Linked List: February 7, 2013

Thursday, 7 February 2013

So the big new app of the day, deservedly so, is Orchestra’s Mailbox. It’s an email client, currently iPhone-only and limited to Gmail accounts. It’s a well done, good-looking app with some innovative ideas. Because of those ideas, though, using Mailbox requires granting Orchestra access to your email account — the app talks to Orchestra’s server, and Orchestra’s server talks to Gmail. So, clearly, there are some trust/security implications to consider. But that’s how they can do push notifications, for example. That server-side component, however, has forced them to roll out access to the app slowly. Sign up now, you’ll get access later, as they slowly grow their user base. As of today the list is hundreds of thousands of users long.

I’m a lucky bastard and have had access to the beta for a few months. The bottom line for me is that it’s an app I greatly admire, but won’t use personally. For one thing, it’s too Gmail centric. But I can see how a lot of people will really like it, especially people who primarily use email through one main Gmail account.

Lex Friedman has an effusive review at Macworld; he’s sold on it. (I was probably never in the target audience for Mailbox — personally, I really like iOS’s built-in Mail app.)

Ed Bott on Surface Pro and MacBook Air Storage Space ★

Ed Bott:

Microsoft has been pummeled by critics this week over supposedly inadequate storage space in its new Surface Pro. But those criticisms are horribly flawed. Big surprise: when you do the disk space math, Surface Pro and MacBook Air are practically twins.

Good piece. I sort of can’t believe Apple is still selling the Air in a 64 GB configuration. The truth is that the Surface Pro is a MacBook Air competitor with some iPad/tablet-like features. But when people look at it, they see an iPad competitor with some PC-like features. Hence the mockery regarding how much storage space the OS consumes on the Surface Pro.

The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards ★

Make your browser window big.

What Happens If You Count Tablets as PCs? ★

You get Apple as the world’s number one PC maker.

(We have to take these numbers as ballpark estimates, of course, because companies like Samsung and Amazon do not report sales numbers. Analysts have to estimate them. This report is from Canalys, and they peg Amazon’s Kindle tablet sales at 4.6 million for last quarter. But here’s a report from IDC covering the exact same quarter, claiming 6.0 million tablets for Amazon. A million or two tablets here or there isn’t that big a deal to Apple, because they’re selling around 20 million iPads per quarter, but it’s a significant difference for companies like Samsung or Amazon, who are (seemingly) selling single-digit millions per quarter. But, no matter how loose these estimates are, if tablets are counted as PCs, there is no debate that Apple is number one by a long shot.)

Pickpocket Extraordinaire Apollo Robbins on The Today Show ★

I can’t get enough of this guy.

Language Log: ‘The Cyberpragmatics of Bounding Asterisks’ ★

Ben Zimmer at Language Log takes my piece on bounding asterisks and runs with it, brilliantly:

Now let’s skip ahead to Internet usage. Gruber characterized the use of bounding asterisks in online communication as a form of emphasis, but pragmatically it’s a bit more complex than that. True, bounding asterisks can emphasize a word or words in plain-text messages where italics and bolding are unavailable, but the legacy of the comic strips points in another direction — the use of bounding asterisks to signal non-verbal noises or actions as a kind of self-describing stage direction. […]

What’s fascinating about these asterisked stage directions is that they have moved well beyond the onomatopoetic coughs, gulps, and sighs of the comic strips into more complex actions stated in the third person, such as *jumps up and down*.

So there’s nearly century-old precedent in comics for asterisk-like symbols to denote onomatopoetic expressions — sigh, cough, gasp, etc. — but this usage never made its way into print typography until after it became commonplace online. But where it’s used in print is not as a Markdown-like alternative to italics in general, but specifically as an alternative to italics to denote stage-like actions on the part of the writer. (Yes, Pogue’s *cough*s made it into today’s print edition of The Times.)

This trend suggests that type designers should perhaps stop creating asterisks that appear quasi-superscripted, as though presumed for use to denote a footnote. Asterisks should be bigger and sit on the baseline — like other common punctuation characters (@, #, %, &) — to better work with this bracketing style.

Update: Some readers are arguing that even in this usage, asterisks should remain superscript-y, to make them more like quotation marks. I can see that argument, but to my mind this asterisk usage functions more like parenthetical brackets than quote marks. (For another, not all languages use English-style quotation punctuation. In European languages that use «guillemets», a baseline-sitting asterisk would seem natural.)

Android Fragmentation as a Security Problem ★

Craig Timberg, reporting for The Washington Post:

In late October, researchers at North Carolina State University alerted Google to a security flaw that could let scam artists send phony text messages to Android phones — a practice called “smishing” that can ensnare consumers in fraud.

Google’s security officials replied in minutes, confirming the flaw and promising to correct it. Within days they had incorporated a fix into the latest version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.2, and made available a security update for earlier versions.

But for most Android phones, the fix never arrived. For many, it never will.

Handset Profit Share: 72 Percent for Apple, 29 for Samsung, Zilch for the Rest ★

Rather astounding numbers from Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley:

Apple took home 72% of the profits with only 21.7% of unit sales (up from 15.4% in Q3).

Samsung’s 29% of the profits came from 28.9% of unit sales (down from 32.3% in Q3).

The press and investor community have been hammering for the last few months on the idea that Apple is in trouble because the iPhone is under increasing pressure from Samsung. They’re right about one thing: Samsung is doing well. But Samsung isn’t hurting Apple; what they’re doing is destroying all of the also-rans. Apple lives in the high-profit premium range of the market; that’s why their profit share so greatly exceeds their unit sale market share. This is the fallacy of the Church of Market Share — all unit sales are not created equal.

Samsung plays the game the traditional way, where its profit share is very much aligned with its unit sale market share — 29 percent of the units sold, 29 percent of the profits. But what Samsung has done is suck up all the oxygen in the market underneath Apple. But I would bet that the symmetry between Samsung’s market and profit shares is misleading — my guess is that Samsung makes the majority of its profits from a minority of its unit sales, the high-end Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note, etc.

Update: Lots of readers on Twitter are confused by the fact that 72 + 29 = 101. These are rounded numbers; I presume Walkley’s numbers came to around 71.5 for Apple and 28.5 for Samsung. Update 2: Or perhaps Apple and Samsung do, combined, account for more than 100 percent of the industry’s profits, because the rest, combined, are in the hole?

The Verge: ‘Microsoft’s New Xbox Will Include Improved Siri-Like Speech Recognition’ ★

I’ll bet headlines like this drive speech recognition experts — whose work predates Siri by decades — batty. But it speaks to the power of Siri’s brand.