Linked List: December 10, 2013

Tuesday, 10 December 2013

You Should Buy a New Daring Fireball T-Shirt ★

In case you missed it, brand-new Daring Fireball t-shirts are now available. We’re only taking orders until tomorrow, so if you’re interested, act now.

Hey Reuters, JK Keller Fixed Your ‘Glass Ceiling’ Graph ★

Scale matters.

Weather Line 1.1 ★

Not one but two weather app recommendations today. And this one, Weather Line, has become my primary weather app. I find the temperature graph (hourly, daily, monthly) to be an incredibly useful visualization. How warmly do I need to dress today? What should I pack for this trip? And it has built-in precipitation forecasts powered by Dark Sky. $2.99, cheap.

Update: Here’s an interview from Rene Ritchie at iMore with Weather Line director Ryan Jones.

Perfect Weather 1.1 ★

Before podcast listening apps became the new Twitter clients, weather apps were the new Twitter clients. I remain a sucker for good ones. Perfect Weather is a good one; my favorite feature is the integration with NOAA animated weather apps. $2.99, cheap.

Castro 1.0 ★

New podcast listening app for iPhone, with an elegant, simple iOS 7 interface. I don’t recall ever seeing a playback/scrubbing interface quite like Castro’s, and it’s really good. $2.99, cheap.

Here’s John Moltz on Castro:

So far Castro has been great about downloading episodes in the background and having them waiting for me when it’s time to walk the dog (which is not a euphemism I actually have a dog that I walk). The only downside to Castro I can think of is that it’s iPhone-only, so there’s no syncing, of course. Not that Apple’s syncing has worked that well for me anyway.

‘If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating’ ★

Ravi Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman, reporting for the NYT on a string of “viral” stories that garnered millions of page views, all which stories turned out to be false:

“The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage,” said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, which reposted the fictional airplane tweets, the letter to Santa and the poverty essay. “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”

Think about that. The guy who allowed all three stories to run says it’s a problem and the incentives are all wrong. I’ve been saying for years that page view-based advertising is a corrupting force. This is where it leads.

Scott Forstall ‘News’ ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors yesterday: “Former iOS Chief Scott Forstall Surfaces After Quiet Year of Traveling and Philanthropy”. Where by “surfaces”, they mean “is mentioned”. The source for this breaking news is this report by Amir Efrati for The Information. The relevant bit from that report:

What he’s doing now: Laying low after some travel to places including Italy and South Africa, with occasional appearances at Silicon Valley networking events. He advises some companies and has become more active in philanthropy in areas such as education, poverty and human rights.

What’s next: Venture capital firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz have maintained ties with him, but Apple insiders bet he’ll want to build something.

No news at all, other than that Forstall traveled to Italy and South Africa at some point in the last 13 months.

At Business Insider, Jay Yarow writes:

One of the biggest mysteries in technology is what has happened to Scott Forstall.

What I’ve heard is that when Tim Cook fired him, Forstall was offered (and accepted) a big truck full of money as part of a severance package. The terms of the severance agreement included a period of time during which Forstall can not (could not?) work for any other company, nor make any public statements. A garden leave, if you will — and pretty standard stuff in a tempestuous senior executive shake-up like this. The only question I’m curious about is how long the quiet / non-compete period is. I thought perhaps it was one year, which would mean he’s now free to talk and work elsewhere, which in turn was why I was at first excited to read The Information’s report yesterday. I thought perhaps they’d landed Forstall’s first post-Apple interview. (And I was jealous.)

For all we know, Forstall is free to talk and is simply choosing to remain quiet until he actually has something to announce. Shocking, right?

‘Decembond’ ★

Sean Dove:

For the next month I thought it would be a fun little project to rewatch every James Bond film and create a little illustration for each one and maybe a little review.

Great work so far.

Matthew Bischoff on Software Criticism and the NYT’s ‘Today’s Paper’ ★

Matthew Bischoff:

By my count there are at least 13 ways to read the Times: Paper, iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Kindle, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Web, Mobile Web, Replica, Times Skimmer, Time Wire, and now Today’s Paper. We don’t need more ways to read the same content that better imitate the past. We need the existing applications and websites to be much much better and focused on the future of news consumption.

The platform-specific apps aren’t a problem, but the fact that The Times has so many different ways to read the exact same content on the web is damning. Why not work on making the standard web view less cluttered and more elegant instead of creating an entirely separate view?

Square’s New Card Reader ★

Kyle Vanhemert, writing for Wired:

Jesse Dorogusker is used to working tiny. Before becoming Square’s VP of Hardware, he spent eight years leading the accessories division at Apple, heading the development of the works-both-ways Lightning connector. With the new Reader, he had the chance to take a crack at a flagship product. Sitting in a booth in Square’s immaculate new offices, huddled over a piece of paper with a dozen half-assembled Readers taped to it like bugs pinned to a science museum display, he detailed the challenge for Wired. […]

The even greater undertaking with the new Reader, however, was the development of a custom chip, built from the ground up. “It’s not typical for a startup to do that,” Dorogusker says. “It’s a little bit of upfront cost to build this from scratch.” But the benefits were huge. After all, this tiny fleck is the brains of the operation. And by building their own chip, Square was able to improve several aspects of the product–its performance, its size, and its overall reliability–in one stroke.

Custom chips are the new competitive edge.

See also: retention of talent is perhaps the biggest problem Apple faces.