Linked List: January 21, 2013

Monday, 21 January 2013

Indie Film Shot Guerrilla-Style Within Disney Theme Parks ★

Steven Zeitchik, reporting for the LA Times from Sundance:

About three years ago, Randy Moore, a struggling screenwriter living in Burbank, had an out-there idea: What if he took a tiny camera and, without asking permission, began shooting a narrative movie at Disney theme parks?

(Via Aaron Cohen.)

MacStories Interview With John Siracusa ★

John Siracusa, in a wide-ranging interview with Federico Viticci at MacStories:

Simplicity is great, as iOS has shown. But there’s a difference between conceptual simplicity and visual simplicity. Just hiding controls does make things appear simpler, but it doesn’t actually make them any simpler. The complexity is now just hidden. Similarly, removing features that few people use is a good idea, but like any good idea, it can be taken too far. At a certain point, you’re just making your application worse for everyone, even new users.

You can’t always tweak or refactor an existing application into the beautiful thing you’re envisioning. Sometimes the only way to achieve true simplicity is to start over with a new concept for the whole app.

What Does Google Need From Android? ★

Benedict Evans:

Someone (sadly, I forget who) described Android to me as an unguided missile: very powerful but spiraling semi-randomly with no clarity on where it would land. There is the fragmentation issue, and the weakness of most of the OEMs. There is the threat of Amazon or Samsung forking the platform. But there is also the threat that an increasing number of Android devices might have no more connection to Google than does an iPhone.

‘One Strategy, One P&L’ ★

John R. Moran:

For a coherent strategy to work, then, the organization executing it must be measured as a whole, rather than as parts. In other words, if a company is to have a single strategy, it must be driven by a single P&L.

This may sound like an extreme position. Yet some of the world’s most successful companies operate this way. Apple famously has only one P&L, for which its CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, has direct responsibility. And while each of its major hardware product lines is priced to make a significant profit, it bundles in all its key software upgrades, products, services, and platforms for free. […]

It’s Apple’s single-company mindset that lets it give away industry-leading software and cannibalize its own products, which in turn has led to its unprecedented success.

Astute.

iPhone Math, Indeed ★

Brightwire, translating a report from the China Times:

Apple will announce three new iPhone models in 2013, and two of them, the 4-inch iPhone 5S and 4.8-inch iPhone Math (both featuring 8-mega-pixel cameras), will hit markets before the end of June, China Times reported citing Taiwan-based Commercial Times.

Red flags:

This is an English translation of a Chinese newspaper report whose source was a Taiwanese newspaper report.
Apple’s supply chain partners do not know product names. Every iPhone just says “iPhone” on the back. (Same for iPads; I knew a lot about the iPad Mini before it was announced, but I didn’t know its name.) Many are raising an eyebrow at the “iPhone Math” moniker because it sounds like a terrible, nonsensical name — I say take a step back and question any purported source from the supply chain who claims to even know an upcoming iPhone’s name. Even Apple engineers in Cupertino don’t find out product names until they launch. (That said, “iPhone 5S” is a pretty reasonable guess for an upcoming phone with the same physical dimensions as the iPhone 5.)
I disregard any report of an upcoming iPhone with a bigger display that doesn’t include precise pixel dimensions. Anyone in the supply chain who knows the size of the display should also know the pixels. It would be nice, too, to hear an explanation of Apple’s software plans for the display size. When rumors of the iPad Mini became credible, they were accompanied by pixel dimensions (1024 × 768) and an explanation for how software would accommodate the size.

Citing Apple’s suppliers, the report added that the third model, which has not been exposed, will be launched before Christmas. The model will feature a 12-mega-pixel camera.

Three new iPhones in calendar 2013. Does that make sense to anyone? Why bother with the June 5S in this scenario?

Update: “iPhone Plus / iPhone+”, mangled in translation, is a good guess for the root of this “iPhone Math” name. But, again, it makes no sense that a supplier would have heard the name of such a device.