Linked List: January 17, 2013

Thursday, 17 January 2013

The one and only Jeffrey Zeldman was kind enough to have me as the guest on his podcast this week. I think you’ll like it.

Napkin 1.0 ★

Also new (and currently featured as the Editor’s Choice) in the Mac App Store: Napkin, an elegant simple utility for making diagrams and annotating images, from my pals at Aged & Distilled. There’s some really clever stuff in Napkin — to draw a shape — rectangle, circle, or a line — you just draw it on the canvas, and the app figures out what shape you want. The app is just chock full of nice details, including a really nice help system that guides you through discovering all those nice details. $40 in the App Store, worth every cent.

See Rene Ritchie’s piece on Napkin at iMore for more, including a video showing a bunch of cool features.

Kaleidoscope 2.0 ★

Fresh out of beta — Black Pixel’s unparalleled file comparison app for the Mac. Shows the differences between text files, folders of files, and, most amazingly, images.

How Apple Sets Its Prices ★

Marco Tabini, writing for Macworld:

Both iOS devices and Macs seem to be impervious to the discount game. In fact it’s so rare to find a significant price variance between retailers that, when it does happen, the event usually draws considerable press coverage.

With so many laws regulating competition among retailers, how does Apple pull off this amazing feat? It turns out that the company uses a fairly straightforward strategy, known as price maintenance, that takes advantage of the popularity of its products and exploits a quirk in the way retailers are allowed to advertise their merchandise.

Newsstand ‘Read Them Here First’ Titles ★

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple today quietly launched a new feature for Newsstand, whereby publications by partner Hearst (covering their entire catalog) will now be available to subscribers days before they come to print, or other digital editions. Hearst’s library includes a number of top titles, including Car and Driver, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Seventeen and Harper’s Bazaar among many others.

The ‘Apple Needs a New Hit Product Now’ Argument ★

On the flip side of the coin from the preceding item by Dan Pallotta, we’ve got this one by (the coincidentally similarly surnamed) Therese Poletti. There’s nothing in it I haven’t seen before, repeatedly, and don’t agree with any of it, but it serves as a good rundown of the general consensus of the Apple pessimists.

What gets me is her main point, that Apple “needs” a new product of the disruptive scope of the iPhone or iPad. I don’t get it. Sure, it’d be great — for consumers and for Apple — if they were to soon unveil some major new initiative. New stuff is great. But why would you think they needed to? Why just Apple? Why does no one argue that Samsung “needs” to unveil a major new disruption? What harm would Apple suffer if they spent the next five years refining and growing the products already in their stable? They’re already the most profitable technology company in the world, and their three major platforms — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — are all growing. They don’t need to change a damn thing.

The Market Wants Apple to Unveil a Time Machine ★

Dan Pallotta, writing for the Harvard Business Review:

The critics that are screaming right now are intellectually lazy. They’re throwing temper tantrums instead of looking at the big picture. Like two-year-olds, they don’t really know what they want. And they’re not happy when they get it, anyway. Apple could unveil a new car and they’d say Apple’s days are over because it’s just bet its future on an industry it knows nothing about. Not unlike, say, Apple’s entrance into the mobile phone industry. I bet that if Apple did unveil a time machine, they’d claim it wasn’t fast enough.

Spot on.

Apple’s Churning of the Gut ★

Elia Freedman:

I honestly believe people read their gut and say it can’t be possible therefore it isn’t. Apple can’t be this successful. It’s not possible. And I know that because my gut tells me so.

I had lunch today with one of my old college professors and his attitude was almost “about time.” Apple had its day in the sun, it did well for a while, but it’s time for market realities to catch up to the company. Apple has been a fad for a decade now — since the iPod launched in 2001 — and it is time for it to fade into the sunset like some hokey 1950s western.

Great piece. I’ve made an argument along these lines on The Talk Show, in the context of early impressions. A lot of people formed their impression of Apple in the 1990’s, and to them, that’s what Apple will always be: a niche hardware maker that insists on doing things the wrong way (closed instead of open, etc.) in the name of control. To these people, everything that’s happened with Apple in the past decade has been a fluke, an aberration.