Linked List: June 7, 2013

Friday, 7 June 2013

We have a different name because we make a different sandwich. A true Philly hoagie is so much better than a “sub”, it’s not even funny. We’re famous for the cheesesteak, but the Philly hoagie is just as great. (Sarcone’s is the best; Primo’s are excellent too.)

Marco Arment on Vesper ★

Marco Arment:

From the outside, then, it’s easy to be dismissive or even resentful: How can these guys launch a relatively expensive text-note app that’s missing so many features of competing text-note apps?

Balls.

It takes balls to release an iOS app in 2013 for $4.99.

It takes balls to enter this extremely crowded category.

It takes balls to release a note-shoebox app in 2013 that has no sync, import, or export.

It takes balls to name your note-shoebox app after a cocktail nobody has heard of, then to age-rate the app “12+ for mild alcohol references” just so the cocktail’s recipe can be included in the Credits screen.

Federico Viticci on Vesper ★

An astute review of the app, and an interview with yours truly at the end:

Federico Viticci: In a talk you gave at Macworld in January 2009, you mentioned how you didn’t work well with other people in a team. Fast forward to 2013, you have teamed up with Brent and Dave for Vesper. What’s changed?

John Gruber: Great question. I’m not sure what my exact words were then, but the way I’d put it now is that I don’t work well with people I don’t like, or with people who don’t seem to get what I want. […] The three of us make a good team, that’s the difference. The big thing is that all three of us are willing to try anything, and to take however long it takes to get it right. Iterate, iterate, iterate; over, and over, and over. Dave designed certain elements of Vesper dozens of times. Brent implemented many of the features and animated transitions numerous times, just so we could try different designs and see what they really felt like each way. And not only did neither of them mind this, they loved it. Brent even devised a custom framework for the app to provide us with CSS-like tweaking for things like layout, color, and animation timings.

Jason Snell on Vesper ★

Jason Snell:

It’s simple enough not to get in my way with a lot of fiddly organizational features, but provides me with more structure than something like the Notes app. Tagging notes made a lot of sense — I immediately made Work, Writing, and Recipes tags. I commingled work notes, ideas for my novel, a favorite recipe for buttermilk biscuits, and an idea for my podcast without any trouble. Once I started treating it as the iPhone equivalent of a small paper notebook tucked into a pocket, it all began to fit.

Yours truly, in an interview with Snell:

“Bond’s gadgets have always been at the intersection of utility and elegance,” Gruber said. “That’s as good a motto for a software company as any.”

LaunchBar 5.5: Introducing Snippets ★

Nifty new feature in one of my all-time favorite Mac apps.

Verizon and the NSA: The Problem With Metadata ★

Jane Mayer:

The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of Surveillance or Security?, is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening — you don’t need the content.”

President Obama’s Dragnet ★

The New York Times:

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Google Glass Banned From Google Shareholder Meeting ★

Matt Clinch, CNBC:

Tight security restrictions at Thursday’s Google shareholder meeting led even the company’s much-hyped Google Glass technology to be banned, infuriating a consumer watchdog group who accused the tech giant of hypocrisy.

Eric Schmidt, back in 2009:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Washington Post Backtracks on Claim Tech Companies ‘Participate Knowingly’ in NSA Data Collection ★

Jon Russell, writing for The Next Web:

The Post previously claimed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple ”participate knowingly”. The phrase that stood out in the report (it has been repurposed by numerous tech blogs and news sites across the Web) since it suggested that US firms willingly agreed to a process that — at best — could violate the rights of millions in the US if their data is accidentally monitored by the NSA.

Hours after the news broke, and every company bar PalTalk and AOL denied any knowledge of the program and allegations of their involvement, the Post has changed its stance. The phrase ”participate knowingly” has been removed from the article, a new passage suggests the firms were unaware of PRISM.

How Q Branch Works Together ★

Brent Simmons:

Since I’m always interested in hearing what other teams use to work together and ship their software, I figure I should list what we use to work together on Vesper.

The short answer: Mercurial, Bitbucket, Glassboard, Lighthouse, and HockeyApp.

I’ll add one more: iMessage. Brent didn’t use it, but Wiskus and I exchanged thousands of messages to collaborate on the design.

The Talk Show, Live, Next Week in San Francisco ★

Speaking of podcasts, I’m doing a live episode of The Talk Show this coming Tuesday in San Francisco, during WWDC. The first batch of tickets sold out, but we just put another 150 on sale. Grab them while they’re hot.

Debug 15: Simmons, Wiskus, Gruber, and Vesper ★

Guy English and Rene Ritchie were both beta testers of Vesper; a few days ago they had Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and me on their podcast, Debug, to talk about Vesper. We talk about almost everything: how we collaborated, the tools we used, “flat” design, accessibility, app pricing, and more. Oh, and Mad Men. It was a lot of fun.