Linked List: December 7, 2012

Friday, 7 December 2012

Craig Mod Follows Up on Subcompact Publishing and The Daily 

Craig Mod:

In the end, The Daily chose the wrong slice from the tablet publishing distribution dichotomy. Right now (and certainly two years ago!) you get to choose one, and only one:

  • Large → Many: A huge publication with massive overhead that’s distributed on everything
  • Small → Few: A lean publication with small overhead that’s laser focused on a single platform

They went for the most ridiculous non-option: a huge publication with massive overhead, laser focused on a single platform.

Tablets Are Waiting for Their Movable Type 

Ryan Singer:

Remember the web before Movable Type? If you wanted a blog you had to program one. You had to know databases and webhosts and PHP or Perl. If you were “just” a web designer, or a writer with ideas, you had to hire an in-demand web programmer to make it happen. Publishing was expensive and hard. […]

Now is a great time for another Movable Type.

The Real Threat That Samsung Poses to Apple 

Interesting guest post at Asymco by James Allworth. I disagree with him that smartphone hardware has yet been commoditized — at the low end, sure, but there have always been low-end commodity cell phones. At the high end though, it’s still early days. There are many dramatic innovations yet to come.

But his story about Dell and Asus, from Clayton Christensen’s latest book, is quite interesting:

Asus came to Dell and said, “We’ve done a good job fabricating these motherboards for you. Why don’t you let us assemble the whole computer for you, too? Assembling those products is not what’s made you successful. We can take all the remaining manufacturing assets off your balance sheet, and we can do it all for 20 percent less.”

The Dell analysts realized that this, too, was a win- win… […]

Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers.

Improving the iOS Keyboard 

Speaking of writing on the iPad, Federico Viticci:

I think the discussion on the iOS keyboard often mixes writing with editing. Personally, I believe the iOS keyboard is great for writing, because it’s just a normal keyboard, but iOS text selection is in serious need of an update, because it feels outdated.

As Viticci goes on to say, the answer is not adding more rows to the keyboard.

Writing on the iPad 

Jason Snell:

I can’t argue with the results. Pieces I’ve been promising myself to write for weeks remain empty text files in my MacBook’s Dropbox folder, while 800-word essays sprout from my iPad in no time.

Not the case for me, but fascinating nonetheless.

Another Thought Regarding Reed Hastings’s Trouble With the SEC Regarding His Facebook Posts 

This is why Apple (and its executives) mostly eschew social networking.

‘Recency’ vs. ‘Recentness’ 

I ran into an intriguing (to me at least) language issue today, wherein I needed a nominal form of recent. My first thought was recency; my second recentness. Ends up both are accepted. (I went with recency.)