnatko on iCloud and the Mac App Store Transition 

Great piece from Andy Ihnatko:

An app does syncing through MobileMe. Now, it needs to do it through iCloud. Fine. But Apple won’t let an app use iCloud unless it’s sold in the App Store. Fine. But Apple won’t approve an app for the App Store unless it’s sandboxed. And for many developers, sandboxing means that half of their app’s features will either no longer work at all, or will need to be dumbed way, way down. Selling your app there also means being cut off from any kind of simple and direct line of communication with your users.

Mac developers are getting pinched: they can only hook up to iCloud if they’re in the Mac App Store, but now they can only be in the Mac App Store if they comply with the new sandboxing rules, which rules severely curtail features and capabilities the apps previously relied upon. iOS developers don’t face either problem: all iOS apps go through the App Store so they all have access to iCloud, and the sandboxing rules have been in place on iOS all along. As Ihnatko writes:

Products that were working just fine are now broken. Time, money, and resources that developers could be investing in making a great product even better must instead be spent just to keep their software working.

Yojimbo iCloud Transition Update 

Rich Siegel, Bare Bones Software, on the dilemma(s) faced by Mac developers with apps that use the soon-to-be-closed MobileMe for syncing data:

As one of the very first developers to adopt MobileMe for synchronization, we’re accustomed to working closely with Apple to address the complexities involved. iCloud represents a radical change in how data synchronization operates; it’s unfortunately not just a switch that developers can throw.

I switched to Dropbox syncing with Yojimbo last year, when I upgraded my MobileMe account to iCloud. It works, but it requires you to manually quit Yojimbo from Mac A before launching it on Mac B. (Yojimbo is smart enough to warn you if you try launching it on Mac B while it’s still running on Mac A, which happens all the time with me because I’ve always got Yojimbo running, at which point I need to pop over to Screens and remotely log into my other Mac just to quit Yojimbo.)

Long-term, the switch to iCloud should make for a better-than-ever syncing solution — not just for Yojimbo, but for Mac apps in general. Short-term, however, this is confusing for users and an enormous headache for developers, especially those with apps that predate the Mac App Store.

Claim Chowder: ‘Apple iTV OS Demo Scheduled for WWDC’ 

Jonathan Geller, writing at BGR back on May 30:

BGR has learned from a trusted source that Apple is planning to demonstrate a brand new version of the Apple TV operating system next week at WWDC. This new OS is said to be much more feature-complete than the current OS that runs on the Apple TV, and is apparently the one that Apple’s upcoming HDTV will run.

So much for that trusted source. (Worth noting: I took a guess that Apple might announce something like this at WWDC, but Geller wasn’t guessing. And from what I gathered asking around during WWDC, there was never anything Apple TV-related slated for announcement at WWDC. Something big is going on with Apple TV in Cupertino, but it’s still being cooked.)

New iOS App From Apple: Podcasts 

Blockbuster new iOS app from Apple through the App Store. At a glance it seems to be very well done in every regard — good for playback (including syncing your location in an episode between devices), good for discovery, good for automatically downloading new episodes.

This, we now know, is why iOS 6 doesn’t have podcast playback in the Music iTunes Store app. Word on the street at WWDC was that this was slated to get featured in the keynote, but got bumped because there was so much other stuff to announce.

‘Johnny Carson: King of Late Night’ 

Now available on iTunes: American Masters’s documentary on Johnny Carson. Loved it.

(Frustrating side note: It’s only available for purchase in standard definition; if you want high-def, you have to rent it. Why?)

Update: Via David Friedman, ends up you can watch it for free in the PBS iPad app, which itself is free of charge — or on the web.

Fragmentation and Segmentation 

Benedict Evans on Apple’s segmentation-by-device of new features in iOS:

How do you segment without fragmenting? Apple achieved this pretty easily with the iPod by varying the storage, but that wouldn’t be meaningful for the iPhone. The cheap one has to run the apps, but people still have to have a reason to buy the expensive one.

What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting.

Nailed it.