Linked List: May 8, 2013

Wednesday, 8 May 2013

AOL vs. Netflix: The Broadband Era Illustrated 

Interesting chart from Dan Frommer: AOL’s dialup demise is nearly the mirror image of Netflix’s rise.

John McAfee Answers Questions From Slashdot Readers 

Almost certainly the most entertaining thing you’ll read today. A taste:

I haven’t been involved with McAfee anti-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87% of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations — madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few. Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.

Photographer Peter Belanger on Shooting for Apple 

Michael Shane for The Verge:

You’ve almost certainly never heard of Peter Belanger, but you’ve definitely seen his photographs. In fact, you may even see his work every day, and it’s likely that you own some of his most famous subjects. Belanger is the man behind some of Apple’s most iconic product images, a San Francisco-based product photographer at the top of his field.

Beauty, Truth, and Jony Ive 

In a similar vein, John Siracusa asks:

It’s interesting that Jobs and Ive saw eye to eye on hardware design and yet seemed far apart, at least in Jobs’s final years, when it comes to software design. While Jobs was reportedly a champion of rich Corinthian leather, Ive could only wince when asked about it in an interview.

I’m confident that we’ll see less leather, wood, felt, and animated reel-to-reel tapes in Apple’s future software products, but the question remains: what does it mean for an application or an OS to be true to itself?

Put another way, if the hardware should be true to its materials — glass, aluminum (hard not to spell it aluminium when discussing Ive), plastic — what is it that software should be true to? RGB pixels? I think not. I think the on-screen UI elements should (and under Ive, will be) simply true to themselves. Let a button be a button, and make it look good, with an emotional feel appropriate to its context and purpose. No need to overthink it.

Jony Ive on Designing for Emotion 

Jony Ive, quoted by Ben Thompson from a talk a few years ago:

You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

Thompson offers some good thoughts on what Ive’s leadership means for iOS7 — but I think he vastly underestimates just how much work even just an appearance-only overhaul of iOS would be. An appearance overhaul plus the usual annual dose of functional changes, additions, and improvements is even more work.

Syncing Is Only Part of the Future 

Brent Simmons:

Even if Apple works out syncing — somehow — that’s just not enough. That just gets us to where we should have been in 2008. The future belongs to apps with more sophisticated services.

And the future belongs (in part) to whoever provides those services. If you’re an iOS or Mac developer, you’d like it to be Apple.